What to Farm

Everybody knows that the auction house is the key to making quick cash. But what items do you put up, and where do you get them? I'll be covering Northrend exclusively in this post, but if you know of an Outland or old Azeroth item that goes for a lot on the 'house, leave a comment.


Cooking
Skilling up cooking is fun for many players. Not only do I advise taking it, but gather more meats than you actually need. Many people are too impatient to go out and get their own meat, so they'll happily buy it off the auction house. That's where you come in.

These four meats make up the Great Feast, which serves a whole party.
Rhino - Some in Storm Peaks and others in Borean. For you non-AoE grinders, there are some spread out around Sholozar.
Chilled - I wouldn't eat this raw, but it drops off of every single beast type mob. You'll get quite a few while farming the other types of meat. It's also the most common meat, so it doesn't sell for a whole lot on the auction house.
Shoveltusk - On the other side of the world as mammoths and rhinos are the shoveltusks. Their flanks sell nicely, even though they're really easy to take down. They travel in herds, but are neutral (similar to rhino and mammoth), with a few aggressive types spread out here and there.
Mammoth - Big, mean, and scrumptiously delicious. Grab a chunk o' this beast from Borean for you AoEers, and for single-targeting try the higher level ones in Storm Peaks.

The Fish Feast is higher level than its 'great' counterpart, but you have to have a high fishing skill to make farming these more profitable. Wowhead has excellent info for each fish on their page, so take a click if you find yourself desiring to cast a pole.
Musselback Sculpin
Glacial Salmon
Nettlefish

Other high-demand meats to keep an eye on include Worm Meat.

Skinning
...is a fairly straight-forward profession. One that I can't really touch upon because it's so direct. It combines well with cooking, as just about all the beasts you kill can be skinned. If you know any skinning friends and you're going AoE farming on mammoths, invite them! Not only will they be greatful to you, they may even but you a portion of their skins if you kill things fast enough. Hope for those Arctic Furs!

Ore
Three types of minerals exist in Northrend soil, each one more rare than the last.
Cobalt Ore - Okay, I lied. Cobalt sometimes goes for more than Saronite because there are fewer nodes, as well that everyone needs Cobalt ore to skill up their blacksmithing and jewelcrafting to Saronite levels. Cobalt is best mined while leveling up, but if you have a flying mount, apparently Zul'Drak and Howling Fjord have the most deposits.
Saronite Ore - The most common end-game ore. Icecrown and Sholozar are the way to go.
Titanium Ore - Un-prospectable, but used for many recipes. Very, very hard to find, but plenty will show up while on your Saronite route because it only spawns in saronite/cobalt nodes.

Herbs
For the most parts, herbs are easier to find than ore. Farming for these is less competitive, but there are still a few things you should know.

• Borean and the Fjord have mostly Goldclover.
• Avoid Dragonblight, as it's all frozen herbs, which can be 1-3 of just about any low level herb - even ones you're not after.
• Frost Lotus (a hot seller) can be found equally from all Northrend herbs, so if you're seeking those, pick a zone with a lot of nodes. Icecrown, lower Zul'Drak, and Sholozar come to mind.
• Talandra's Rose is just about only found in Zul'Drak. If you dislike that zone, then stock up a lot at once.

Alchemy
If you are an alchemist, I suggest seeing what potions and elixers you can make after a long flower-picking session. You might be able to sell the potions for more than you could the combined flowers. But sometimes, it'll just be more profitable to sell the raw flowers.



What do you sell?

Rules of the auction house

This is a list of very important rules you should follow while dealing with the auction house. Scan the bold, and if you're curious about a topic, read the summary. If you're even more curious, leave a comment and I'll address the matter in a later post.


Don't post on your main
- Always use a bank alt. See my long list of reasons.

Buy raw materials
- A netherweave bag goes on the auction house for 9-15g on my server. The mats - 1 stack of netherweave and a rune thread - fluctuate in cost between 3 and 8 gold. That's a bargain for your bags.

Don't impulse purchase
- By not buying things right away, you can save a bundle. As the market becomes further saturated with a particular item, prices drop.
- Two examples I've watched closely are Frostweave Cloth and Titansteel Bars. When Wrath of the Lich King was brand new, I sold cloth on the auction house for 50g per stack. Now I see stacks for as low as 9g per, even lower sometimes. Titansteel was the same - once upon a time, I was able to sell them for 200g each. Now they go for less than 75.

BottomScanner SearchUI is your friend
- Although I'm not a big fan of the bloated Auctioneer Suite, BottomScanner SearchUI is a proven method for finding under-priced items that you can quickly buyout and re-post. It's also an excellent excuse to stretch your legs and refill your coffee. (SearchUI is included with the Auctioneer addon.)
- Please note that due to the size and scope of Auctioneer, I advise against running it at all on a laptop If you have to, only run it on one character.

Pennies matter
- A player will buy the cheapest item presented to them in the auction house - even if that item is only one copper cheaper than the alternatives. Undercutting a 6g cost with your own priced at 5g 99s 99c, you're equally as likely to find a buyer as if you had posted yours for 5g 80s.

Overprice enchanting materials
- Dust, essence, and shards have no cost to auction them. Even if your dream dust only goes for 1g normally, you're welcome to price it at 5, or even 10 gold if no others are up. If no one buys it, no problem, you can just re-list it later for a (slightly) more reasonable price. And fi they do buy it... then you're rich!

List auctions for 48 hours
- Always post your auctions using the longest time period possible. Over the course of one day, the market might not fluctuate much and someone could undercut you, negating any of your profits. But two days is a long time for the auction house, and once the other auctions have expired or been bought out, yours will be left standing, the only option for potential buyers.

Create a bank alt

Hearthing to a major city and then flying back to your quest hub can take a lot of time. But you need to do something when your bags are full and you just can't loot that one extra piece of cloth.

One method has gained popularity due to its ease and modularity. Bank alts hold an infinite amount of storage in their mailbox. Technically it's not infinite, as you can only view 50 mails at a time, and each mail can hold 12 items. (50*12=600 storage space possible.)

When you're far away from Dalaran, such as in Grizzly Hills, and you just can't carry anymore bear livers or wolf teeth, you can just visit a mailbox, drop in all the items you want to keep but don't need at that moment, and send the mail to your bank alt! Then you can get back of your way of questing, without ever leaving the zone. Worry about all those items later!

Bank alts should be parked in a major city with a bank and auction house that are near each other. A vendor is also preferred, but unnecessary. It's also very convenient to choose a city other players frequent. Stormwind and Ironforge are the preferred cities for the Alliance. The horde cities are Orgrimmar and Thunder Bluff. With a connection in a major city, your main character can now bind their hearthstone to the current zone they're questing in.

Using an alt to manage your money will also help you save it. Without having your stacks of gold on your main character, you'll be less likely to spend. Easily avoided will be spur-of-the-moment spending. By the time you log on to your bank alt, send the money over, and then log back to your main, you'll have realized you probably don't need to spend 50g for that 1 dps increase.

A bank alt will also let you free up some computer resources. Addons like the Auctioneer package use a lot of computer memory and processing power. When they're enabled and active alongside other addons, your computer can quickly become overwhelmed. When you use a bank alt for managing your auctions, you can disable Auctioneer on your other characters, leaving your precious RAM to be used for more important things.

They can also serve the purpose of taking the burden off logging on your main. Some tanks and healers in large guilds dread logging online due to the shear amount of group invites they'll be expected to accept, even if they only have a few moments of time. Using a bank alt unknown to your guild, you can check your stash of items and gold, and post and purchase auctions unhindered by those guildies you hardly know.

A few people feel the need to equip their bank alt in the best equipment... a haliscan suit and silver cufflinks with a monocle to match. However, many of those items are expensive and you needn't have them to utilize the bonuses of an alt. You simply need a snappy name (iamabankalt, dontrenameme, sirbanksalot, iliketobank, richrthanaig) to begin the trade.

Update: I've thought of a few more reasons you should have a bank alt.

Having multiple bank alts lets you sort items conveniently. Zul'Gurub and the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj have zone- and faction-specific items that are only useful after saving up for a certain time. Now that those two instances are easily farmable on a regular basis, these items can become bulky on a main and take up your entire bank if you're not careful. Making an alt (named "zgfarmbank" maybe?) can be a good way to store those items until you have enough to use.

Placing and hawking items anonymously can find you prospective customers you might not have found on your main. If you've grouped with players who turned out not to like you, or your guild is infamous, people might be wary of your items and would not buy from you, even if you're offering the cheapest wares. Using a bank alt lets everyone buying from you know that you're an alt, clearly, but no one will know who your main is (as long as your have a dissimilar name, and aren't in your main's guild). And trust me: No one ever asks. Generally, no one cares because most people use or know people who use bank alts.

Having a handy bank alt will save you trouble! Sometimes I don't feel like going to town in the middle of a good grind/quest session to post my auctions and put up with trade chat. Other times, I'm in a group and don't want to abandon them or burden them to wait on me. With a bank alt, you can put off handling the tedious details of trading until you're more fit for the task. If you're not in the mood for it, it shouldn't be getting in your way until you do it.

And lets not forget the roleplaying opportunities. With a properly-equipped alt, you can partake in the major-city roleplay scenes quite seriously, with a very humorous character. Having a class you wouldn't like to roleplay as a bank alt can let you experience their character when you're in the mood, and keep to your main the rest of the time. Also, since no one knows the alt is you, you can have fun with comical gnome or undead characters, or a stuck-up blood elf. Just remember to respest your fellow roleplayers and the roleplay-realm rules, as always.