Gold-making addons

Today it's time to talk a little about addons.

If you're new to World of Warcraft, you may have not heard yet about addons. If you're raiding or pvping, it's likely that you know some and use them. Addons are little alterations to the game interface that can make life lot easier. There are hundreds of different addons for every imaginable purpose and some that just seem to be completely out of this world… There are addons for raiding, boss fights, pvp, communication, roleplaying and for many more purposes. Today I will introduce some addons that are especially good for making money with professions. You don’t need addons to play the game and you don’t need them to play the auction house, but they will save you a lot of time. To make it clear, this isn't an overall article about addons. Today it's just the ones you should have if you're getting serious with the gold making. I'm going to make an interface customization guide some time later.


 What excactly are addons? They are simply text files and maybe some graphics included. You don’t need to install them in any way. They are just put into your game /Interface/Addons folder to their respective directories. If you’re a programming type of person, have a look on your addons’ lua-files to see how they work. If you know how, it’s possible to tweak them little bit to your own liking or even make a completely new addon to a specific purpose.  

Addons should simply load when you start the game. On your character login screen, there’s small button on the lower left corner where you can turn addons on or off. An addon called Add-on control panel lets you do the same in-game. Remember to tick the box that says “Load out-of-date add-ons”. Addons take a little time to be updated for the current patches, but they still might work just perfectly. Sometimes addons can take some time to set up in-game, but we’ll talk about that when we go through individual important addons.

Where to get them? 

There are two different websites that I actively use to get and maintain addons: www.curse.com and www.wowinterface.com. Curse-website has also a downloadable client program that makes addon downloading and installation even easier. It also notifies when updates are available. Both sites have also a lot of user maintained premade interface packages. Let's talk about them some other time. Now we're interested in some specific addons.

 

Postal

Ok. You are a successful enterpriser in WoW economy and you have sold 57 gems and 32 glyphs + some pieces of armor. You have also bought 50 stacks of elementium ore and 75 stacks of whiptail. So you have over 200 messages waiting you in the mailbox. It would take ages to open them all manually. That’s were Postal and other similar mailbox addons help you. You just press “Open all” button and you will get everything from your mailbox while you make a cup of coffee.

Postal is easy to use and just simply adds some extra features to normal mailbox interface.

Gatherer/Gathermate

 

If you farm ores or herbs, you’ll benefit greatly from an addon that shows you all the spawn points for nodes in the map. Then you can just travel a well-planned route to  gather everything you come by. These two addons come with updatable libraries that contain the spawn points and they are shown in the world map as well as mini map. Remember to update the library from time to time.

Auctionator

 

A must-have for auction house game is an auction house addon of some sort. The most popular one is Auctioneer, but I’d recommend Auctionator as it is lighter and simpler to use and does the important things very efficiently. Simplicity also means that it doesn’t break so easily with every single patch.

Auctionator is a tool for scanning the auction house to build a database of prices so you can always see from item tooltips how much they are worth. It also offers easy ways to buy and sell items in the ah. I'm going to make soon a separate guide for auctionator, but it's easy enough to work out on your own.

Panda

 

You will prospect, mill and disenchant a lot and that can be quite a workload. Everything that makes things little easier is usually worth it. Panda is an addon that makes prospecting and milling easier with mass milling/prospecting/disenchanting macros that can be then pressed every few seconds until you run out of items to handle. You could do same thing easily with rather simple macros, but I personally like the easy to use interface of Panda addon. It works out of the box, no additional setup is required. Remember to just turn on the auto-looting option from your game interface menu. 

TradeSkillMaster

 

The absolute killer in the profession addons genre! There used to be loads of addons that you could use to make crafting queues and handle auctions. TradeSkillMaster does it all and a lot more. This is the tool you want to use especially if you’re into high-volume markets like gems and glyphs. When set up, TSM can evaluate what’s profitable to craft and then help to shop the required materials from the auction house and vendors. Then you can just click “Craft next”-button and then mail all your crafted items to your bank alt with a single click. Then on your bank alt, you’ll just get the items and in ah put up everything for sale in just a few seconds. You can literally list hundreds of auctions easily in really short time and all it requires you to do is to scroll your mouse scroll wheel a bit. To get there, the addon or a collection of addons to be more precise needs to be set up. That is a daunting task to a beginner, but no need to worry, I'm going to do through-out guide soon enough.

TSM is a collection of modules that each does a different task. There are modules for auctioning, mass-mailing, shopping, crafting and destroying (milling and prospecting). TSM release version has just come out and oh boy, I like it. Panda addon serves the same purpose as TSMs destroying module, you can use whichever you prefer

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The author of TSM is a serious player in the glyph market and TSM truly shines with glyphs. That’s why I will in the upcoming guide use glyphs as an example for setting up TSM. You can then repeat the same procedure for gems or potions or whatever it is you’ll end up crafting.

The Undermine Journal

 

Not an addon, but goes well with the rest. This is the ultimate market research tool! www.theunderminejournal.com has easily searchable information about every single auction on every single realm. It’s the best tool to get in touch with your realms market and to find what sells and what doesn’t. It’s also the way to learn your competition. You can search individual seller and see what they have up in the auction house and what their posting history is. That way you can find out their posting times and learn when it’s the most profitable time to put up your auctions. 

Mobile Auctioning

 

This is one of the more current features in WoW. You can use ah from everywhere, from mobile devices or website. It’s not free to use though, but not very expensive either. Mobile auctioning is good if you don’t have too many items for sale and want to follow them and cancel and repost if necessary. This works in low volume, high price markets like end-game blacksmithing, leatherworking and tailoring armors. You don’t make more than a few at a time and they are easy enough to manage with the mobile system where you can’t have the same addon tools as in-game. Mobile ah has also daily limit on the amount of auctions you can post. It isn’t much use for high-volume markets, but feel free to have a try if you post only a few auctions per day. I don’t use it myself, but it’s good to know that such option is available.

Share your favourite gold making addons in the comments.

Adel