Unlimited Maelstrom Crystals

The demand for high end chants has gone up and driven the prices of high end enchanting mats up too (particularly Maelstrom Crystals and Heavenly Shards). Maelstrom Crystals are going for 200-250g or more on many servers now. What many don't know is it's possible to manufacture unlimited Maelstrom Crystals for under 150g each.

To get the best cost per crystal you need an enchanter in a level 24 guild who's exalted with Avenger's of Hyjal. Go to the Firelands vendors, buy cloaks and disenchant them for unlimited Maelstrom Crystals. If you're not exalted you must be at least friendly to buy the cloaks.

Exalted rep with Avenger's of Hyjal gets you a 20% discount on prices with the Firelands vendors
Bountiful Bags (level 23 guild perk) gets you a 20% bonus when disenchanting
Bartering (level 24 guild perk) gets you a 10% discount and stacks with the rep discount

In the best case, assuming you're exalted with Avenger's of Hyjal and in a level 24 guild, your cost per Maelstrom Crystal comes out to about 146g. Shattering crystals will keep your cost on Heavenly Shards to about 73g too. Horde characters of the Goblin race have it even easier, all they need is friendly rep since thier racial gives them a 20% price discount with all vendors (which does NOT stack with rep discounts).

In the worst case, you need to be at least friendly and the cloaks cost 250g each. Guild perks still apply though, you'll get 10% off for Bartering, and 20% more crystals from disenchanting with Bountiful Bags. Bountiful Bags alone brings the price per Crystal down to about 208g and Bartering brings it down a little further to 187.5g per crystal (5 x (250 x 0.9)) / 6 = 187.5. Exalted rep alone without the guild perks will bring the price down to 200g per crystal.

Tips and Tricks - TSM Custom Reset Method

Posting walls of items works well to squeeze and discourage campers. The idea is you post multiple items at prices the campers really don't like. Lower than they like selling at, yet higher than and too many of than they'll buy you out at.

The camper then has 3 choices:

1. Undercut you anyhow
2. Buy you out and attempt to reset prices
3. Stop posting until the price goes up again

In my experience most campers will continue to undercut for a while anyhow. That's fine, let the campers work their butts off for peanuts for a while. All you have to do is post enough items often enough to keep the price low and discourage buyout attempts until they stop camping.

Campers figure if they can stop all your sales for a while you'll lose gold on deposits and give up. That only works on the little guys and the casuals. All it's going to do with an experienced goblin who's in it for the long haul is get his attention focused on making things difficult for the camper(s) in question. The goblin won't be losing gold either. He'll be making less gold, but that bothers campers a lot more than it bothers goblins.

The biggest problem with walls is getting your walls up at high enough prices to discourage buyouts while at the same time being low enough to keep the pressure on the campers. If you post too high they'll gleefully undercut you forever and you won't sell much. If you post too low then you might wind up being the one working your butt off for peanuts and that's no good. Worst of all if you post too low the campers might buy you out and reset prices much higher.

Ideally to prevent buyouts you want at least 3 walls at low, medium and high prices. Or better yet think of it as low, medium and high profit margins. The low priced wall puts the pressure on, the high priced wall caps the market and the medium priced wall discourages buying out the pressure wall and re-posting just under the cap wall.

Let's say you're battling an obsessive gem camper who mostly focuses on Inferno Rubies and Ember Topaz (hi phlox).

The three important Inferno Ruby cuts sell fast enough the simplest and most effective thing to do is just post and forget 5 or 10 of each at a time. Keep an eye on the camper and post several times a day for 24 hours with threshold near cost (the price you can normally buy raw gems in enough bulk to not run out at), fallback 150-200% cost and 10-20% undercut. Enough will sell you really don't need to do anything more complicated. If a camper tries to stop your sales completely he's going to have to camp hardcore posting at or near cost. He won't do that for long, especially not if you occasionally buy him out when he goes under your threshold and re-post his gems for more.

Ember Topaz on the other hand are a little trickier, particularly if the camper posts them cut under the usual bulk buy price for raw gems. There are so many different cuts, most of which sell fairly well, it'd take an awful lot of stock to do the same as with Inferno Rubies. Fewer walls (3 or 4 at most) with steeper undercuts works better here. The problem with this is there's a bigger gap between walls making buying out the low priced wall more tempting.

Reset Method tells TSM what do when prices are below your threshold. The options are to post at fallback, threshold, to not post and to post at a custom value. If you set reset method to threshold someone might buy you out anyhow if they see an opportunity for a big price jump. If you set it to fallback they'll just 1c undercut you forever. What's needed here is a wall priced a little higher than the threshold wall. Over the bulk buy price on raw gems but not by too much.

This is where TSM Custom Reset Method comes in handy. The high and low priced walls are easy to maintain with Threshold, Fallback and Undercut settings. Custom Reset Method only comes into play when the price is below your threshold. Simply set Custom Reset Method to somewhere between your threshold and fallback (closer to threshold usually works best) and it'll post at that price when prices are below your threshold.

Unfortunately Custom Reset Method can't be set any higher than 100g so while it works just fine for gems and glyphs it isn't suitable for everything. It's really too bad it can't be set higher because it'd be great for chants, belt buckles, leg armors, spellthreads or anything else that sells in volume and is heavily camped.

In fact I'd love to see custom reset method expanded to allow it to change everything about the reset post from price to duration, stack size and number of auctions posted.

Tradeskillmaster - Part I Overview

Tradeskillmaster (TSM) is an offshoot of QuickAuctions 3 (QA3) combined with Scrollmaster and a whole lot more added. It's a very comprehensive modular integrated package with optional modules covering pretty much everything an auctioneer could wish for. Everything from managing inventory across multiple characters to buying materials to crafting, auctioning goods and tracking sales data.

I think Tradeskillmaster is by far the most complete and best set of tools for auctioneers and highly recommend it as such over anything else. However that doesn't mean TSM is perfect, while there are a lot of things I really like about TSM there are a lot of things I don't like too. Things that still need work, things I don't think are very well implemented, things I feel could be much improved and things I just find incredibly annoying.