Lament of the Fel Lotus: Part II

Fel Lotus gathering must be generating too much money....

From the patch notes 2/26/08:

Herbalism

* Ancient Lichen now has a chance to drop a Fel Lotus where it used to drop a piece of random green jewelry.
* Black Lotus replaced by Fel Lotus in herbalism skinning tables for Outland creatures.
* Increased the chance that Felweed, Dreaming Glory, Ragveil, and Flame Caps will contain a Fel Lotus.

Gather and sell Fel Lotus while you can! The new Sunwell areas should increase Raid volume and demand for this lovely little Gold maker.

The Economics of Flying Mounts and Gold Sinks: Druid Edition

I think the idea of money sinks is very interesting. The biggest money sinks are commonly thought to be mounts and, more so, the training required to ride them.

In theory, money sinks are to prevent inflation from occurring. Inflation is the devaluation of currency. For example, in Zimbawbe a roll of Toilet Paper costs $417. Imagine if a Super Healing Potion cost 40g! (please note that the situation in Zimbabwe is very serious and not equitable to a virtual game in any way).

Why do mounts constitute a sink?
1) everyone wants one
2) the gold spent on mounts leaves the player economy (more later)

1 and 2 can be insidious, like AH fees or prominent like mount fees. In fact the other likely sink in WoW is the AH fee.

Items such as the Mongoose Enchant, are expensive, however only select players have a demand for such damaging enchants and the money for the enchant remains with the player performing the enchant. The demand for mounts is greater, as players can easily see how much faster players with mounts can move. While a glowing enchant is cool, its power is only really apparent when you are on the receiving end of it in a PvP setting.

Other items are popular, but must remain inexpensive in order to maintain reasonable game play. Common items could be made into money sinks, but if a Super Healing Potion cost 40g, MANY players would have to spend huge sums of money just to successfully quest or step outside of a city, which would not be fun.

Soulbound items superficially appear to be a sink. Soulbound items create large pseudo-sinks of money, because the items are sold from player-to-player for high prices and then must be vendored for much lower prices. However, the high purchase price is transferred to another player, so the gold never leaves the economy. In fact, this is likely a source of inflation in the WoW enconomy. If high-value items were sold more commonly from vendors, then this would represent a sink (most high-quality items in WoW that are from vendors are relatively inexpensive- time (rep, badges....) is the currency of these vendors).

Are riding skills and mounts really money sinks?

There is no question that the cost of mounts represents a significant sink for currency in the WoW market. These items remove money from the economy, most players will obtain them and they are among the highest priced single ticket items in the game.

Is it possible that mounts cause inflation by decreasing the amount of time it takes to gather highly profitable materials such as herbs and ores? Well, herbs and mining represent the only two gathering professions that don't involve significant amounts of time (fishing and skinning being the other two which do require significant time). Enchanting could be included in this list, but requires gathering from the AH and is not dependent upon a mount. So, it is hard to imagine significant amount of inflation occurring from rapid gathering. Swift mounts are 5x as fast as walking.

The big question is: Do Druids need Swift Flight Form?

More than any other class, druids need their Swift Flight Form. As per the discussion regarding druid profession choices, every druid should have herbalism or at least mining. The addition of Swift Flight should allows droods to acquire gathered items at a bit less than 4x the speed of a swift ground mount. The instant cast ability allows for a reduced mount time and for quick getaways from mobs. It is hard to imagine that in Wrath of the Litch King that the increases in mount speed will exceed the gap currently seen in the Burning Crusade (hard to imagine mount speed 9x faster than a ground mount). I suppose anything is possible though. Regardless of the time between now and the expansion, every druid should be working on getting Swift Flight, if they arent already.

Herbalism: Can I get a Green Thumb?

Herbalism is comparable to fishing in terms of the amount of neurons firing while "engaged" in this profession. I think the time has come for herbalists to do more than gather (right-click).

Herbalism Masteries:










Wow Item Creator!


I think some type of mastery, such as those above would make herbalism a much more interesting profession.

Nightmare Seeds

Last night was a first in herbalism for me. I picked a Nightmare Vine and ended up with some Nightmare Seeds.

I can see using these similarly to Fel Blossoms. However, these little weeds seem to have the advantage of increasing your health pool considerably, allowing your healer to fill your HP 2000 points above usual HP for a prolonged period of time (30s). In comparison, Fel Blossom absorbs a fixed amount of damage (1250 max) and only lasts for 15s whether damage is absorbed or not.

For druids, our inability to use items while in a form makes these less useful than for a warrior, but with the new changes in 2.3 to macros we can quickly:

/cancelform
/use Nightmare Seed
/cast Dire Bear Form

I can see using this in those special moments of pause that occur after a knockback, but before a nice Feral Charge. When your healer is wondering if they will be the boss's primary target for their last seconds before a corpse run.

Of note, the cooldown is 3 minutes, which would prevent use of healthstone, Fel Blossom, etc. I will have to experiment to see if the timer is the same as healing potions. It also appears that you may get the extra 2000 health in addition to the 2000 HP capacity.

Wowecon.com shows these items as selling for a median 2.25g and having very low volume across all servers. I think these items are likely too rare to make any great amount of money from dedicated gathering. Items like this tend to be in low demand due to their low profile on the supply side.

Anyway else have experiences with Nightmare Seeds?

Lament of the Fel Lotus

I am still searching for a great money making plan that (hopefully) doesn't involve a huge amount of farming or grinding, though some of this non-recreational time is necessary to make such sums of money.

Briefly, my history of making gold in WoW involved the following:
Level 10-40: stacks of Firefin Snapper, Oily Blackmouth and level appropriate Elixirs of Agility and Defense.

Level 40-60: Arcanite and Ghost Mushrooms.

Level 60-70: Quests and Primal Earth to Primal Water Transmutes.

I thought that Fel Lotus would be a great item to gather and/or work the margins in the AH for profit. However, my server has had a median price that is about 50-66% lower than game-wide pricing (median 12g, realm-wide 18g). I think one large factor contributed to this devaluation of Fel Lotuses and hope to learn a lesson of market patterns from this endeavor:

Fel Lotus is almost exclusively for raiders and as such is a very sensitive to raid volume. From watching the Nordrassil forums, it is clear that raiding guilds are the thoroughbreds of Warcraft- awesome, powerful beasts capable of spooking at the sight of their own shadow. When guild break-ups on the server started to occur (probably 3 top raiding guilds in the last 2 months) I should have known that prices on Fel Lotus would be reduced. If guilds start coming back and our server raid volume goes up, Fel Lotus may again arrive back at its true value.

In addition, it was also apparent from the AH listings that:

1) Many players don't list things for what they are worth or even close to what they are worth. Despite Fel Lotus being rare (only from herbalism and a random pick from other common and "mapable" herbs) and many AH prices with shorter remaining AH duration (very long>short) being much higher, about half of the players were setting buyouts more than 2g below the next highest auction.

2) Low volume markets are difficult to control. On at least 3 occasions, I bought out ALL of the Fel Lotus stock (at around 10g each) and listed my own Fel Lotus for about 15-18g. NONE of my auctions resulted in buyouts or even had bids. Instead, a few auctions listed at less than 12g as a buyout ruled the market (as they should). I think players bought a small amount of the Fel Lotus stock at low price, while a significant amount of low price stock remained on the market for 48-hours, further perpetuating days of low pricing. This maybe another effect of the 48-hour auction?

3) Guild Banks may be creating a repository for raid consumables that causes demand to be less in the AH. Whereas previously raid items may have been lost on guild-bank alts or just simply not donated to raid guilds (less likely, raiding guilds are highly organized), with the advent of guild bank, I think it is likely that more flasks, cauldrons and their respective materials are being put into guild banks by raiding and non-raiding segments of guilds. Arguments against this theory would include the continued high price of Fel Lotus game-wide.

Lessons Learned:
-Don't try to "industrialize" sales of an item that is required by a small, niche population that has highly variable demand for that item.
-Don't try to monopolize the pricing on an item that is vastly and consistently underpriced, because you can never underestimate other players' ability to ruin pricing on the AH.

I'm going back to herb picking and Primal farming.