Friday, October 22, 2010

Reader Submission: Relics of Ulduar & Reputation In Cataclysm

Reader Submission from Lasse aka Dahmek of Turalyon-EU



Hello your hallowed Coldness. Off to a good start with a wordplay :D


My question is this: Do you see any profit in stocking up on Relic of Ulduar now?

What I am considering is the following:
1: The prices of Relic of Ulduar have dropped a lot since the introduction of shoulderarmors as BoA items.
2: Come Cataclysm, a lot of new Worgen/Goblin will be created. Some of these as new mains.
3: A small part of this "new" playerbase will be interested in achievements and reputation.
4: Buy Relic of Ulduar at insanely low prices now and cash in in Cataclysm.
5a: You could merely use AH as normal
5b: Do "/2 WTS complete Sons of Hodir rep package to exalted. Get your achievement now"

This was a short overview of what I've been thinking about. Relics of Ulduar is atm at 13.07 servertime ~25s a piece at my server, Turalyon-EU, and I see them lower sometimes. I figure you should be able to at least get 1g return a piece, possibly more with Cataclysm inflation.
Thank you for an excellent blog. I follow you daily, and you have quickly become my favorite blogger.
Kind regards from a fellow AH camper and golddigger.

Lasse aka Dahmek of Turalyon-EU

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Thanks Dahmek for the sumbission.  I highly welcome guest posters and reader submissions or questions.  Thanks again!

The real questions here are:
  1. Will there be enough demand to flip the Relics for a profit?
  2. Will people be continuing to collect these themselves?
  3. Will they continue to be available on the auction house once Cataclysm releases?
  4. Are there any recipes or items from the quartermaster that new players or alts will continue to want from the Son's of Hodir quartermaster?
These Relics drop off of mobs all over the Storm Peaks, but they also drop off mobs in The Halls of Stone and The Halls of Lightning so people will be receiving a small amount of them through the dungeon finder.  As far as people leveling in Stormpeaks, I would tend to think most players will skip The Storm Peaks and finish their leveling in Icecrown, due to the sheer number of dailies for various quest hubs and argent tournament quests.  So I would think that these may tend more towards drying up than be in constant supply.

There are a few reasons to continue with gaining reputation with The Son's of Hodir.  New characters will probably be wanting to grab the shoulder enchants, if they have no main to send them a BoA shoulder enchant.  Alts may skip the enchant altogether as it can't be used on BoA shoulder gear anyways.  Mount collectors will surely want to be able to purchase the 2 mounts that are available from the quartermaster.  Recipe collectors, may be after the patterns for +16 crit gem, Pattern: Glacial Bag, or Pattern: Mammoth Mining Bag.  Nothing really groundbreaking here.  So your main market you would be selling to includes Achievement Seekers, Mount Collectors, and Recipe Collectors.  Good news is, these kind of players tend to have money to blow on items.

Selling these in Cata may be a strategy for profit, but probably not much as your buying audience is pretty slim.  Although it probably is a low risk investment, if you can find the Relics cheaply, but you will have to continue to buy out them while you are selling these kits, in order to keep the value higher.  At least storage space wouldn't be an issue since you can stack 200 at a time. 

In my opinion, this could work, but I tend to like to focus on things that have a better return on investment to make it more worth my time.  Plus you can get to exhaulted fairly easily without even using these rep turn ins, since the dailies reward a nice chunk of rep each and you get more dailies opened the farther your progress with their reputation.

Thanks again and let me know what you decide to do.

Anyone else have any thoughts on the Relics of Ulduar strategy?

7 comments:

  1. Based on the shattrath rep items I'm going to say that I believe this won't work. However, with any type of speculation you have to measure your risk vs reward. Have an extra 2k gold to spend on relics? Go for it.

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  2. I haven't thought of that before, so I love the idea! Thanks, Dahmek.

    I feel like the market would be so small for the relics that they would take forever to sell. I have other things I want to buy currently that I think could provide similar returns, or only 50-100% returns but flip much faster.

    I would think that the achievement-seekers are going to have all these new achievements to focus on, and most of the collectors already have exalted with Hodir on their main toon. There's going to be new quests, new mounts, new dungeons, new reps, new achievements...so everyone will get back to Hodir, but it's going to shoot down the priority list.

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  3. I think this will probably make some gold if you buy them cheap enough, but it'll be somewhat risky, and not likely to make a large amount.

    Worth trying, but I wouldn't stockpile too many, as I don't think they'll move all that fast.

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  4. I don't think this will work at all. The NPC that used to sell things for Emblems of Triumph sells rep tokens. For 16 justice points, you get a token for 520 rep points.

    While currently justice points are in high demand, by the time the relics would be worth something justice points will be plentiful, and 16 isn't very many. Cataclysm heroics will give 75 PER BOSS - so a single heroic could give you upward of 10,000 rep.

    So unless they remove those tokens (and I don't see why they would), the relics won't be valuable.

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  5. After Cataclysm releases, I liken these to Argent Dawn rep turn ins. I used to farm Stratholme a lot trying to get that damn mount (still don't have it), and I'd accumulate a ton of Crypt Fiend Parts and Bone Fragments in the process. I would post them in stacks of 30. My price has been 1g 25s each, so round 38g for the stack, and I'd sell about 10 stacks per week.

    I think the Relics of Ulduar will probably sell, but probably not in large quantity, and maybe not at very high prices. Also, I think there will be more competition for a while then I faced with the Strat rep items. Most people who run Strat probably vendor that stuff, but I'd bet people hang onto the Hodir rep stuff because it's been an AH commodity for a while, which will keep supply high in the short term.

    To Uriul's point above, I don't agree at all. There's just too many other good things to spend JPs on that you can't get for gold. Not to mention the value just doesn't compare.

    16 JPs = 520 rep. So to go from Revered to Exalted would be 40 tokens. That's 640 JPs. I think I saw somewhere that Bracers are 347 JPs. Gloves are 695. To give them a gold value, comparable BoE epics might sell for 5k (yeah, that's pure speculation, I realize).

    On the flipside, 10 Relics of Ulduar give 650 rep. That's roughly 33 turn ins to go from Revered to Exalted. So assuming 1g each for the Relics, that's a whopping 330g. When compared to the value of JPs, you'd be pretty foolish to spend your JPs on rep tokens.

    Ok, I just spent way too much time analyzing this...

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  6. One thing that devalues RoU is that quest chain. I have a LW who I would gladly spend the gold on RoU (MMB); except that you have to do that ten quest chain to get to where you could spend RoU. Or at least you did, who knows now. Trivial I know, but doing it one more time on yet another character drops it from my "go do" to my "I should do this sometime but doubt I ever will" list

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  7. Cold -

    Expanding on the possibilities of stacks of rep items:

    http://wowmidas.com/2010/10/23/the-big-fat-rep-stack/

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