How New Goblins Can Edge Out Veteran Auctioneers

Young Goblins and Veteran Auctioneers

The Army of Alts

Having multiple World of Warcraft characters is a very important advantage in playing the World of Warcraft auction house.  By having multiple characters that cover multiple crafting professions, you can weather the highs and lows of market swings and won't be stuck selling your items at a less than ideal price.  I recommend having multiple Ideal Alts that are created with a specific role to perform within your army of alternate characters (alts).  This helps you to focus on being more efficient with your gold making stream.  This includes both farming characters and profession characters.   

Gaining An Edge On Other Players

As a new entry into the auction house side of the game you can gain a slight advantage over the old veterans.  If you plan your army of alts properly you can create an ideal efficient combination of characters, racial traits, professions, classes, factions and guild names that can potentially outperform the combinations of the veteran players.  Why?  Many of the older players are stuck in our old routines and patterns and don't want to waste the time to level another profession all over again just for a slight speed or time advantage. 

With a better combination of alternate characters, you can create a speedier process that uses less time per action.  Time is a factor in determining the efficiency of a process.  Therefore, you could create a more efficient process, which gives the potential to run more smoothly and successfully and also require less of a time investment to reach the same output.  "Time is money, friend."

What Ideal Alts Combination Wins?

The absolute perfect combination of alt characters isn't known.  The perfect ideal alt combination is going to be different for each player, since we all like to play the game slightly different.  So we can't compare the results we would get versus the results another player would receive.  We can only analyze the results against our own processes.  So start thinking about your plans for your other character slots.  Do you have every professsion covered?  Do you have a plan for getting the other professions covered?  Think about your profession combinations and your open character slots and create some of the best Ideal Alts that you can.  You too can gain an edge over another player, who is still running an inefficient gold making operation just because it is the process he is used to running.  Think Smart.  Think Ahead.  Think Efficiency.

Enjoy The Posts Here at Cold's Gold Factory? Check Out Cold's Mysterious Fortune Card Mastery Gold Making Guide To Get You Started. This Guide Can Be Applied To Multiple Markets Not Just Barking MFCs.  Check out Wes's Birthday Celebration at Capped by Cata For a Discount Code.

Image Credit: http://www.goblinsearch.com/kidnapped340.jpg

The Benefits of Creating Alts In WoW

Alt Characters Can Fill The Missing Link

World of Warcraft Alternate Characters

It is pretty common knowledge that I am a strong proponent for creating 10 characters on your server.  By leveling and advancing all 10 of your alts into farmers and profession crafters (and not just banking toons for storage), you can greatly benefit and expand your abilities to make gold.  If you need some ideas for what roles your alts can fulfill, be sure to check out my previous series on Ideal Alts for some nice template ideas.  Here are some of the major benefits of creating and leveling alt characters in WoW. 

The Benefits of Alternate Characters

• Allow For Covering Every Possible WoW Profession
• Ability to Weather Price Crashes With Diversity
• Ability to Profit From Most Price Spikes With Flexibility
• Potential to Craft Almost Everything Yourself at Materials Costs
• Knowledge of Multiple Professions, Classes, and Races
• If You Understand Different Characters and How They Work, You Will Better Understand What to Sell For These Other Character Types
• Creating Specialized Farming Characters For Maximum Efficiency
• Tons of Extra Storage Space
• Working on Earning Guild Experience With Multiple Characters
• A Greater More Broad World of Warcraft Gameplay Experience
• Helps Prevent Character Burn-Out
• Ability to Have Multiple Personalities and Playstyles
• Options to Take Advantage of Each and Every Patch or Game Change That Proves Profitable
• Potential to Never Pay a Tip or Crafting Fee Again
• Able to Have Multiple Characters With Duplicate Professions For Extra Daily / Weekly Cooldowns
• Ability to Play Characters On Both Horde and Alliance Factions
  

These are just some of the many benefits of creating an army of alts to level and nurture into full fledged independant farmers and crafters.  If you only have a character or two, then I strongly suggest you level a new character the next time you get bored with your current roster.  Just make sure to think ahead and plan out future alts and compare them with your current roster.  You don't want to waste time or gold on a character or their professions, so make sure to plan ahead and leave space for some of those perfect alt combinations for future creation.

What Are Some Of The Benefits That I Missed?

Enjoy The Posts Here at Cold's Gold Factory? Check Out Cold's Mysterious Fortune Card Mastery Gold Making Guide To Get You Started. This Guide Can Be Applied To Multiple Markets Not Just Barking MFCs.

July Topic For Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival

Cold's Gold Blogging Carnivals: July 11th Topic

 These blogging carnivals are excellent resources for our readers to get some excellent nuggets of knowledge all in one place. They are also excellent tools for bloggers to get recognized and start to drive traffic from our sites to yours. I highly recommend participating in these blogging carnivals as your submission's will tend to be some of the most visited content on your site. Be sure to read about the benefits of blogging carnivals, if you are undecided about participating in Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival.

What Is a Blogging Carnival?

A blogging carnival is a compilation of blog posts all created around one specific topic, which is chosen by the host site. Entries into the carnival are submitted to the host. The host then organizes the posts into one big post with links back to the original articles on the participating author's sites.

Rules for Cold's Gold Factory Blogging Carnivals

• Create the entire post on your own site and go ahead and post it live. (You don't have to wait until the last few days before the entry is due.)
• Send me an email with a link to your post. SSmith0911 (at) live (dot) com
• Submissions must be in by the 10th of each month.
• All carnivals will go live on Cold's Gold Factory on the 11th of each month.
• All World of Warcraft bloggers are invited to participate. You don't have to author a gold making blog, but you need to follow the set topic.
• Each post written for the carnival should begin with a link with the anchor text "Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival" and link to http://coldsgoldfactory.blogspot.com/p/colds-gold-blogging-carnivals.html

Learn more about the importance of proper anchor text here. Linking to the above page with the proper anchor text in each carnival entry will help to drive traffic to the gold blogging carnival and in turn drive more traffic to your entries.

July 11th Blogging Carnival Topic

Create Your Own Ideal Alt

The Ideals Alts Series has concluded and I now open the door for the other bloggers to create their own Ideal Alt.  For this carnival, your assignment is to create a single template for a gold making alt.  Choose the race, class, and professions to maximize the potential of a specific role that an alt could perform.  Explain the role and why you made the choices you did.  What's this WoW Alt character's purpose?  Remember that readers will be returning to this post for ideas once they are looking to make a new alt.  Have fun with this one!  You can review the Ideal Alts Series below for an idea.  I mainly covered some various types of farmers.  There are still plenty of alt ideas to cover for the blogging carnival.

Ideal Alts Series
■Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
■The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
■The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
■The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
■The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
■The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer
I highly recommend participating in this blogging carnival as this topic will be revisited by new readers and will continue to bring you traffic to your site long after the carnival is over.

Ideal Alts Series | The Solo Raider & World Boss Killer

Ideal Alts Series Concludes

Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer

The awesome World of Warcraft character building series on Ideal Alts comes to an end today.  This will be my last installment for this series.  The alt character templates that I came up with are by no means exactly perfect as these ideas are based on my own personal preferences and ideas.  You may tweek them to meet your exact needs.  Hopefully, they have inspired you to make a new alt, with a specific role.  Or they may have given you some ideas for starting your very first alt character!  The great thing about World of Warcraft is the variety between builds and specs and this is no different with the alt characters in WoW.  So have some fun with a new alt, but plan ahead.  I may eventually do a post about some more Ideal Alt ideas, but I also may be opening the Ideal Alts topic idea up to the other bloggers by using it as the WoW gold blogging carnival topic.


Readers:  Is this a topic that you readers would like to see explored further by various bloggers?
Bloggers:  Sound like a good topic for you to do a post on?





Ideal Alts - The Solo Raider & World Boss Killer


The Solo Raider & World Boss Killer is a super fun alt to play.  This is the type of character I play as my main, although my professions are completely different.  This Ideal Alt actually makes an amazing main character and can be a legitimate high end content raider and can  fulfill the solo raider and world boss killer roles as well.

Role:  The Solo Raider's role is to be able to run old raid content, solo old heroic instances, and kill world bosses all by yourself.  The combination of professions will allow for maximizing your raiding ability as well as maximizing two of the best potential gold making professions in the game.  The Dungeon Running Ideal Alt varies greatly from the Solo Raider.  The dungeon runner can't solo raids and is a support character for dungeon groups (since it's a healer).  The solo raider needs to be able to kill and heal itself somehow or it just won't last.

Class:  Deathknight - Blood Tank
Some would go with a Paladin, but to me a deathknight blood tank is the better choice.  Stacking mastery will get you a really nice raid tank that can solo the old raids and world bosses with help from no one.  DKs tend to be faster killers than Protection specced Paladins.  Death Strike buffed with stacked Mastery rating, the ability to heal yourself with deathcoils while Lichborne, and the ability to explode a ghoul for a ton of health make this an awesome self healing damage dealing solo spec for the role of farming old raids.  Having an army  of ghouls as well as a single ghoul and a dancing rune weapon are also excellent additions to your arsenal of abilities.  The various cooldowns are great for mitigation when those big raid boss hits come at you.

Race:  Horde - Tauren  /  Alliance - Night Elf
Really, any race would work.  I would lean towards Night Elf for their Quickness ability which gives an overall 2% more chance for mobs to miss you.  That is a nice bonus when facing raid bosses and world bosses.  On the horde side Tauren is nice for the base health increase, which plays well with death strike too.  You could pick another race for their profession bonus, but once your maxed skill, the bonus has less luster.

Professions:  Jewelcrafting and Enchanting
Enchanting and Jewelcrafting alone are 2 of The Big 3 Professions when used in shuffling, so there is a ton of gold making ability with this combination.  Having 2 of the 3 major shuffling professions on the same character is a huge time saver.  For raiding though, you get extra stats from using the Jewelcrafter only gems and the Enchanter only ring enchantments.  That's a lot of extra Mastery rating to stack to further buff that Death strike.  Enchanting allows you to disenchant anything you come across and both Enchanting and Jewelcrafting allow you access to some of the old patterns / recipes that are BoP or only drop if the profession is present for the kill.

You can also dabble in PvP since you are going to be shuffling items in town for profit.  Shuffling ores takes forever and you can get into the PvP queue while doing your work.  Once you are inside you the battleground you can either help your side try to win the battle (Blood knights are fun and survivable) or you can continue your shuffling inside the battleground while you gain free honor.  Yeah, that won't make you any friends in the battleground, but greedy goblins don't need friends.  You can then turn that free honor in and get some Large Brilliant Shards for your honor or  use that honor to get other enchanting materials from disenchanting items.

Ideal Alt - The Solo Raider & World Boss Killer

• Night Elf
• Deathknight Blood Tank
• Jewelcrafter
• Enchanter
• Extra Powerful Gems
• Extra Ring Enchants
• High Survivability
• Get BoP and Prof Only Recipe Drops
• Farm BoE Epics
• Can Also Be An Awesome Main

Ideal Alts Series | The Low Level Dungeon Farmer

Ideal Alts Series Continues On

The series of creating Ideal Alts continues today with another entry - The Low Level Dungeon Farmer.  This is the 4th installment in the Series on Ideal Alts.  If you are looking for ideas for a new character or swapping professions be sure to dig into this great series.

Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer

The Low Level Dungeon Farmer

Role:  The Low Level Dungeon Farmer varies greatly from The Dungeon Farmer.  The Dungeon Farmer focuses on profiting from the high end dungeons and heroic dungeons.  The Low Level Dungeon Farmer requires a separate set of skills to match the goal of farming the low level dungeons most effectively.  The goal is to farm lower dungeons for prime items and materials in as fast as effectively as possible.

Class:  Rogue
One of the big differences between the current Cataclysm level dungeons and the lower level versions is the lack of chests within the Cataclysm dungeon content.  The low level dungeons have a lot more chances to spawn chests within the instances and some of those chests are locked.  Without a rogue (or a pricier option blacksmith lockpicking or an engineering lockpicker) all of the locked chests will be unable to be looted.  So a rogue is the Ideal Alt for the access to all locked instance chests.  The BoE blues and recipes items that can be found within these chests cannot be overlooked.  The ability to stealth undetected directly to instance bosses is a great benefit.  Pickpocketing can also add a slight boost to earnings.

Race:  Horde - Troll / Alliance - Worgen
Not many of the races have racial traits that help a rogue character, but Worgen is definately the ideal choice for any skinner.  The extra 1% crit is nice on a rouge too along with a 2nd sprint-like ability in Darkflight.  The Troll does get 5% extra damage to beasts and has regeneration and bow and thrown weapon bonuses.  That as good as it will get for the Horde racial options for a rogue.

Professions:  Enchanting and Skinning
Enchanting is a must.  The whole reason for farming dungeons is mainly for 4 things:  Enchanting Materials, Cloth, Blues and Recipes.  There is no bonus for being a tailor in the lower level dungeons.  Lower end dungeons don't have many herbs or mineral veins when compared to skinnable mobs, so Skinning is the ideal choice for a 2nd farming profession for the lower instances.  There are some super profitable farming spots for skinners within instances.  One of the best spots for gathering Rugged Leather in Cataclysm is inside of Dire Maul.  Rugged Leather brings a premium price these days on the auction house.

Worgen Rogue Low Level Dungeon Farmer

Ideal Alts - The Low Level Dungeon Farmer

• Worgen
• Rogue
• Enchanter
• Skinner
• Stealth Right To Bosses
• Sprint + Darkflight - Super Speed Buffs
• Can Pick Locked Chest
• Pickpocketing
• Option to Disenchant Anything
• +15 Skinning Skill
• Faster Skinning
• +1% Crit
• Get In, Get Out, And Repeat

Ideal Alts Series | The Herder AoE Farmer

Ideal Alts Series - The Herder

Ideal Alts Series

We've already discussed The Dungeon Farmer and The Collector, which are both excellent options for your factory of alts.  If I were a new player looking to make my first alt new character today, The Collector would be the type of character I would make.  It is an excellent choice for expanding into both the pet and recipe flipping markets as well as the Inscription market selling glyphs and Mysterious Fortune Cards.  Both can be excellent income sources for any gold making player.  Today's Ideal Alt is focusing on The Ideal AoE Farmer Alt - The Herder.

Ideal Alt - The Herder

This was once a very fun alt character for me.  It was a lot of fun during Burning Crusade when this type of character was my main, before I switched to my current Deathknight main character. 

Role:  The Herder - is a farming character, but is a farming specialist.  The Herder can round up large numbers of mobs and survive the onslaught while killing wave after wave of humanids, dragonkin, beasts and more with the AoE abilities and the healing skills that Herders possess.  The Herder is the farmer that doesn't kill things one at a time.  They kill things 5, 10, 20 at a time.  Herders looking for locations with mobs that are closely packed together or in groups.  This allows for maximum benefit for the AoE abilities they posses.

Class:  Paladin is in my opinion the best AoE farmer for an Ideal Alt.  Many players may choose a Mage as the best AoE farming alt, but I disagree.  You can overcome one of the major drawbacks of using the Paladin, it's short range, with one of the profession selections.  A Paladin has some excellent AoE abilities as well as some stacking-DoTs and has the survivability to endure the major damage received as a Herder Alt.  You will be Protection specced similar to a tank, but with talents focusing on mobility as well as AoE damage and survivability.  Something similar to a 0/31/10 Paladin Herder Build would be what you are aiming for.

Race:  Horde - Tauren  / Alliance - Dwarf 
The Tauren is the ideal choce for the extra 5% base health and the AoE stun Warstomp.  Dwarfs are another good option for Stoneform.

Professions:  Goblin Engineering and Skinning
By giving this Ideal AoE Farming Alt Goblin Engineering, we can both further increase the AoE damage and stunning options and also greatly increase the pulling distance with the Engineer Only Rockets.  The Engineer only extra shield belt attachment as well as the rocket speed boost are also excellent additions to the increased survivability and mobility that The Herder Ideal Alt is centered on. 

Skinning because you are a farming character and the sheer numbers of mobs you can kill in quick order make skinning a much better farming option then mining or herbalism.  Then again, you could choose Tailoring over Skinning if your main purpose was cloth farming off of humanoids.  As a Tailor you would get extra cloth from your Cloth Scavenging ability once you hit Northrend.

This is really a fun Ideal Alt to play as you can herd up massive numbers of creatures, zap ones that are far away with your rocket, speed boost for faster herdings of even larger herds of mobs, and tons of other fun tricks.  Creating massive trains of mobs that all stack around you is a lot of fun, especially once you start to take those massive numbers of attacks all at once.  Better burn em down quick!

As an Engineer you have plenty of ways to empty your bags without leaving your farming spot either.  Toss in a Traveler's Tundra Mammoth and you may never need to even go to town.  If you decide to go with this Herder Alt build, you can really do some amazing things with an item like a Demon-Forged Breastplate and a Skullflame Shield.  I would try to collect those 2 items for the alt before I started leveling it.  Trust me, you can do some amazing pulls with built in drains.  You have so many mobs pounding on you at once, that there are soo many RNG rolls for the proc that a lot of times you will visually see them procc multiple times each pull.  Once you get the correct level and reputation, upgrade your shield to the Petrified Lichen Guard with a Shield Spike and it gets even nastier.  Those poison DoTs stack up and inflict the many attackers that are already on your Consecration, while you Hammer them down.  This build is all about letting the mobs kill themselves in addition to the AoE damage.  It is possible to lose you connection and log back in to all dead mobs surrounding you.

Ideal Alt - The Herder AoE Farmer

• Tauren
• Protection Paladin (0/31/10)
• Engineer
• Skinner
• Survival Specialist
• AoE Specialist
• Ground and Mounted Mobility Specialist
• Massive Kills per Hour
• Independent - Engineering Services
• Engineering Portals to Northrend Farming Zones
• Loot-a-Rang - Ranged Looting and Engineering Utility
• Engineering Pet Seller
• Can Farm Anything Mob Related
• Also great option for Profitng From GlowCaps since you want the Sporeggar reputation shield anyways.

Be sure to check out the other entries in the Ideal Alts Series and catch Wes and I discussing them on The Auction House Junkies | WoW Gold Makers Podcast.

Who has a different option for an Ideal Alt that is a Herder AoE Farmer?

Ideal Alt - Tank AoE Herder

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Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer

Ideal Alts Series - The Collector

Ideal Alts Series Continues

Today we have another installment in the series on Ideal Alt World of Warcraft Characters.  This series is geared to give you some ideas on various types of alternate characters to add to your World of Warcraft gold making arsenal, or the Gold Factory as I call it.  Here we are taking a look at some of the roles that your alts may perform.  We are looking to maximize the benefits of each specific type of these Ideal Alts to get the most out of each individual character slot, since we are limited to 10 characters per server (per account).  Yesterday I discussed the Ideal Alt - The Dungeon Farmer and today we will be looking into another Ideal Alt - The Collector.

Ideal Alts - The Collector

Role:  The collector is an important alt character in many gold making line-ups.  The collector is an alt that has the sole duty of traveling around and collecting items to sell on the auction house.  This ideal alt is not a farmer.  The collector is strictly a buyer.  He is a buyer of vendor sold goods.  He collects items from npc vendors to flip on the auction house for a nice profitable mark-up.

Class:  This one is a no brainer.  Which class is the most portable (No pun intended)?  The Mage class is far superior to any other option.  Mages can port to the major cities in a few seconds, thus making them the absolute ideal class for your Collector Alt.

Race:  Horde:  Goblin - Alliance: Any would work fine, but I lean towards Worgen for their Darkflight racial ability, which would assist in running to and from various vendors.  Goblins are an easy choice as they get the Best Deals Anywhere (20% off all reputation linked items) and Pack Hobgoblin (1 minute of bank access every 30 minutes) racial bonuses.  Pack Hobgoblin is a great help when out purchasing large quantities of items in remote locations with no mailbox access.

Professions:  Engineering and Inscription.  Engineering is an awesome addition to a mage's portal library as being an Engineer is sorta like being a ghetto mage.  Mages can teleport to many cities, but an Engineer can port himself to a lot of wilderness locations in Northrend via the Dimensional Ripper.  Depending on your engineering specialization choice, you can also use an engineering transport to get to Toshley's Station and Gadgetzan (if Gnomish Engineer) or Area 52 and Everlook (if Goblin Engineer).  Since your main role is to travel around and grab items to flip and some of those items are in remote locations, having a Mage who is also an Engineer is by far the most mobile of all character options.  And while you are in those remote locations you can use your Zappthrottle Mote Extractor while in Outlands and Northrend for free primals and eternals.

Any of the other professions would work alongside Engineering, but I chose Inscription as the best 2nd profession for The Collector Ideal Alt.  Why?  Because your main job as The Collector is to gather items to flip for profit then post on the auction house.  This means you will be spending a great deal of time within cities, so barking is a great secondary income source.  You're going to be in a lot of cities, so you can bark Mysterious Fortune Cards and make a killing like I do. 

So we have came up with the best combination for a Collector type of Ideal Alt, whose main role is to travel around and collect items to buy from vendors and sell for a profit.  This character would be ideal for getting into recipe flipping, selling vanity pets (like Winterspring Cub), sporregar cooking recipes, and tons more!  The engineering choice is excellent as a goblin spec engineer can port to Area 52, look for Adamantite Frames and Khorium Power Cores on the engineer vendor, then can fly to Stormspire to pick up companion pets.  The Engineer also gets quick and easy access to the Scholazar Basin Oracles' Egg for hatching your way to easy gold.

Ideal Alts - The Collector

• Goblin
• Mage
• Engineer
• Scribe
• Mage Portals and Engineering Portals - Most mobile of all characters
• Forged Documents Daily
• Mysterious Fortune Card Barker
• Pet Seller
• Recipe Flipper
• Glowcap Investor
• Zapthrottle's Mote Extrator for free primals and eternals while traveling
• Dimensional Portal chance for access to the rare undergound vendor in Dalaran
• Glyph Seller
• Engineering Pet Crafter
• Fast Access to a Neutral AH (to buy and sell cross faction pets)
• 20% off reputation linked vendors
• Goblin banking every 30 minutes
• Engineering access to mailbox, vendors, and bank access in the wild
• Plenty of ways to profit with The Collector Ideal Alt

Anyone have a better combination?

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Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer

Ideal Alts Series | The Dungeon Farmer

Ideal Alts Series

Today is the first entry into the series on Ideal Alts here at Cold's Gold Factory.  The purpose of this series is to give you readers an idea for some of your alts to help tweek and tailor your gold making army.  I made my characters a long long time ago and I wish I would have thought them out more clearly.  So you readers get to benefit from my knowledge and my mistakes.

Everyone has a main character, some have a bank alt, but what are all of the others?  What role do they have?  Here's the first idea to get you thinking.  Let's start building some Ideal Alts for your own personal gold factory.

The Dungeon Farmer

Role:  This Ideal Alt only runs dungeons and heroic dungeons, not old dungeon farming for enchanting mats.  This alt is a master of getting the most out of current dungeon content.  The dungeon farmer is an ideal alt to have in your World of Warcraft character arsenal.  The dungeon farmer is designed to help make the most of running dungeons and turning those dungeon runs into profits.

Class:  Resto Druid - We want either a healer or a tank as the ideal dungeon farming character so they can take advantage of instant queues.  Being a healer or a tank also opens up the Call to Arms bonus Satchel of Exotic Mysteries.  We are going to kick the tank idea for dungeon speed running purposes.  Healer it is.  Tank won't mesh with all the other options that require being in the back of the pack of dungeon running characters.  Druid is the best choice because they tend to have the shortest downtime between pulls.  We are maximizing every aspect of this Ideal Alt the best we can.

Race:  Horde:  Any  / Alliance:  Worgen (For speed skinning)

Professions:  Tailoring and Skinning.  Why not enchanting?  Let someone else bring the enchanter.  If you are a low level dungeon runner farming enchanting materials thats cool, but this is a max level dungeon runner.  Every dungeon has humanoids and some also have skinnable mobs.  Having a tailor allows you to scavenge extra cloth off of humanoids after others have looted.  Having a skinner allows you to skin a lot of mobs within dungeons including some of the dungeon bosses, which drop great loot when skinned.

Both skinning and tailoring go hand in hand for a dungeon farming alt because they both require you to hang around after the fight waiting for others to loot.  This goes perfect with being a healer who already hangs out in the back of the party and being a druid minimizes the downtime between fights, so you have time to skin and loot your extra cloth.  And if you are a Worgen you get a speed bonus to your skinning!  Another bonus of being a tailor is that you will be eligible to roll on the BoP Chaos Orbs.  You can use those Chaos Orbs to craft high end gear or save them in hopes they become tradeable in a future WoW patch.  As a tailor you can be used outside the dungeons to craft netherweave bags, Dreamcloth, Spellthreads, Rich Purple Silk Shirts, etc.

So in my opinion, the absolute best combination for creating an Ideal Alt - Dungeon Farmer would be a Worgen Druid with Skinning and Tailoring.  Here's a quick review of the bonuses of this combination.

Dungeon Farming Ideal Alt

• Worgen Druid
• Tailor
• Skinner
• Free extra cloths via scavenging
• Free hides, leathers, scraps, dragonscales, volatiles (from inside Bloated Sacs that skinners get), etc.
• Worgen Skinning Speed Boost
• Healer
• Instant or Fast Queues
• Call to Arms Eligible
• Free pets and mounts, etc. from the Satchel of Exotic Mysteries
• Chaos Orb eligible
• Can sell spellthreads and high end tailoring items
• Netherweave bag seller
• Dreamcloth cooldowns
• Perfect!

Anyone have a better combination for farming dungeons?

Anyone already have a dungeon running Worgen Druid Tailor Skinner?

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Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer

Ideal Alts Series | Building A Better Bank Alt

Hagor

Building A Better Bank Toon

My good friend Wes of The Auction House Junkies Podcast ran a nice series on his great World of Warcraft gold making site CappedByCata.com.  Wes's 3 part series was on Building a Better Bank Toon and covered an area that a lot of players forget about.  There are some interesting ideas in the comments as well of those posts.  So if you haven't read Wes's series yet, make sure to check it out.

Wes's Building A Better Banker Series

• Part 1: To Level or Not to Level?
• Part 2: Choosing the Best Class
• Part 3: Professions?

I had left a comment on the original post asking what was a bank alt.  It was a serious question as I don't consider any of my alts to be a bank alt. 

Cold said...

I'm confused a bit.

What's a bank alt? I don't think I have one.

I have 9 characters that are all levelers, crafters, and gatherers. They all list items on the auction house, gather mail, etc. They mail items to each other. They have multiple guild banks for storage.

I guess the closest thing I have to a bank alt would be my Twink I am working on. Since he's just a liquidator of guild overstocked items at the moment.

Ideal Alts

Then I realized that I haven't had a bank alt character in quite some time, or at least what I would consider to be a bank alt.  I thought about the idea more and realized that while I do have 10 characters that all contribute (well the twink isn't a contributor, so 9), they all have specific functions.  They all operate as a link in the chain that runs the Gold Factory.  When I look at the alts I created, I know that I could have done a much better job of tweeking out their roles with better combinations.  Many of the reasons for certain combinations have changed, as Blizzard is always making changes.  So a once great combination, may not be the most wanted currently.

So I am going to be starting a new set of posts here at Cold's Gold Factory on some ideal combinations for your alts based on specific functions that they perform.  Some of the posts will be based off my current characters.  Others may highlight a great combination for those of you looking to start leveling some alts.  What to do with alts? is a very common question I am asked.  These posts should help to steer some of you with ideas and roles.

So check out Wes's post at CappedbyCata on Building a Better Banker and come back tommorrow for the first installment of Ideal Alts.  I will be talking about an Ideal Alts : The Dungeon Farmer.
See Ya Then!

-Cold

PS:  Hagor says go check out Goldgrub's Goblin Academy.  An All*Star Staff of bloggers and podcasters waiting to teach young goblins and new players in World of Warcraft.

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Ideal Alts Series

• Ideal Alts Series Intro | Wes’s Building A Better Bank Alt
• The Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Heroic Farming Alt
• The Collector – An Ideal Vendor Flipping and Pet Selling Alt
• The Herder – An Ideal AoE Farmer Alt
• The Low Level Dungeon Farmer – An Ideal Alt For Farming Low Level Instances
• The Solo Raider and World Boss Killer