So much to do in so little time!

So its several weeks since Wrath was released and the queues have died down. At most times of the day its possible to log in without waiting though most of the realms I check are "full". My main problem now is that I have too many things I want to do yet limited playtime available.

On VeCo, I have just last night levelled my hunter to 30 and got his mounts. My time on VeCo has been fairly short since my last blog post. Each visit I would work on the auction house for a while, then march out and work on my hunter. He has been using three of his 5 pets in rotation. Bear, Carrion Bird and Cat have seen the most action. Of the three, probably the Carrion Bird is the most generally useful. The bear is a great little tank but the limitations on positioning with Swipe make him a bit hard to use effectively. Cats as usual are awesome single target tanks. Without any form of AOE, they require frequent retargetting to handle groups. Both Bear and Cat could regularly handle 1-3 same-level mobs without too much trouble. Bear has slightly better survivability and cat kills quicker but otherwise theres not much difference.

My Carrion Bird however was significantly easier to use than either of the others. Screech will hold the attention of any additional mobs long enough to allow the primary target to be burnt down. If you can wait long enough for two screeches to go off before using mend pet there should be no problems with aggro. Earlier casting of mend pet would sometimes cause problems.

Changeabull and Replaceabull, my druid and shammy alts have mostly remained in town. Changeabull is at level 18, fully rested, so should get level 20 and cat form the next time I actually make use of him. Poor Replaceabull is still level 6 and hasnt been touched for months. He might end up becomming a true bank alt for the others.

VeCo mercantile activity has been going quite well. On each of the 5-6 times I've logged in, I've hit the AH pretty hard. Traceabull scans the whole auction house to set baseline values then uses auctioneer's scan ability to find loads of disenchantable items.

On any particular scan, Trace will find upwards of 500 auctions to buyout or bid on, just for disenchantable objects below skill level 225. The buyouts are immediately disenchanted and then relisted. Quite a few of the bids are outbid by other people but even so I can expect another 200+ items to arrive in the mailbox over the next 48 hours. All these will be disenchanted and relisted as I find them.

At this time I am being fairly indiscriminate on what materials I'll try to sell. Any object that can be disenchanted with the current maximum 225 skill is fair game. Often I have won auctions on ridiculously low bid prices, even when the buyout was set well above average. Even some blue items have fallen into my hands in this manner.

The resulting shards, dusts, essences etc are relisted on the auction house. In most cases, a greater essence sells for less than its component parts, so I break them apart and sell the lesser essences. I still sell some as greater essence though as it seems not everyone is aware they can be split in this way!

Another thing I do to increase sales is set stack sizes to less than 10 or 20.
Many things I sell in groups of 2 or 3 or 5. Shards I usually sell individually. Mostly this is because the enchants that require these materials use small quantities, but it is also because some people cannot do the maths to see that my prices are actually a bit higher than the average!
When listing my auctions, I will sometimes buyout my competitiors if they are sufficiently undercutting for me to relist and still make a profit. I also look to see opportunities to bid cheaply on otherwise overpriced materials.

So, does all this market stuff make any money? Hell yes!

I have repeated this cycle about 5 times since my last post. In the initial round I invested just under 200g into materials, out of a net worth of about 350g at the time.
Last night's scan saw me invest about 700g in new materials. I have about another 700g worth of unsold auctions and about 1400g in cash. Total net worth would be edging close to 3,000g, nearly all earned within the safety of capital cities. Time spent on purely AH related stuff would be no more than 4 hours in that period.