Gaining without (nearly) logging in

Hi! This post is my entry for this month  WoW Gold Blog Carnival. This month we have a great topic: "How would you make gold if you had limited play time?", so let's start!

Let's take a look at some professions

Inscription:
What surely won't work:
First of all, having limited play time, IMHO, excludes Inscription almost completely. You won't be able to make glyph and re-post them efficiently when you get undercut if you can't log in several times a day or for long periods of time.
What could work:
There could still be two things you can do, depending on your server:

• Darkmoon Cards: That's quite obvious. It has a great number of advantages: the cards are random, so people can't just make more to keep undercutting you. Even if someone undercuts you, they will do so with just one card. If you can't sell singles, decks sell great during the Darkmoon Fair, since there is not so many people getting into the trouble of creating a full deck, so there are usually very few of them.
  The only problem is that 1 out of 4 you'll get cards "of Stones" which don't sell very well.
• [Mysterious Fortune Card]: This is a bit tricky. Normally it takes a lot of barking to sell these cards well, as Cold said in a lot of post in his Cold's Gold Factory (I'm not linking them all, since they're a bit out of topic... But you'll find some of them in his "Top 10 Popular Posts" sidebar). But if the gambling craziness has already taken your server, you could probably sell some just putting them on the AH and leaving. Start with small amount to check how this could go.

Jewelcrafting:
What surely won't work: Prospecting to cut and vendor IS time consuming. So pay attention to the amount of ores you buy. Prospecting is still a great way of making money in no time when raw gems sell well.
Even creating jewelcrafting items and disenchanting could be quite time consuming, but you should still do it for [Carnelian Spikes].
What works: Remember that you don't have to cut and vendor instantly. If you think that in some weeks you'll have more time to play, you could still prospect to get the mats you need and put somewhere.
Things you can still do:

• Cut high-selling rare gems. Things that you can easily sell in large quantities (JMTC recently published a post about Wowpopular and the Best Gem Cuts to Sell), so if you got undercut people whill simply buy through the undercut gems and reach yours.
• Jewelcrafting/Enchanting: Make Carnelian Spikes. You can even buy the raw [Carnelian] from the AH, if they're cheap enough. To see if they're so, just compare their price to those of Greater Celestial Essences: if 3x[Carnelian] < 1.5 x[Greater Celestial Essence], do this ([Carnelian Spikes] disenchant on average in 2x[Greater Celestial Essence], I put 1.5 in the formula so you'll have a good gain margin).

Enchanting:
What surely won't work: Scrolls are still selling for really low prices so, no matter the amount of time, you won't be making money from this.
What works: Disenchant. Create [Carnelian Spikes] if you're a Jewelcrafter, otherwise check your AH to look for green items to disenchant. This won't take long, and will net you some good profit totally risk-free on most servers. You're not assured of finding those greens, but it's not an hard work checking.

Mining:
The only not time-consuming thing you can do with mining in smelting Hardened Elementium Bars, and it can easily become time-consuming if you have to smelt [Elementium Ore] into [Elementium Bar]. However, this is an activity your character can do alone even without any add-on or macro, so if you can run the game on a computer while you're doing something else you will be fine.
Just check [Hardened Elementium Bar] are profitable on your server.

Alchemy:
Just remember to do your transmutes every day.
Check the AH to see if there are potions/elixirs that can be made for a gain. In my server [Mythical Mana Potion] and, to a lesser extent, [Mythical Healing Potion], are good sellers.


Without needing any profession:
Well, there are basically two things you can do without any profession involved:

• Flip items on the AH:
  Make yourself a good snatch list, if you already don't have it. The Consortium Forum is a great source of good advices about snatch lists. Don't stop at the post with their suggested Snatch List, but roam around in the forums... It's full of very useful things.
  Another thing you could do, if you have the money to invest in it, is slowly buying Darkmoon cards at the AH when they're cheap and then sell the complete decks (if you buy when there isn't the Darkmoon Fair, and sell the decks when it's there, you'll surely make a profit). Avoid the [Earthquake Deck] (->[Darkmoon Card: Earthquake]) (so cards "of stones"), since most tanks who needed it already have it. Prices are now half what they were two weeks ago, and are still going down.
• Flip items bought from NPCs:
  People could think this isn't very appropriate if you don't have time to travel around, but they're wrong. You just need an alt parked near some vendors, ready to buy their goods when needed.  Now that Dalaran is totally empty anything sold just from those vendors sells great at the AH.

Now, if you are looking other ways to make money without investiong too much playtime in it, check this month WoW Gold Blog Carnival* hosted by Just My Two Copper: you'll surely find lots of useful information to get rich or richer come Cataclysm!

I'm now organizing a new Blogging Carnival of my own, the Best of the Month Blogging Carnival. If you want to participate you have time until February the 4th to choose your favorite post of January for your blog, add a link to the Carnival and send me an e-mail at kreaton05 (at) gmail.com

On February the 5th I'll publish the posts I've received for the month of December... Go to the Best of the Month Blogging Carnival page to check all the rules!

You can also see the Best of December post!

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*Available from February the 2th.