u/Doredrin

not damage done

not objective stats

not healing done

not deaths/kills

maybe not even the score

The best way to tell if your team sucks is if everyone on the other team has every single one of their cooldowns ready at all times. If everyone on the other team is always trinketing out of your stuns, using defensive/immunities, movement cooldowns, etc. It means your team is putting so little pressure on the other team that they don't even need to use any of their cooldowns.

This post is mainly about general tips in managing an alt concentration army. If you want specific instructions on how to make a build for specific professions and have it take you through tool selection/one time treasures/etc there are plenty of guides for that.

I apologize for my somewhat spammy threads here, I've just been doing an irl concentration dump of the knowledge I've gained from midway through TWW until now running a concentration army. This is not advanced stuff, but there seems to be people here in the dark about some of this stuff, and most youtube videos are about the flavor of the month concentration setups rather than general advice. I run 100 alts that aren't super optimized and have averaged about 250,000 gold a day so far this month even in this current terrible wow economy.

The real reason to even make a concentration alt army is that it's one of the most efficient ways to make gold per hour. Ignoring login times, you could probably dump concentration on 2 professions on an alt within 30 seconds. A lot of time that can be several thousand gold, so even if you only make 3,000 gold total on one alt login, for 30 seconds that's literally 360,000 gold an hour. Now that is ignoring startup costs etc, but even factoring in that it's still very efficient. Given that 250,000 gold is 15 blizz bucks, 120,000 gold an hour would be roughly minimum wage. So that 360,000 gold an hour would be a $21 dollar an hour salary in blizz bucks given that you can't transfer gold for money without breaking the terms of service.

The downside is that even though the gold per hour for alt armies can be absurdly high, it's gated by the amount of alts you have. So you may technically be averaging some absurdly high gold per hour doing crafting alts, but once you have depleted your concentration you can't just infinitely keep making gold the way you can with mass crafting, gathering, or item farming.

It's important to note that login times can be a very large problem based on how much you scale. Technically doing daily transmutes on tons and tons of characters might be one of the best ways to make gold, unfortunately login times hamper that a great deal. If you are only logging in 5-10 characters every few days, then login times mean basically nothing. But if you wanted to login something like 100 characters in a single day, a 30 second login time for each is literally an hour wasted staring at the login screen per day. If you decide to go down the tryhard path and making a hundred alts like me, keep in mind that things scale up incredibly like that the more alts you have. There are various methods online for reducing login times, but you are still dealing with probably 10 seconds minimum per character.

So first off you need the actual alts. If you want to make at least a token (~250,000 gold) a month I would suggest 5-10 alts just to be safe. Leveling traditionally through the world from 1-80 can be really fun, but unless you are running an optimized route it can literally take 10 hours or more. So your best bet if you don't have the alts already leveled is just to wait for the remix or timerunning events or do the earthen exploration leveling method that seems to be the current meta.

The next step is picking your professions. If your goal is to make as much gold as possible, alchemy and enchanting are historically the best bets, but all through this expansion there has been wild swings in terms of profitability in a lot of the professions. So my advice is to do some research into what makes the best gold, and keeping in mind it can change from week to week. If you just want to chill and experience different aspects of the game I would consider doing at least one of every profession. Some of them like leatherworking are very difficult to make gold with, but you can get a few achievements and familiarize yourself with different parts of the game.

One of the most important and overlooked parts of running a concentration army is buying the materials and selling the items. Especially right now in wow, holding on to materials for several days or weeks may result in your crafts actually losing gold. But you have to also balance that with the time lost from buying the materials continually. When markets stabilize if you are a serious crafter you should familiarize yourself with the current prices for your biggest expenditures, and know when some of them are being sold for cheap. Keeping in mind you might also possibly be stocking up on them right before a crash in their price. The easiest to counter act this is through reducing the time between when you purchase the materials and craft/list the finished item.

Currently I funnel all of my finished products to one character that I've designated for sales. You can far more quickly make a sale on the character that you crafted the item with, but it can be a nightmare to consolidate all of your auctions over multiple different characters. The way I transfer the completed items and assorted raw materials/runes I get from patron orders to the sales toon is through the warbank summon skill. If all of your alts are on the same server, it may actually be ideal to mail all the finished items to your main. That way you don't have to dig out the items from the warbank every time you want to list them on the AH.

In terms of addons, I would highly suggest getting "midnight routine" or something similar which tracks per character whether you've done the weekly profession quest, darkmoon, weekly treasures, disenchanting, and treatise. Also some form of concentration tracker that will show you how much concentration each alt has. Those are the two basically essential addons, because it is a complete nightmare to track all of that with the default systems. Less vital are addons like "no mats no make" which helps streamline the patron order tab. Craftsim is arguably vital, but if you get good enough at knowing the prices of materials it becomes less important.

General tips:

I would suggest for patron orders not doing any that require concentration and avoiding any skill ups that cost over 500 gold per knowledge point.

Skilling up your profession is surprisingly not as important as it would seem currently. It can be passively done through patron orders.

Artisan moxie is not as profitable as it used to be, but 600 moxie will get you a bag still worth 5-10k and it occasionally has expensive recipes.

Enchanting is similar to the gathering professions (herbalism, mining, skinning) in that the catchup mechanic allows you to basically get fully caught up within a few hours.

For disenchanting items for enchanting. It's basically necessary to have an alt churning out cheap evercore or cloth items for ~5 gold a piece and then disenchanting them. Buying the same items on the AH can be over 100 gold.

Skinning was, and still is in many ways, extremely profitable. But keep in mind the price of hides may crash down even further. Even though skinning is not concentration based, it still follows a similar principle of timegated production with majestic beasts.

Old expansion transmutes still make decent gold, but some of them require an initial investment in rep or gold.

Blacksmithing was consistently profitable in TWW, but is rather weak now. Things may change or they may not.

Jewel crafting was absurdly lucrative for a while then moderately so, now you are lucky to get 1500 gold a concentration dump. I can't imagine blacksmithing and jewelcrafting though continuing to be this poor performers the entire expac.

It's up to you how much time you want to invest in blue/purple tools. Just remember they can be enchanted.

For specifically how to invest your knowledge points, I would suggest checking out the latest build videos. However, just remember that often things become significantly reduced in profit as the expansion matures.

New to Midnight is that most of the most profitable recipes cost voidlight marl as well as moxie. Which shouldn't be much of a problem if you play a lot, but they are often 1500 marl which can be a lot if you don't have a lot of normal hours played.

and now the most terrifying word for crafters everywhere and one of the most important concepts:

UNDERCUTTING

Very often, if not always, you will be undercut by either bots or people. You will post your item on the AH and then within 30 seconds there will be other players who have reposted their own items. Since the AH sell order goes cheapest-most recently posted and the posting fee is based off of the vendor value of an item, undercutting and reposting/cancel scanning has become the norm.

You have two options as I see it:

-babysit your sales and constantly repost your own items too

-leave them up for a while and hope they sell

-undercut enough that people are discouraged from reposting

It's an entire artform to know the value of your products, and what to post them as. Typically for high volume items it doesn't matter that much if you are undercut or cancel scanned, they will eventually sell. Just be warned that especially during times of market volatility, you can post an item and then 6 hours later it will still be up and there will be hundreds of items listed before yours for maybe hundreds of gold less.

This is really a major problem with enchanting which can be a truly cutthroat market. If you are just creating reagents or whatever you can usually make the sale listing at the lowest price or often 5-15% more expensive than the lowest price.

I will add that if you are feeling risky or greedy you don't have to list at the lowest price or undercut. If you know the markets well you can often make 10-15% more by listing it at a higher price than the lowest prices. Be warned though especially now with a downward trend of a lot of items, you may miss a sale entirely. If you are starting out or just want your gold ASAP then it's probably best to list at the lowest price or undercut.

True AH sharks know the markets extremely well and will very often not even post at the lowest cost or undercut because they know the price will eventually go back up. Personally I've just been listing at the lowest price or undercutting (probably too much) just because I don't want the stress of not making a sale. When prices stabilize as they always do I intend to get a good idea of the market value of things and often not post at the lowest price.

This is why I suggest making all your sales on one character. It's infinitely easier to monitor all your auctions if they are posted by one character.

I also suggest on your main selling character to favorite all your commonly bought raw materials as well as your finished products. If you have an alt management addon like altoholic or whatever it will tell you in the tooltip when you mouse over it on the AH how many you have on your characters so you will know what you need to restock. I think TSM has an automated system for this, but I've never used it. Generally a good strategy is to scan the AH or whatever on your AH selling character. Then buy the raw materials you are running low on, check the profitability of the various crafts. Then quickly craft your items, mail them to your seller/put them in the warbank, then log back into your seller, post them, and decide whether or not you want to babysit the sales.

This isn't super profitable and is limited by the amount of alts you have, but if you want a change of pace from midnight concentration crafting or whatever it can work. This requires alchemy and jewelcrafting to work to it's fullest potential:

WoD garrison: with fully upgraded followers with scavenger traits you can still get 500-3000ish garrison resources a day. With housing driving up the price of a lot of old world materials, you can trade the resources at the trading post on certain days for 15-30 garrison resources per material. For things like flytrap that often trade at 3-5 gold, that can be 3,000 gold per 10,000 resources. So that 2,000 garrison resource mission you just got could be worth 450 gold in materials. In addition, you can get medallion of the legion or Ogre caches that usually sell well for about 7-10k. You often get these about once a week or so, averaged out that's about 1,000 a day. Plus random things like primal spirits, mounts, toys, etc. There is also the mine/garden which are maybe a few hundred gold combined.

Alchemy daily cooldowns: if you do all of the alchemy cooldowns across all the expansions (some of which are rep gated or whatever) you can get about 1,000 gold a day

greater haste taladite: this works in conjunction with the WoD garrison. It's about the only WoD material that has a daily cooldown and is used for one of the WoD decor items. It sells for around 800 gold often and uses 50 taladite crystals. Meaning each crystal is about 15 or so gold. 20x15 on the daily cooldown. Combined with work orders from the jewelcrafting hut it's maybe about 500 gold

Northrend daily jewelcrafting quest: it takes maybe 1-2 minutes to complete and you can get dragon's eye that often sells for 1,500 or so gold

cataclysm daily jewelcrafting quest in stormwind/orgrimmar: prices can be up and down but maybe another 500 gold

Pandaria farm: either trillium (snake root) or vegetables which can be more profitable but the market is very volatile. Anywhere from 500-1500 gold per day

so adding it all up:

WoD mission table: 750-2000 a day

Alchemy cooldowns: 1,000

northrend quest: 1,500

cataclysm quest: 500

pandaria farm: 500-1500

so that's maybe 3-6k a day total... which is very competitive with concentration cooldown stuff. The only drawbacks are that it takes a lot longer than just pressing buttons at a crafting table, and does take an initial time and gold investment to set up.

one thing I will edit in, is that both the wod garrison quest chain and pandaria farm setup can be done with chromie time on a leveling character. They both have tons of dense easy to complete quests and when you are done setting them up on a leveling character you may be level 40-50 or so. In addition the northrend and cataclysm quests can theoretically provide a daily trickle of xp to characters leveling.

If you are doing mass crafting I guess epic tools are a requirement, but do they really offer much benefit for concentration alts? I am not a master crafter, but I have a reasonable amount of experience. My math could be wrong, but this is how I see it:

-about 1-3k per day from concentration

-very rough estimate of about 500,000 to 1,500,000 gold per year

-about a 50 point difference in rank 5 purple tools vs blue

~5% of ~1,000,000 = 50,000 in added profit from purple tools

- each run of abundance takes 3 minutes, need 20 vitality which means about an hour per tool (you can't speed up abundance from my understanding)

so you spend an hour minimum per alt to get 50k more in profit per year?