When the brutosaur mount was announced at 5 million gold, I knew I would never go for it. I’ve had a LOT of gold over the course of WoW, however, I’ve always gotten just enough to pay for my characters’ needs. The brutosaur was going to end up as just another mount to get on my list and it’d probably wouldn’t happen for a very long time.
That changed when Blizzard announced the brutosaur would no longer be obtainable once Shadowlands arrived.
On that day I started planning. I had my goal (5 million). I had a target date that I figured was reasonable (my birthday) but I did not know HOW I was going to get there. I’ve tried to break things down as best as I can for you, so that it can help you on your road to the brutosaur.
Tools
TSM4. Trade Skill Master 4. I’ve dabbled a bit in TSM3, however, TSM4 is such a huge improvement in terms of UI friendliness and functionality. This is a must-have.
All The Things. Not necessarily a must-have but I found it useful to see how many pieces of gear a particular appearance had. If an appearance had 2-3 pieces of gear that was infinitely more valuable on the AH than an appearance obtainable from 10 pieces of gear.
Rematch_TSM Values. This addon would take whatever value sources you choose and display them in the list of battle pets you have in rematch. It was so useful to be able to see my market’s minimum price vs the pet’s regional historical value.
Multi-Boxing. Actually, I did NOT multi-box at all. I thought about it but when I looked at my progress I determined I didn’t really NEED the aggravation of multi-boxing at all. All this was done from a single account.
Time. Yes, I classify this as a tool since not many people have the time to be able to aggressively cancel scan their auctions. On my realm, time played a big part in being able to sell well. I’m a FULL REALM and the AH is played aggressively (often with dire consequences for some item values), so being able to have the time to cancel scan multiple times a day (think 10-15 times a day at minimum), helped ensure my items were the things people saw first.
What I Sold
I’ll try and categorize these as much as I can, but, honestly, if it was something that could be put on the Auction House, it was going up there. There were very rare occasions I sell items to a vendor as it would all really depend on what I thought I could get for the particular item on the AH. Again, very rare for me to do that.
Battle Pets
These were my prime source of income. Over the years I’ve collected a TON of battle pets, you may have too. If you look at your battle pets you might be sitting on a gold mine. I already had my battle pet teams set up for things like running Draenor, Legion, or BFA world quests and even the Battle Pet Dungeons.
Any pet that could be caged and was NOT on a team was basically sitting there doing nothing to earn me gold. I was 100% okay with sacrificing some of collection in order to get that mount. I can always go back and recollect them.
Besides these pets that I had already owned, I made a point of making sure I got pets from Winter’s Veil, Lunar Festival, and Love is in the Air. I’m still sitting on some of those pets, just waiting for their value to inevitably rise.
I was also running raids like Siege of Orgrimmar and Throne of Thunder for their battle pets. Those two raids are long and have no skips, so the prices of the pets are much higher than even pets from MSV. If no pets drop, no worries, you just picked up a bunch of vendor trash epics to give you some raw gold.
Mounts
If I could craft it, I sold it. My target mounts were the Steelbound Harness (Legion blacksmithing) and the JC Panthers (Mists jewelcrafting). I did finally get the blacksmithing pattern for the Monelite-Reinforced Chassis but I didn’t end up making a lot of them.
Again, I took the opportunity to nab a handful of mounts from Winter’s Veil and Love is in the Air.
Craftable Things
Inflatable Mount Shoes. These dang things sell like hotcakes. At Level 100, a character can use these.
Enchanted Elementium Bars. These are forging a legendary item. Their sales were not regular, however, when they did sell, boy what a pay day.
Platinum Whetstone. or something like that… it’s an item that increases mission success by 10%. It does require Expulsom, so if you don’t have any, you may want to consider farming some through bracer scrapping. These sold for a great profit as well.
Bracer Flipping
So, I decided to try my hand at this three times. The basic theory is that you go make the cheapest green BFA bracer you can (this was cloth for me), go and scrap it to get a chance at nabbing some expulsom and use that expulsom for various things.
My first go at it, I did the standard flip where I’d use the expulsom to create a PvP bracer (honored combatant something) and then send those to my disenchanter to get my hands on the DE mats. I made a relatively decent profit on it.
My second go at it, I intended to “stock up” on DE mats for the new Ny’alotha raid, however, I did not count on the DE mats going so low. The market was flooded and I ended up losing gold on this endeavour.
My third go at it was not for the DE mats actually. In fact, it was more for the platinum whetstones. I definitely made a profit on these.
I was able to design a spreadsheet to give me a pretty good idea at whether the current value of the bracer mats were in line with the value of the DE mats. If would show me how much I was standing to make or lose depending on current market prices.
Transmog
I used to learn all the transmog appearances I could, regardless of their rarity, as gold was not a concern for me. That changed with my new focus on getting the brutosaur mount.
ANYTHING that was BoE, from greens to purples, were listed on the AH.
There were some rare exceptions where the market value was too low compared to DE or even vendor values, but overall, I listed most, if not all, gear I came across in my day to day activities.
TRANSMOG DOES SELL. It does. Really. Perhaps not as quickly as folks might want it to…. but it DOES sell. Patience is key here. Being able to look at your market and determine whether the AH fees is worth it is really key here.
End to End (Numbers for you)
- It took me 98 days to gather 5,000,000 gold (plus another 360,000 gold ’cause I bought tokens as I was planning on purchase Shadowlands via gold. I wound up winning the expansion in a draw, but I still spent that gold. Ah well).
- I made 49,654 gold / day on my single account (again, no multi-boxing).
- My highest single day was 268,702 gold after two JC panthers sold (onyx + one of the other colours) and a bunch of elementium bars.
- My lowest single day was spending 230,068 gold on JC panther mount mats and inflatable mount shoes, among other mats. Days like those are nerve-wracking: Sometimes it takes days to make that and then spend it all in one go.