Mists of Pandaria holds a special place for me as it was the expansion where I started getting really into goldmaking and following the blog scene at the time. It is probably why this site even exists. So today I will cover an old market from back then that I had a ton of fun with!
The gear gap
Both Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria zones drop gear with a lower required level to equip than what you need to be to get there. This is level 77-79 required level for Cata zones and and level 84-85 gear from MoP zones. Both of these brackets represent HUGE item level upgrades over the same level gear from the previous expansion, so buying this gear can massively improve your character while leveling. Very few people realized this back in the day, so you could easily find cheap deals.
75-300
Back in the day you would look to buy items for about 75 gold maximum and sell it for 200 gold+. At any one time I would usually have a hundred or more items on the AH in these brackets as there are tons of armor classes and stat variants. You only really ignored the spirit stat combinations that don’t make sense.
Setting it up
The base setup back in the day was to use auctioneer to search, but it seems to no longer be maintained. That means we will have to rely on TSM. The required level and item level brackets we care about are 77-79 and ilvl 272-350 for Cata and 83-84 and item level 363-510 for MoP. You can also look for rare items in both brackets, as they can also be flipped following the same logic. You want to set a low max purchase price for yourself to ensure you have a good profit margin. I would suggest swapping the default maximum shopping price to a hard coded gold value when doing these searches so you can very quickly ignore any above your max purchase price.
The searches
The searches you want to use are listed below
/77/80/i272/i410/Armor
/77/80/i272/i410/Weapon
/83/84/i363/i50/Armor/
/83/84/i363/i500/Weapon
Will it still work?
With more streamlined gameplay and more optimization it is possible this market is gone, but the general idea behind it should be real in Mists as well, as the items still represent huge power increases. I was a big player in this market back in the day, so much so that when I changed my normal post price in TSM that would be the new going rate on my realm within a day or two. My best guess is that it will still work, but pricing will be very different. You will need to find a good way of pricing your items as we get into it.