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| Preserved Holly Machine |
Deeprock Salt spikes in demand one time every year. This happens during the Feast of Winter Veil every December. After completing the Metzen The Reindeer quest chain, a follow-up quest becomes available. This quest, The Hero of the Day, requires 5 gold and 1 Deeprock Salt in order to award 5 Preserved Holly. (Note: Refined Deeprock Salt won't work, so any leather workers that have already ran their salt through a salt shaker have missed this opportunity.) The preserved holly are just for flavor and are pretty worthless. The real reason to complete this quest is because the reindeer chain quests and The Hero Of The Day quest all count towards the 3000 Quests Completed achievement.
Converting Those Salts To Gold
If you haven't figured it out yet, I love to rape the auction house for massive profits by planning ahead each and every holiday season. Must be the evil goblin coming out of me. Start now by looking on your auction house for deeprock salt. Anything super cheap or in big stacks at a good price go ahead and buy it out. On my server, they are going for 4.2g per stack, which is dirt cheap compared to what I will mark them up to when the time is right. If you want to farm some, click on the Deeprock salt link (First word in this article) and it will list all the mobs that can drop the deeprock salt. Knot Thimblejack's cache in Dire Maul North is also a good source for these salts, which may result in a few nice priced stacks on the auction house as people are rushing to finish their insane title currently. Store all your deeprock salts until the night before Winter Veil.
You should always post your highway robbery priced demand spiked holiday goods the night before the holiday and on a 48 hour sale. This insures against problems getting to post in case their are server delays. You want to be the first and only one to have these posted once the holiday goes live at 3am server time. You do know that all holidays start at 3am right? So posting the morning or afternoon of the holiday start date has already lost you a ton of sales. When you buy these salts up now, then post the eve of the holiday while setting your own prices, you can easily bring in 25g per deeprock salt. They will sell and they will sell well. They always do, until some idiot comes along and throws his up for 5g each. By that point though, you've already sold pages of them at your crazy prices. You can then undercut him or buy him out to raise your prices back up, until too many copycats try to get in on the holiday sales. It's fun to watch these late comers fight over undercutting each other down to 1-2g or less per salt, while you continue to laugh as you sold 80 of them for 25g each while everyone was still asleep. This works particularly well if you are on a server with an aussie presense or a lot of overnight / late players.
Got any stories of Winter Veil price gouging?
I thought all holidays started at 3 AM too...but I do distinctly remember Hallow's Eve "turning on" at midnight server (so, 3 hours earlier than thought) and "turning off" at 11:59 PM server this past Sunday night. I checked the in-game calender and sure enough - the midnight turnovers were there!
ReplyDeleteI'd recommend checking the in-game calender to make sure when the holidays go live on your server.
This may actually be a good thing as a lot of people (myself included) are still online at midnight and don't mind just jumping straight in. More profits before others post their wares!
Nice. I'll be adding this to my small egg and chocolate cake sales. Like the deeprock salt scenario you just outlined, the market eventually gets flooded by undercutters (usually in about 2-3 days).
ReplyDeleteI'm alliance, so for small eggs I take my engineer hunter to outside of silvermoon city and farm the dragonhawk neutral mobs out there. There are dozens, they respawn quickly, and have a super high drop rate on small eggs (90+%), often dropping two at a time. I'll farm stacks and stacks, then pop up my portable mailbox and send them to my bank alt. In the two years I've done this, I've literally have not seen anybody else farming this spot on my realm. It's out of the way for alliance, and well...the horde don't typically hang around in silvermoon city.
@ Aaron J
ReplyDeleteYou must not be on a US server. I double checked and I am still correct all holidays start at 3am including Hallow's End.
I also farm big ammounts of small eggs, you are not alone. That portable mailbox is a nice trick, dont have and engineer toon :(
ReplyDeleteEvery serious gold maker needs an engineer.
ReplyDeleteI've been snatching salt and small eggs off the AH for about a year now, planning ahead for this holiday. I also farmed up some small eggs just to make sure I was prepared to meet the demands. Couple of questions though on selling these items.
ReplyDeleteLets say I post up Salt or eggs @ 25g each and sell several, then as you said, someone else will come along and undercut you by either a large or small amount. Since you don't really know how large of a stockpile they have, is it a good idea to try to buy them out? Of course first lower your prices till they are posting at a really low price, then buy them out and cancel/raise the prices again. Or is it better to just drop your prices, force them to undercut and let their auctions sell out and and then re-post yours up again at a large markup?
@ Anon
ReplyDeleteWhat I do is post a ton, then undercut if there are a large number of undercut eggs already up. If a small amount up, just buy em out and keep your prices high. Any eggs you don't sell just save for Children's Week, instead o fposting them for under a gold.
I'm going to double check Cold on the times tonight. I'm on a US server. Very odd.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous - In the case of the small eggs, since they are so easy to farm (especially in advance), I would try to just beat your competitor with sheer volume. Wall up the first 5 pages of the AH with single small eggs. If he undercuts you, wall it up with even more eggs. It's obnoxious but it'll bury his auctions deeper in the listing.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing you can do is try to find his threshhold. Repost a few eggs cheaper than him, if he undercuts, cancel and repost those same few eggs, etc. See how low he'll actually post his eggs, then buy them and resell them for higher. The idea here is to get him to lower his prices as much as possible while also TAKING his goods so he can't compete, then re-posting for profit. If he has no eggs, he can't compete.
Of course if he also has hundreds of eggs to sell the scenario changes. You can sell your eggs in trade channel too.
@ Cold & iceveiled
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tips!
On EU-Thunderhorn the Deeprock Salt is 300g each. And only one person to sell them, so im going for it.
ReplyDelete