The original release of WoW to many is called vanilla WoW, where the level cap was 60 and we all ran around Azeroth farming materials.   Some of those vanilla materials offer a far greater return for your farming time, if you don’t mind kicking it old school, you can make yourself a tidy profit pretty quickly.

The reason these materials still find is a demand can be categorized as (a) yes, people are still just starting to play the game  (b) creating new alts or (c) changing professions.  The latter is pretty common, right now I’m torn on dropping tailoring on my main (separate story on that later) and perhaps grabbing inscriptions.  After the break, we’ll talk about some materials that provide some pretty surprising returns for you farming time or might be good spec buys during the week for that AH Day Trader.

I’m going to quote some amounts that are related to my server,  mileage can vary so check your local realm but crafting professions seem to suffer from a price choke point in the 250 – 300 range and key items below that.   Think back to the last profession you leveled from zero after TBC, didn’t you go AH and cringe when you saw the price of something you could farm but just didn’t feel like going all the way over there so you paid what you thought was an outrageous price?  Well what made you cringe is also your opportunity, take a look at just a short list below.

Thorium Bar / Thorium Ore – Requirements in Blacksmithing, Jewlcrafting & Engineering, a few loops around Winterspring, Silithus or the Plaguelands during the week can tuck up to 1000 gold each weekend.  During the weekend these peek in price at 90G per stack on my server.

Mithril Bar / Mithril Bar – If you’re traveling around for some Thorium, you’re bound to grab some Mithril,  consistently seeing highs of 50G to 60G a stack depending on availability.

Mageweave Cloth – You’d expect Runecloth to be the bottleneck item but the fact is most people will run through a Strat or Scholo and quickly grab all the stacks they need to level a profession.  Step it down a notch to Mageweave as seems to have a higher demand since fewer people bother to farm the 40-50 level instances like BRD, Uldaman, Zul Farrack or Sunken Temple.

Illusion Dust – The demand for illusion dust has been constant, a constant home run if you don’t mind farming some old content.   Try hitting up Dire Maul or a Combination Strat Live/Undead, you are sure to walk out with a pretty descent pile materials and Illusion Dust seems to pull down 50G to 60G a stack regularly for me.

Greater Eternal Essence – If you don’t end up with Illusion dust from farming efforts listed above,  the alternative are Eternal Essences.  Greaters go for 10G to 15G and the demand is pretty much constant.

Huge Emeralds – According to one of my favorite leveling guiles and I’m sure a favorite of many is wow-professions.com and you’ll note there is a requirement for a whopping 24 of these according to this site to get your JC to 300.   There is always someone who decided the grass is greener and I’ve seen these going for as much as 40G to 50G each.

Golden Rods - I’m continued to be amazed that I can craft a half dozen of these each Friday and watch them disappear for a solid 50G each.   So yes there’s even something a Blacksmith can do to turn a tidy profit in the Auction House in our Vanilla WoW hot list.

Briarthorn –  This is very much a low level mat used in Inscription and Alchemy,  It continues to amaze me at seeing these priced out at 60G per stack but it proves the point that scattered around Vanilla WoW,  we’ve got some great ROI for time spent farming.

CONCLUSION: The point is it never hurts to go back and check markets on materials in your profession.   Vanilla farming is a change of pace,  a good fallback if you no longer making the returns you want for your current gold making venture and it’s also something to do besides just standing around and adding to the Dalalag problem.

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Do you have the Darkmoon Fairie blues,  with the potential for Darkmoon Decks to drop in price with the release of Patch 3.3.  It would be nice if Blizzard offered the Inscription community a nice layover item for the time being.  My suggestion would implementing Scroll of Teleportation

Inscribers would be able to make Scrolls that allow the player to teleport to various cities in the game.  Sure no one will be Teleporting to Exodar anytime soon,  but these would offer a descent amount of functionality, mages still own the market on portals and this would offer a sense of balance to the Inscription folks who are probably cringing at the Darkmoon issue.

Furthermore,  as Cataclysm and the revamp of Azeroth will obviously bring some activity back to the major cities of Vanilla WoW, I’m of the opinion  demand should be there?    The real question will be materials,  what price would be reasonable for a stack of scrolls for Iron Forge.  Obviously free markets will work that out as players will be willing to pay for convenience.

Having watched Blizzard introduce various items in the game over the last four years,  I don’t think this idea is too far fetched.  Blizzard has been very much inclined to bring more convienence to the player base.  When people QQ’d about the time involved to obtain materials to raid they changed the elixirs where a player could only have two at a time.  When the players QQ’d about making gold in the game they added dailies.   This seems like a logic path of convienence,  an opportunity for the Inscription profession.  Of course from a development standpoint the ability to create such scrolls also provides the opportunity for Blizzard to expand Cataclysm content even further.

Win – Win – Win? What do you think?

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The economy has treated those who make an in-game living with inscriptions very well during WOTLK however in looking forward to Patch 3.3 one has to wonder if the the money making profession is going to see a serious nerf bat when this patch drops.

A key money maker for the Inscription Entrepreneur has been selling decks for the Darkmoon Fairie events.   These decks have provided some significant benefits even up through patch 3.2.  However the Icecrown Citadel loot tables may very well make these items finally obsolete.  Although some may still be purchased for alts,  they are great trinkets.  Are players going to continue to spend that kind of gold for the alt?  After all,  between gems and enchants on gear coming out of Icecrown the average player is probably going to be a be stretch out.

I thought the value of the decks would drop dramatically in 3.2 however with the release of the trinkets made available with Emblem of Triump had only a nominal effect on prices.  In trying to predict the market,  it’s not hard to guess that Icewing having a dozen bosses and 12 trinkets available to the players according to MMO Champion’s PTR Build Notes as of 10/21/2009.  Perhaps we’ll be surprised even more with a few BOE trinkets which would also put a hurt on the Darkmoon deck market.

At the end of the day,  I don’t think the Darkmoon Deck market will vanish entirely,  Glyphs will still offer good revenue streams and inks will still trade.  I just don’t see a Darkmoon revival until Cataclysm.

What do you think?