Glyph Market Update

Well, it's been a couple of weeks since I started my grand glyph experiment. It took a while for me to settle in to a rhythm and to work out some of the kinks in my glyph processing routines. After spending over 25k on stuff for Djargenstad (bracers, mace, shadow-spec belt, epic flight), I've recovered back up to about 40k gold in the bank, and am making around 2k gold per week. Which means my profits are WAY down since I started this experiment. But they still exist, which is sufficient for now.

I've finally worked out an addon scheme that creates an appropriate amount of profitable glyphs and sells them at reasonable prices. Check back tomorrow for a technology update.

The only problem I have is the pricegap issue. If I have a glyph in stock, and the current market has two listings at 50s and five at 5g, QA3 will consider the value of the glyph to be 50s (and not post it). I've tried fiddling with the settings in QA3 to no avail, but what I'd really like is for in certain circumstances (less than N glyphs posted below threshold, basically) to post either at the fallback price or the highest price that's above threshold and below all other above-threshold prices. So in the prior example, I'd post at 4g90s. I can do this manually (and have been doing it manually for about ten or so glyphs that I know are good sellers but I've been temporarily undercut by someone), but I'd rather include that in my automation. Any advice on that front is welcome.

After some initial rumblings and hatemail, the glyph market has stabilized. Egnormous (my other major competitor in the rare-glyph market) seems to have set a price ceiling at 4g on all his (her?) posts. The trainer glyphs, especially the low-skill trainer glyphs, are as hectic as usual. There will be a market void for a day, I'll make 5 copies of the glyph and sell 2, and then all of a sudden there's 10 other postings, all at 50s or so. Frustrating but expected, since most people view any sales at all of trainer-taught stuff as bonus gold, since they're only making the glyphs to get skill points.

As I mentioned in my prior posts, I've been getting some really cheap herbs lately on the AH. This has led me to branch out a bit into new markets. I've started selling some Rituals of the New Moon, which actually come in four flavors (Red, White, Black, Grey). They don't sell often, but when they do, it's like 100g profit. I've tried my hand at vellums as well, but there's some pretty stiff competition in the vellum market (as well as the runescroll one).

I also took the change in the gem market that came from 3.3.3 in stride and changed my alchemy spec from transmutation to elixirs. Now that you can get an epic gem from about one battleground's worth of honor (if you do the daily), the epic gem market has tanked a fair bit. Prices on raw gems are down about 25%. Flasks still sell well, and I've got a ton of cheap herbs, so I have done some experimental forays into that market.

Unlike glyphs, where there is a huge number of individual items, there are really only four flasks worth speaking of: Endless Rage, Frost Wyrm, Mojo, and Stoneblood. Of those, Mojo and Stoneblood are kind of secondary- they're not in nearly as high demand, since tanks tend toward endless rage and most healers toward frost wyrm, except in certain rare circumstances. Each flask costs more-or-less the same amount to make: 10 herbs, one bottle and one lotus makes 2.4 flasks (base of 2, and you get about 20% more flasks made from elixir spec procs).

The main market problem I'm facing right now is that in there's two other serious players in the flask market, both of whom tend to have about 100 flasks at a time on the AH. Neither particularly "camps" the auction house, but flask sales aren't as consistent as glyph sales either- more guilds have in-house alchemists, and most of the sales are on tuesday for the upcoming raid week. So it's important to position your stuff well, and I doubt that I'll be able to shove these other two competitors out of the market any time soon, given that they've got so much capital tied up in their flask stocks. We'll see. Even still, I've made some sales already, and the flask prices are good enough that I'm happy to just post 40 at a time.