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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It still appears that Braeg Stoutbeard is still selling Artic Fur the PTR for the equivalent of 10 Heavy Borean Leather.  The big winner here will be those with the Leatherworking profession who didn’t bother to max out yet,  and this should be the boost that gets them over the hump to 450 leatherworking.   I know there are many people out there who somewhat looked at the professions and said “meh,  that last leg is really not worth the investment since I was able to get much better gear in other places.

There are definitely some gold making opportunities with this change.   Many may say we’ll it’s really no secret here it’s in the patch notes,  but let’s remember that there is a vast portion of the community that doesn’t pay attention to bloggers on the game nevermind niche blog’s like the WoW Economist so after the break we’ll dig more into the finer points of this change.

You can already expect that prices for WoTLK leather to raise in price,  it doesn’t take rocket science to see this one coming.  But when and where will the opportunities to move come from?   Early shoppers today are looking for good deals.   If you’re farming to support your raid habits,  go ahead and keep moving your leather.  If you’re looking for that big payday,  stocking up might be a good idea  but you might find yourself quickly in undercutting pricewars once patch 3.3 hits as people make the trade for Artic Furs.

When you break it down Artic Fur is a reagent in 33 items in game,  and you need Artic Fur to buy a number of in-game recipes to but it’s nothing to the extent that you have to deal with like Jewlcrafting.    Bottom line,  this change will boost the price of Borean Leather but really I think we’re going to see big dip in the prices of Artic Fur in the post 3.3 patch days.   Might be worth while to keep an eye on Borean Leather scraps may be the hidden gem in the rough,  many who post scraps online are the casual players who might not be translating the value upwards to Heavy Borean Leather around patch time and tidy profits may be found here.

Ultimately Supply and Demand will hit an equilibrium in the weeks to follow patch 3.3 with Borean Leather materials succumbing to downward pressure as the demand drops from both people trying to finally ding on professions and those looking to craft a few items.  The latter is a little less important,  since the dozen bosses in Icecrown are going to provide plenty of drops for our leather wearing friends.   Bottom line,  it’s a short term opportunity for some pretty sizeable gains if you play your cards right.

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