A guide to reagent craft for afk goldmaking.
Making gold while being afk is amazing. In this article, you'll learn about risk management and craftsim goldmaking.
GOLDMAKINGFEATUREDWAR WITHIN
The war within professions are complex. That’s actually a good thing. When you understand complex things, you gain an advantage. With that in mind, learning the system can be extremely worthwhile.
Today, I want to showcase the potential of the new profession system when it comes to mass crafting. In addition, I’ll share my ways of doing it while afk. I also want to start with a bit of an encouraging speech.
This article is the most complex article on this website. You might have a hard time. However, if you follow the steps, the potential for this method is huge. I’ve made over 10 million gold with this since the start of the expansion. You definitely don’t need to go as hard as I did! Take it one step at a time and who knows, maybe you’ll find something you are very successful at!
Crafting is a risk
A lot of people tend to forget this small but important information. The process of crafting is to transform some items that have a value into other items that have different values. However, prices on the auction house aren’t fixed unlike prices of the npc vendors. They are volatile.
In Dragonflight, I could often see items being extremely profitable on one day while being atrocious a day later. It’s the same thing in TWW. In my discord, I showed a lot of screenshots from making tons of gold from missives. I was making around 2000 to 3000 gold per craft for rank 2 missives and they were selling like hotcakes. Here is an image of my sales in the first 2 weeks of the expansion.
I’m sure some of you know what came next. Missives became unprofitable. Now what? I’ve spent a ton of points to get missives going and it’s not profitable anymore. It’s unfair. It sucks. But here is what’s crucially important for you to understand. Missives aren’t profitable today.
Don’t switch your profession or abandon making missives. You now have an ability that a small number of people have. You can craft r2 or r3 missives for a low crafting cost. Today, this ability has no use. In the full TWW expansion, this ability is pretty neat to have. Missives will become profitable from time to time as price resets happen everyday. What you want to do next is to diversify by collecting more of these abilities.
How to make gold while being afk
In the image above, you’ll see that the addon craftsim estimates my profit at 33 gold and 92 silver per craft for bismuth bolts. What a waste of time to craft an item for 33 gold?! But what if you were to craft bismuth bolts non-stop for an hour?
Let’s do some math! I can make 2432 bismuth bolts crafts per hour. If you multiply that by the 33.92 gold from the craftsim interface, that gives you 82 508 gold. The best part of it? You don’t need to be at the computer when those bismuth bolts are being crafted!
After 30 minutes, the game will disconnect you. You can simply start crafting and go away from the computer. Take a shower, watch your favorite streamer or go for a walk. Come back and see everything has been crafted!
If you click on the image above, you’ll open a spreadsheet. If you make a copy by going in “file”, you’ll be able to edit the spreadsheet. Insert the values in the yellow cells to see your profit per hour! To find out how long it takes to craft a certain numbers of items, I use the addon quartz.
More on craftsim
Craftsim doesn’t work too much as a standalone ( unless you enter your own prices manually ). You’ll need a price source addon. Most users use either Tradeskillmaster or Auctionator. I personally prefer Auctionator as I use the “search” feature that gives you the “real” crafting cost in seconds! You can also buy your items for your crafts faster.
It’s very important to scan the auction house for your craft with the search button. Otherwise, the prices may have changed and the profit isn’t the same anymore! It’s also important to be aware of baiters!
The importance of secondary stats
Secondary stats make all the difference when it comes to the war within professions. In the craft below, each multicraft point gives me 51.64 silver per craft. Turns out I have 629. That’s 325 extra gold per craft! This is why you see so many players saying that crafts aren’t profitable. When it comes to the current professions, it’s all about precision! Having a multicraft tool in this craft is mandatory!
Can I make this craft better?
Another nice quality of life aspect of craftsim is the specialization info. Each recipe is affected by certain nodes in your specialization trees. If you click on the “specialization info” section, you’ll see which nodes can improve the craft selected.
What about concentration?
Concentration can be extremely profitable. It’s crucial to use your concentration. You get 10 concentration every hour which means if you are capped, you start losing 10 concentration every hour. Very often, professions have a craft with at least 10 gold per concentration. For a full day of not using your concentration at 10 gold per concentration, you just lost 2400 gold. It’s also easy to track your concentration on your alts with craftsim!
Average profit isn't guaranteed profit
If you make 5 crafts, you have a real chance to lose gold. You can also make way more than expected. If you craft 1000 of the same item, your chance to be far away from the average profit is much lower. It's very important to understand that there is a lot of luck involved in the resourcefulness, multicraft and ingenuity stats. However, the more you craft, the more luck averages out.
Calculating the risk
As mentioned earlier, crafting is a risk. How does someone calculate such a risk? In the spreadsheet and in craftsim, you’ll see a “return on investment” percentage. When you see the “ROI” at 10%, it means that you’ll need to invest 100 gold to make 10 gold. If we look back at the 82 508 gold per hour, it was at a 20% ROI. To make 82 508 gold, you’ll need to invest 412 540 gold!
Not everyone has this amount of gold! On top of that, the more items you craft, the more subject you are to risk and price changes. As much as it says gold per hour, you don’t need to craft for a full hour. The bigger quantity crafted, the bigger the risk. The gold per hour metric is more of an answer to the question: “ What is the best amount of gold earned from the least amount of time spent?”.
Maybe you’ll prefer a craft at a lower gold per hour but a higher ROI. In other words, a bigger profit margin. Going the safe way is not necessarily a bad way at all. Especially if you are new at this.
Tradeskill master sale rate
The tradeskill master addon has data that can really help us figure out how much an item sells. In the image above, you’ll see "region sale rate". The “region sale rate” is the percentage of times the item sells when it is posted. In the example above, it would be 20.2%.
If you post the items 5 times, it will sell ( on average ). It’s the same if you post 1000 of the same item. On average, 200 will sell. Sometimes 0 will sell. Other times 1000 will sell. It’s important to keep in mind that the more items you post, the lower the sale rate.
If you post 10000 inks, it’s very unlikely that 2000 will sell every time. If you post 100 inks, it’s very likely that they will all sell. Inks have a very high sale rate which is why you can post in bigger quantities. On the other hand, it’s extremely unlikely to sell a 100 missives if you post 100 missives. Missives are quite expensive and when people buy them, they usually only 1 or 2.
The best way to figure out how fast items can move is to start with small batches of items. Start with crafting 50 inks and see what happens when you post them. If they sell instantly, craft 100 the next time. If the 100 sell instantly, then make 200 or 500 and so on. If you struggle to sell the 50 inks, then you know not to craft 200 at a time. The bigger the quantity crafted, the higher the risk!
Rank 2 reagents with rank 1 materials
You can craft rank 2 reagents with rank 1 materials. You don’t even need blue quality equipment! If you hover over the skill bar, you’ll be able to see how much skill you need to reach guaranteed rank 2 reagents with rank 1 material. This can be extremely important for profitability.
Note that unless you are using concentration, it’s impossible to craft rank 3 reagents with rank 2 materials. The ways to get skill are profession equipment, profession racial, knowledge trees that give skill and using higher quality reagents. Sometimes, you can use a mix of rank 1 and rank 2 materials to guarantee rank 2 reagents. You can also use optional reagents ( obtained from the auction house or from patron orders ) to increase the skill by 5, 10, 20 or 40. However, those are expensive and are usually used to guarantee rank 3 crafts.
Sales data from this method
In the image above, you’ll see my numbers for engineering on 3 different reagent crafts. Bismuth bolts, gyrating gears and whimsical wiring. In total, I’ve made 7.7 million gold profit from this process. Now, the ROI % is extremely high for this. It is definitely way harder today to get such an ROI % for an item with such a sale rate. All of the data is from crafting rank 2 reagents with rank 1 materials.
I’ve also used leatherworking, jewelcrafting, blacksmithing and inscription to do reagent crafting. I’m also pretty sure that other professions are viable as well. Coming soon in the nextl few weeks will be profession builds. Two builds are coming this week on Patreon while one is already there!. More Make sure to sign up to the newsletter so you won’t miss out on these amazing builds! Good luck on your reagent crafting ventures!
