Cataclysm Release Day Strategies

The question on everyone’s mind around this time is what is the best strategy for Dec. 7th. So much is changing there has GOT to be ways to make lots of gold. Well, you’re correct. The possibilities are nearly endless, and only limited by the amount of time you are willing to sit on your bank character instead of leveling. Easy choice right? Right!

Economics isn’t an easy subject when you get down to the rough and gruff theory, however for the laymen and laywomen it is easy enough to understand that when there is a demand, sales will be good. During normal periods of playtime, when expansions aren’t coming soon or major game changes like huge content patches, the ratio of supply to demand is about equal. There are definitely outliers here, but the point is most of us supply what most of them need, and we all get along pretty happily. When an expansion comes out, the demand skyrockets, and there is hardly enough supply to go around. This means that the value of the supply is going to hike way up, so if you can supply yourself now with what you need to supply all the players on your faction on your server during release day, then you are going to make lots of gold.

Okay, so with that out of the way, what exactly do people want or need when the expansion releases. I won’t get into a full list but will instead highly the more lucrative deals (in my opinion) that you should be focusing on when the Cataclysm servers go live.

The first big niche to point out is professions. Many of the recipes that people currently have as orange and yellow while at 450 will help them to skill up. For this reasons I’ve been stockpiling simple materials and ores that will help people get the mats that are harder to find for these recipes. This includes Saronite Ore, Titanium Ore, bars of both those ores, lots of raw epic gems, a couple stacks of each type of eternal, some northrend fish for cooking recipes and 3 or 4 stacks of each northrend herb. I’m still adding to this stockpile and have approximately two bank tabs full of materials that I will be posting the night before Cata releases.

Players will also be rerolling either new races or race/class combos and so it will be useful to have lower level items stocked up too. I’ve purchased 3 full inventories of low-level gems and herbs from auctioneers that quit before BC and just came back, filling up a whole guild bank set of tabs. This is a little risky but even if I can’t sell it all I will likely make a profit as I obtained the gems and herbs for a very low price (nearly free). Other gold bloggers have suggested profession kits and this is also a viable way to go about it. You’d do this by searching for a profession leveling guide and then obtain all the materials listed. I would advertise this in trade along with a link to the guide.

Glyphs will also be a good source of income, both for new players, alts and 80s that want to fill out their glyph collection. Along with this is also the Vanishing Powder market which depending on your server and supply on the AH you can make a fair bit of gold on.

So on to actual strategies for release day! It’s good to get as much actual gold as you can for release day so that you can move with the market and buy out undercutters. This is one of the few times that I will buy out small post undercuts (ie not a wall poster) to ensure that my auctions are the cheapest up. You’ll also want to clear out all of your old stuff from your bags, bank and gbank to allow for massive cancels and reposts if you use Auction Profit Master or ZeroAuctions. Postal or some other mail addon is also quite necessary here.

My plan is to be on my bank toons for the whole first day, jumping around between them all and working my auctions down to the lowest. I know my cut offs and also the best value for my auctions based on the price at which I purchased them or the approximate opportunity cost that I used up while harvesting them. I’ll also be in the #JMTC chat room and lurking on the JMTC forums to catch updates and big sellers that no one sees coming.

A good strategy is to NOT post your items if the supply for your item is massive and way below your margin. If it’s not economical to buy out everyone underneath your threshold (and who wants to sell AT their threshold anyway?) then just wait a couple of hours and the supply will go down. On my server I’m one of the biggest suppliers so I know that if I don’t supply anything, the other smaller auctioneers will run out of stock and I’ll get the market all to myself. However, my server is very populated, so a lot of small auctioneers can aggregate to far more than my stock can handle. This is why waiting is sometimes good. Generally I’ll wait for the auctions to be about 40% above my threshold before I start posting them which allows for a good amount of breathing room on the way down while undercutting.

After the first day, I’ll be spending roughly 3-4 hours of every day that I’m online restocking, selling and upgrading until the expansion fervor simmers down. The great thing though is that most people will level their main and then start on their alts, create new characters, the works, so this market fever is going to last for quite some time. That’s all I’ve got for you today, however keep your eyes peeled for more content!

Oh and don’t forget to level your own professions and get your profession wielding characters up to max level! You’ll want to start supplying for the raiders and pvpers before anyone else to ensure a good profit! Good profits!