The New/Old Auction House

The New/Old Auction House

Before eyes start to glaze over, Wild wants everyone to know that he is 91% of the way to level 89. Wild might have made it to 89 last night but I started falling asleep at the computer. Expect Wild to get started on grinding toward 90 today (Monday).

San Diego sports had a great weekend. The Chargers football team pulled out a stunning upset, beating the Eagles 33-30 on the last play of the game. The Padres baseball team stunned the team with best record in baseball, the Atlanta Braves, beating them twice in three games and coming within a run of sweeping them. The two games were on at the same time Sunday morning (both east coast games) so I had to keep switching between the football game, the baseball game, and the pet battle game.  :-)

Happy was only away from the Auction House about three weeks during the "I quit but not really" period when I thought I was done with the game. That absence didn't have a major impact, but the release of the 5.4 patch certainly has. The Timeless Isle, where players have a new, vast playground to run around in, has completely consumed players. Raiding, which has already been dwindling on our server, seems to be out of favor. Many of the materials that Happy sells are used with gearing up and preparing for raids, and the prices of those items have seriously tanked.

Happy, usually very decisive in making buy/sell decisions, is having trouble gauging the current sell off. The patch didn't introduce another set of new mats, but the falling prices are very like the process when new mats are introduced and the old mats begin to get phased out. For example, a Sha crystal could be sold for close to 300g apiece just a couple of weeks ago. They are selling at under 100g right now. Will that price keep falling, or is this just a bump and prices will start climbing again? Happy, for once, isn't sure. The other prime mats - greater celestial essence, ethereal shards, and mysterious essence, have seen deep cuts in price, particularly the ethereal shards. Older mats, which have always had a modest but consistent level of demand, are not selling at any price.

Happy is still making ends meet, but most of his profit now comes from gems. Gems got a massive boost from the patch. Demand skyrocketed. The price of the key ingredient in making a gem from jewel crafting (JB makes all of Happy's gems) went from 50g each to an average of 70g with spurts as high as 100g. Great day for gem sellers, right? Well, yes and no. The miners out there saw gold in their eyes, too, and they began digging up gems as well. Yes, there was a lot of new demand, but it didn't take long before the supply of gems began to outpace the buying. The big boys who do this for a living started dumping large quantities of gems at cut rate prices. Prices on many gems, usually priced in the 70-100g range, depending on the type, fell to 50g and sometimes lower. At under 50g Happy started buying, since that was less than JB's cost of making them. Happy is still riding that up and down wave and making gold, but it's a feast or famine kind of thing to catch the market in between the big dump fests.

On average, sales are down, but Happy still makes a little from bags, herbs, and healing potions. Healing potions were once not that great sellers, because raiding guilds generally provided them to their members for free. Raiding is mostly LFR and the new flex raids with random players not associated with a guild raid, so they have to make or buy their own healing potions now. It helps that they are very cheap to make and almost always sell.

One surprise seller are the five types of volatiles. These are old mats from an earlier expansion. Happy kept a very large stock of them, and he's now selling them off at a tidy profit. That will last only until the stock is exhausted or Happy's regular price hikes finally dampen demand. It's a finite market, though, since few farm those mats anymore.

Finally, here is a test to see if you read all the way down (you masochist, you).

Wild has collected a few battle-stones during all this leveling and is trying to figure out the best way to use them. Battle-stones can be used to upgrade a lower quality pet to Rare quality, which is the best type to have. Battle-stones are random drops, and they don't drop that often, so I want to get the best value out of them that I can.

Pet battles can include as many as three pets on each side, so having at least three max level pets available is necessary. Out of the ten categories of pets, I have at least three rare, max 25 level pets for all but three categories: Humanoid has just one (Peddlefeet), Undead only two (Lil' K.T. and Lost of Lordaeron), and Magic only two (Arcane Eye and Twilight Fiendling).

Wild isn't quite sure. yet, how he will use the stones. For the moment, anyway, he's still focused on leveling, so the pet battle decisions will have to wait.