Hunting, Shooting, Fishing

I levelled my cooking and fishing skills about a year or so ago. They were not very profitable at the time and so while I used to do the daily quests for gold, I pretty much ignored them after a while.

After a particularly successful ICC run meant I had to find nine new epic gems, plus four new enchants, however, I was pretty much skint last week. With the glyph business dying off a little on my server now we have a new seller who posts glyphs in huge quantities for 5g each, I looked into these old tradeskills to see if there was anything I could use to make money from. I was pleasantly surprised.

I used to make the +hit and +expertise food. The +hit food was better because the mats are so cheap and they use fish that you get from open water fishing - you don't need to find pools and can just fish away. Since (inexplicably) people often can't be bothered to cook the raw fish they get, it was sometimes possible to pick up the fish from the AH for a few silver, and sell on the cooked fish for 4g each. This market seems to be much smaller now - presumably because of the extra hit and expertise on gear so people don't need to use special food to hit the caps.

I have therefore tried to find new markets, and looked again at cooking. Most of the food you can make is rendered obsolete by fish feasts. I need to do some research before I decide whether making fish feasts is worthwhile or not - I doubt it to be honest, but need to look into it carefully. For now, I have hit upon the idea of making food that is better than the fish feast buff. I hope that min/max guilds who are trying hardmodes will use this instead of fish feasts.

I am mainly focussing on dragonfin angelfish at the moment. These are fished up from Dragonblight and the pools are quite rare. Nevertheless, when cooked into +str or +agi food, they sell for around 150g per stack, or even more sometimes. It's possible with good luck on spawns, or by fishing late at night (when rocking a baby to sleep, for instance!) to grab a full stack of fish in around 15 minutes, so this pulls in a decent (if unspectacular) income. The annoying thing is that most (but not quite all) of the value is in the raw fish on my server - it's not possible to buy the raw fish from the AH and cook them yourself for a huge profit. Still - I watch for bargains on there and they do pop up from time to time.

Another reasonable way I have found to make money is on my mage alt. He will never be a main character raider, and so while I am enjoying gearing him up and blasting through instances from time to time, buying him gear with frost emblems is a waste of time. I therefore sold my first primordial saronite on this toon on the AH last night, netting 1750g. A few minutes later I saw someone selling primordial saronite over /2 for 1500g. What I should have done is immediately buy it from him and flip it straight onto the AH for 166g profit (taking account of the AH cut), but I am paranoid about being stuck with this stuff as prices fall (and when 4.0 hits it will be worthless of course). I should have been a bit braver, as demand will probably stay high for a while yet.

I am still making decent money from glyphs. I have worked out that every stack of icethorn that I buy makes me 40g profit assuming I buy it for 10g, mill it for 1 snowfall ink and 6 ink of the sea, and the resulting glyphs sell for 4 or 5g each. Occasionally I do a bit better than this, such as last night when I was the only person listing one of the key warlock glyphs, and I sold three of them in 10 minutes for 20g each. Inscription can be a bit of a grind though, especially because you can't afk-craft or afk-mill. It gets tiresome to have to manually click through the process for the umpteenth time, which is why I am not a big time glyph seller - I just use it to make about 500g a week and that's me happy.

In an effort to make a higher margin on fewer items, I have made a few of the inscription offhand items. These need to be sold over /2 instead of the AH because it is rare in my experience that people will browse the AH for an offhand, but the profit margins are 50g-100g per item, and they are really quick to craft.

I'd quite like to get the crafted tanking legs, which will cost about 15,000 gold at current prices. I guess if I sold everything right now I would have about 6-7,000 or something over all my alts. Still some way to go yet.