Gotta start somewhere

What an awesome weekend! I got out of the house for most of the day on Saturday, and had a lot of fun with some old friends. But that means I didn't get quite as far on my Warcraft goals as originally projected. No worries though, I'm still doing quite well, and even if I wasn't, the RL benefits would still be totally worth it.

Here's what I've got so far:
1st Guild Bank: 2 tabs, mostly empty (previously held a ton of herbs - more on that later)
2nd Guild Bank: 5 tabs, tons of junk. Got this all for free a week ago. Not sure of any of this is worth much, as it's mostly old-world stuff, and nothing stands out so far, but I'm going to try to organize it and put it to use.
1st tab: Various DE mats
2nd tab: Potions, recipes
3rd tab: Meat
4th tab: Leathers
5th tab: Ores, gems
3rd Guild Bank: 2 tabs, completely empty. When I bought it, it was full of vendor trash and a couple low-level things that I disenchanted or sold off pretty quickly.
Specific assets and investments
900 Volatile Life (bought at 4g-5g apiece, hope the price goes up with the next patch. If not, I use them in my daily transmute.)
30-40 stacks of Dense Stone (hopefully buying more before the Faire comes)
15-20 stacks of Wool Cloth
18 Polished Bronze Rivets (buying as many as I can in anticipation of the Top Hat recipe)
3-4 stacks of Embersilk Bolts (for my Dreamcloth transmutes)
Volatiles for Dreamcloth and Living Elements transmutes
2 Dreamcloth (saving to make more pants, or perhaps spellthread later)
Volcanic Deck
Earthquake Deck
All Winds cards except 5
Flame-Ascended Pantaloons
Total cash on hand: 4568g

If you're wondering about the Dense Stone, I plan on turning them into Dense Grinding Stones and using them at the Darkmoon Faire to buy Greater Darkmoon Prize. It's cheap, the trash greens can be sold or disenchanted to cover your expenses, and you have a shot at rare recipes or twink gear that can sell for a pretty penny. I found this tip at The Consortium, and hope to give it a shot this Faire. I could use the rep anyways, so I don't have anything to lose, really.

As for that first guild bank, it was full of old herbs that I bought for cheap when prices dipped for Cataclysm. I sold a good deal of them when prices spiked after Cataclysm and people were leveling tradeskills en masse, but I had about half a tab left of Azeroth herbs, and half a tab of Northrend/Outlands herbs. Well, I decided this weekend to work on my inscription based on these two discoveries:

1. There are no glyphs that require the highest level of Inscription skill, so all glyphs can be made with a lvl 65 toon (like my DK!) at about 400 skill level.
2. There are tons of glyphs that can only be learned through daily research, so the sooner I start doing my Minor Inscription Research and Northrend Inscription Research, the quicker I can have a full arsenal of glyphs to profit from.

So, I took what herbs I had in that gbank, farmed up the rest of what I needed with the DK, then dropped herbalism, learned inscription, and leveled straight through until I learned Northrend Research. It was grueling. But, now I can start learning the 64 glyphs from Minor Research, 41 glyphs from Northrend Research, and 54 glyphs from Books of Glyph Mastery. That last one is going to be tough, because no one plays Lich King content anymore, and the books are nowhere to be found on my AH this weekend, and rarely found on other days.

Well, at least I have a scribe, and I can start investigating the glyph market. My shaman is at lvl 64 and ready for the Nagrand quests, which is still my favorite zone in BC. I've found a couple potential holes in the current AH market: vendor recipes, cloth twink/leveling gear, and certain vendor pets. We have plenty of Alliance pets like the cats and the moths, but no one's selling the Dalaran pets. I might be able to elbow my way into the Yeti pets, having done that quest on my shaman earlier this week. Oh, and I made a decent profit from someone leveling their BS. They decided to list 5 Truesilver Rod for 60s. I turned around and sold them one at a time for 25g. Success! Little by little, I'm going to make my fortune.

Goals: Shaman to Northrend by this weekend, Elder Title before it's too late.
Start selling the glyphs I leveled on, look into further glyph opportunities
Pick up vendor pets and recipes, start selling
Start figuring out production for cloth twink/leveling gear

The point of it all

Introduction
I'm creating this blog as a means of tracking my progress and gathering my thoughts concerning making gold in World of Warcraft. Perhaps eventually I will have acquired enough wisdom to impart to the rest of you, but for now I'm being entirely selfish and doing this all for myself. I need to start setting goals and accomplishing things in an organized manner, instead of the helter-skelter approach that I've defaulted to right now.

So, as a casual raider and collector of achievement points, non-combat pets, and crappy arena ratings, why am I moving into the gold-making business? Here are my reasons.

• I want to be able to afford rare pets and other toys for my main.
• I want to outfit my alts in top-notch BoE gear.
• I want to have enough cash to give generous gifts to my friends and guild. 
• I actually enjoy crafting and dealing on the Auction House.

I didn't intend for it to be that way, but that list is in order from least important to most important, now that I think about it. So, I'm going to look at that as my mission statement, or my core values that I fall back on. From here, I need to make specific goals, broken into manageable chunks, that I can shoot for on a regular basis. But first, I think I need to inventory what I've got to start with:

The Characters
85 Priest (Main) -- 525 Tailoring / 525 Alchemy
71 Warlock -- 450 Enchanting / 450 Jewelcrafting
65 Death Knight -- 450 Alchemy / 380 Herbalism
62 Shaman -- 338 Skinning / 300 Engineering
32 Rogue -- 148 Herbalism / 119 Inscription
16 Druid -- 72 Mining / 63 Herbalism
8 Mage -- nothing yet

Ideally, I think this is what I want them all to have at max level:

Priest -- Tailoring/Alchemy
Warlock -- Enchanting/Jewelcrafting
Death Knight -- Alchemy/Inscription
Shaman -- Skinning/Engineering
Rogue -- Leatherworking/Blacksmithing
Druid -- Mining/Herbalism
Mage -- Alchemy/Jewelcrafting

I plan on raiding with the Shaman and Priest, but I have no desire to play my DK, so I figured I can fill his bags with glyphs and cards. BS and LW are the lowest professions on my priority list, so they got stuck on my lowest-priority toon. I've got my work cut out for me! Now, as for which character to level first, the logical choice would be to get the Warlock capable of max JC/Enchant. However, I have a goal completely unrelated to gold making that supercedes that. I really, really want the Elder title on my shaman, so I'm going to be powerleveling him in an attempt to get to Northrend and finish all the Lunar Festival achievements before it's too late. Last weekend I got him from 52 to 59, so I'm not too worried about hitting that target.

Next blog, I'm taking inventory of the stuff that I've got spread out between my toons. Guild banks, cash on hand, mats on hand, etc. I was kind of stupid previously and put all my cash in Darkmoon Cards, so as I write this I have about 25k invested in that, and only 5k on hand. Makes it hard to do anything between now and the Faire! But, I will be better organized in the future, and make smarter investments, we can hope. That's why I'm doing this blog, right?

Goals: Shaman to Northrend by February 7. Elder title by February 12.
Blog later this weekend about stuff I have on hand.
Plan to identify which markets are most open that I can move into.