For whom the cow trolls

So, off and on have been exploring my cow side and levelling a hordie tauren shaman. I always wanted a cow, but my main will always be alliance because that is where the guild is, and because of all of the time and energy I have invested in my ally toons. But I was still interested to see some of the horde content, and still interested from time to time in being alone, so I rolled a new toon on an oceanic server. I know someone with a guild there so if the sound of silence drives me crazy I have somewhere to go. But for the moment I am enjoying the silence.

Anyway, a little side effect of creating my hordie alt is that I am experiencing for the first time since beginning just what it is like to start with nothing – no gold, no bags, no resources etc. So this is a chance to enjoy some of the challenges of levelling and resourcing my toon from scratch and I thought I might record my process. The first thing I did when I got serious was to train dual gathering – in my case skinning/herbalism on my main horde toon. I don’t want to have to power level or mess about with my professions, so dual gathering is the go with the hope that I will make some gold through other abilities. I also trained fishing, cooking and first aid as secondary professions and will try to keep those levelled as much as possible as I go. But I had already run out of money to train these professions and I was still with only one bag.

I rolled a troll banker and got her to Ogrimmar without too much trouble at level 1, but she didn’t even have enough gold to post those auctions of peacebloom and leather scraps. So next thing I did was roll a DK to run through the starter area. I had heard that running through the first levels and just vendoring the gear was enough to get a fair amount of gold together relatively quickly, so I tried to do that. The blue DK gear doesn’t vendor for much, but the starter green set brings more money. Otherwise the money earnt from three levels of questing both as quest rewards and from vendor trash is more than my lowbie cow can manage.

By the end of that effort after vendoring all my gear and sending everything else to my banker, I had about 30g. This was enough to get my cow a fair float of petty cash with the rest to the banker to make into some real money. For now I have kept my naked DK because having all of the flight points may well come in handy. Started by splurging on some 8 slot bags for the cow which should be plenty for now and cost abour 50 silver each. Then I spent the weekend trying to build up my auctioneer scan data and periodically scanning for items listed for less than vendor. Setting the minimum threshold at a profit of 50s I still don’t quite have enough money yet to buy up all of the sub-vendor listed items on the AH at any given time, but it is a guaranteed return so I am patient with it. By the end of the weekend I was well over 100g with my lowbie cow still sitting at level 15 and doing nothing other than questing and gathering as she goes.

The downside of the sub-vendor bids is that it takes a little time – many of these are bids and therefore you have to wait to either be outbid or to win the item. I am finding a higher rate of success on this server at buying these items so that time is worth it. However, it means that any given time a fair bit of my float is hanging about on the AH waiting so I am limited on what I can do in the meantime. Once I have a comfortable buffer after the vendor item buy out, I will start to follow the same process with items listed for low prices which can be flipped. My experience is that this works most consistently with cloth, ore, herbs, ink, glyphs and twink items. We shall see how we go with this.