WOW Trader Segment #3

Welcome to wow trader 3 where we help you ninja that auction house gold

Today I want to discuss the most valuable resource in wow. This resource is worth more than Eternal fire, worth more than brilliant spell thread, or that Nestingwary 4000. And I know you’re thinking that this is easy, the most valuable resource in the game is gold!

The most valuable resource in wow is not gold. It is time. Gold we can always farm more of, we can buy and sell it. We can trade for it. But our time is set. Once spent it is not recoverable, and once wasted it is gone forever.

The goal of wow trader is to help you acquire gold, but even more basic then that wow trader is here to try and save you time. I am here to try and give you the tools to save your time to do the things in game that you enjoy.

Last segment we talked about selling this segment we are going to discuss buying. Whenever we buy something from the auction house we make a decision, we decide to spend gold, but in reality we are sending our time. Our gold spent on the auction house is equal to the time it took us to farm that gold. The other option is to go out and get the item ourselves.

Let’s start off with an example. On the AH is a stack of Iron, it is selling for 20g. Here is the question which is faster for you, doing two dailies and using the gold from those dailies to buy the iron? Or flying to the old world and running around searching for iron nodes until your find a stack worth?

Whenever we buy something, we have to ask ourselves, which is the best use of my time.

However it is hard to calculate the time… have any of you spent an hour gathering iron ore, then dividing the amount you collected to figure out your stack per hour? Not many of us have. So how can we know which is faster?

And this is why we have gold wage; think of it as your hourly wage but in wow gold. How much gold are you worth an hour. Since we don’t have a job in wow, we have to figure out our gold wage by the activities we do in wow to make gold. Currently my gold wage is 1200g an hour; yours should be between 500g to 2000g an hour as well.

So how do you figure out your gold wage? Well let’s say you can farm 500g worth of primal fire in an hour and 400g worth of herbs, your value is 500g, because it is your highest gold making activity.

Pro tip: if you can farm 500 gold in eternals or 400g in herbs in an hour, you should never be farming those herbs. Farm the primal for an hour, sell them and then buy 400g in herbs and keep the 100g in your pocket. Always do your highest earning potential, to save yourself the most important thing, time.

So step one is to figure out your gold wage, how much gold are you worth each hour. your gold value could be from dailies, farming herbs or ores, running old instances, killing mobs for rep items or anything you can think off. Do it, time yourself and figure out how much gold you make per hour.

Once you know your gold wage, we can apply it to things on the auction house

Let’s go back to that stack of iron. So the stack of iron sells for 20g. My gold wage is 1200g an hour, so 20g is worth 1 minute of my time. I ask myself can I farm a stack of iron in 1 minute. If the answer is no, than I will be buying my Iron off of the auction house.

This applies to everything in the game. Say there is a Nestingwary 4000 on the auction house for 2000g. There is another one that drops in Naxx off of Kel’thuzad. So again we measure in time. I make 1200g an hour, so to buy the gun off the auction house for 2000g so it will take me 1 hour and 40 minutes to get this gun.

Now let’s say I have an excellent group that can clear Naxx in 1 hour. The Neurubian Conqueror has a 19% drop rate so let’s say 1 in 5. That means on average I will need to spend 5 hours to get it from Naxx. So its 1 hour and 40 minutes and 5 hours, hmm this is a difficult choice. 

Now I understand most of you are going to go to Naxx for fun, and so this is something you need to consider, but also you have to consider that 

1. naxx takes longer than 1 hour.
2. You can only kill kel’thuzad once a week
3. Depending on your group, you may not be able to clear naxx in the first couple of weeks and it may take you several months to get it. 

So to recap this podcast segment, remember:

1. The most valuable resource in wow is time.
2. Know your wow gold wage.
3. When you buy your spending time, not gold.

Protip: if you’re one of those people who buys large quantities of the same item over and over from the auction house, I recommend one of two methods to save time. One is AHsearch, which is a mod to allow you to preset searches for faster viewing later on, and the other is snatch which is a module of auctioneer which can store values for items on the ah, whenever it sees those items on the ah for less than the value you set it will let you know so you can purchase them right away.

Thank you for listening to wow trader where we Buff you with arcane intellect on auction house knowledge.