Monday, March 10, 2014

Nothing Ventured - Royal Scribe's Satchel

As gold makers, our biggest threat may not be what you think it is. It's not competition. It's not markets collapsing. It's not a bot constantly undercutting. It's the threat of stagnation, of getting into a rut where once we find something that works, we put our blinders on and zero in on that specific routine.

Now, don't get me wrong. You can still make gold that way. Diversification, though, is definitely your friend. A profitable market that you're not in is money money left on the table.

To that end, I'm starting what I hope to be a new series, called Nothing Ventured. It's a shorter segment that I hope I'll be able to add more often than a standard blog post. It'll feature a quick suggestion of an item you may not be making, usually something I just recently added or re-added to my routine. You may or may not already be making it. It even may or may not be profitable on your server. I obviously can't make any guarantees, but hopefully something in this series will spark an idea.

Today's item came from the fact that one of my banks has dozens of stacks of Inferno Ink sitting around. It's the Royal Scribe's Satchel, made with Leatherworking. Introduced in Cataclysm, it's still the largest Inscription bag at 36 slots. Anyone who makes a lot of glyphs can tell you exactly how useful it is to be able to store more of them, so these bags are a hot seller to those wanting to enter the glyph market.

Now, with this and many other Cataclysm recipes, the blessing and the curse of it is that it's gated behind the Molten Front dailies. For those of you who may not have been playing at the time, the Molten Front was a daily hub introduced with the Firelands raid in patch 4.2. Each daily completed there gives you a Mark of the World Tree, a currency required to unlock further quests in the chain. Unlocking further parts of the chain would unlock new daily hubs, one-time quests, and most importantly for our purposes, vendors.

It's a blessing for gold makers because gated content like this means that not many people stuck with it through the month or so required to unlock everything. It's a curse because, well, it takes a month or so to unlock everything. The vendor you're looking for is named Ayla, and requires you to have unlocked both the Druids of the Talon and Shadow Wardens quests.

This recipe is Bind on Pickup, so be sure to do these quests on your Leatherworker. The last thing you want is to spend a month doing this, only to realize you're on the wrong character.

The materials required for the bag are 3 Inferno Inks and 3 Pristine Hides. Be sure you save everything you can on mat costs by checking your different options for obtaining them. In addition to buying them straight from the AH, Inferno Inks can be bought from the Ink Vendor for 10 Ink of Dreams each, and Pristine Hides can be purchased from the Leatherworking Supplies vendor for 10 Heavy Savage Leather, which can in turn be created from 5 Savage Leather each. Looking up Royal Scribe's Satchel on your realm on The Undermine Journal will usually give a good idea, at a glance, of which is cheapest, but keep in mind that market price doesn't necessarily tell you what the lowest priced good is.

I hope you've enjoyed this new segment. Hopefully I'll have something for you next time that doesn't require a month-long grind of dailies, but this was the first thing I pulled out of my head. If you found this helpful, or have a suggestion for a future Nothing Ventured segment, leave a comment below. I'd love to hear from you.

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