Will the sky golem price explode on SL launch?

Jack The Dipper recently posted on his blog his thesis that we might not see a price boost for Sky Golems this time around. In BfA and Legion the launch of the expansion spurred a huge price bump for these mounts, but will it happen again?

The reasons for the bump

The Sky Golem is a unique mount that allows you to gather herbs without dismounting. This is of course incredibly useful for gathererers. At the beginning of an expansion herb prices are usually incredibly high leading to huge demand and thus large price increases for this mount.

Demand will be high

There’s no question about if demand will rise again. Launch prices for herbs are usually high, primarily due to darkmoon decks driving a lot of demand for herbs.

I don’t see this part of the equation changing at all. Many players will want to get this mount to be more efficient when gathering.

But what about the supply?

This is where things get interesting. Jack noted in his post that supply for the mount has risen heavily over the last couple of weeks across all realms. The same holds true for the main material used, Ghost Iron Ore.

One culprit here is of course the Timewalking campaign, but that does not explain everything.

The supply has already increased

I don’t have an explanation for the massive increase in supply. It could just be a proxy for returning players as the price has not changed that much, indicating that the sale rate is still pretty high. Not surprisingly as mounts in general are doing incredibly well for me personally.

Ghost iron ore increase

This one is very easy to guess the cause for. Ghost Iron is well known in goldmaking circles and with the revamped leveling experience many players are choosing Pandaria and doing a lot of gathering to level up. Gathering gives good experience and this ore will always be in demand.

Timewalking campaigns removed the barrier to entry

This is the big elephant in the room. If you have allied races unlocked you can make a sky golem crafter from scratch in less than an hour. As I covered earlier it is now incredibly easy to start new sky golem alts. I’m sure many players have been doing this. We’ll start seeing the effects of this just about now as the first of these alts will now have finished 30 Jard’s. This could lead to an even larger increase in supply and corresponding dip in price.

Hoarders

Many players on reddit have advocated hoarding your sky golems for the launch of SL. Either through just keeping them in the bank or through investing in them on the AH. This obviously will reduce the current supply, but increase the supply when SL launches.

What will happen?

That’s incredibly hard to tell. I’ll try to sum up all of the relevant effects and how they will impact supply and demand in the figure below.

Overall it seems to me like there are more forces increasing supply. The only thing I’m sure of is that it will not play out exactly like BfA. I expect a dip coming soon as tons of mounts hit the market. We could also see the dip when SL launches if there is a lot of hoarded supply.

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