Preparing for the Expansion

The expansion is now less then two months away from hitting store shelves and its a very good time to begin preparing your characters for the leap into Outland. There is a lot of new content coming out and its best to prepare yourself for it so that you can jump right in and enjoy without nothing holding you back.

What better time to do it then now? Your raiding schedule has probably slowed while your guild waits on the expansion and market prices are remaining pretty stable. The winter holidays are coming up so its a good time to get in some extra farming and preparation for the upcoming expansion!

If youre level sixty, then continue reading on for lots of helpful tips to get yourself ready for the expansion. If youre not level sixty, worry not! Many of these tips apply even to you, although the majority of the new content begins to level fifty five.

Cleaning your Inventory

You can examine most anyones character and find a vault loaded with crafting materials, consumables, spare gear, and junk. When the expansion comes youll be needing a lot more room for even more items that will come from the various instances and quests. Thats why its a good idea to take a look through everything and try to clean-up!

Id start off by selling stuff youre sure you wont need. Gray items, potions youll probably never drink, and crafting materials that youll never use. All good candidates to head to the nearest shop or auction house to be turned into coin. Try out auctioneer to mass-sell items easier.

Next would be making an alt and having it hold your extra stuff. Make a level one character and park it outside of a bank. Mail it your unneeded stuff and have it store it for safe keeping in its vault/inventory. This is a lot of work, but great for collectable items that youll never be getting rid of anyway.

Outside of that, attempt to organize your bags around so you know where everything is at and make room for lots of awesome new things.

Quest Journal

The expansion will be bringing about a large assortment of new quests and youll need somewhere to put them all. Youll have an expanded journal (by 5 slots) when the expansion comes around, but the more room the better.

Do this, take a look at each quest in your journal and ask yourself the following questions:

Do I want to put the effort into finishing this quest?
Do I have the extra time available to finish this quest?
Do I want the reward for this quest?
Is this quest doable with my available resources?
Have I made any progress that I dont want to abandon?
After looking over those questions, if it looks like you really dont need that particular quest then drop it. You can ALWAYS pick a quest back up, so you wont be losing it forever.  

Taking up Jewelcrafting

Jewelcrafting is an awesome profession that will be a big money maker. Its also an expensive profession, requiring rare gems and various amounts of stone and metal to level up with. These gems can only be obtained reliably through mining. When the expansion comes out and jewelcrafting is introduced there will be a skill to allow a greater chance of getting gems out of mineral veins, but that isnt in right now.

So the best thing to do would be pick up mining and get it to 300. Youll have tons of extra metal and stone to make items with AND youll have your mining ready to farm gems to jewelcraft with.

Dont wait around until launch and try to purchase the materials off the Auction House in order to raise your skill in jewelcrafting. Inflated prices will reign and itll be way better, like any profession, to farm the materials yourself.

Rolling a Blood Elf or Dreanei.

Lots of people are planning to start fresh with a new Blood Elf or Draenei come the expansions launch. This means that lots of things, especially newbie gear, will become scarce when the races are introduced.

Thats why it may be a good idea to load up on gear (enchanted if at all possible) to give to your alt as it levels up. Get it while its cheap and in plenty of supply so that you dont end-up meeting supply and demand at launch.

As a note, the two new starting zones do a wonderful job of introducing new characters to the game. As such, they will have plenty of gear to get new characters from one to twenty. The two new starting zones for each race take players on the express trip from level one to level twenty with all the supplies they need. If you want to go above and beyond that though, now is the time to act.

Supply and Demand

Until the initial expansion rush is completed you will probably see a lot of things, especially consumable items such as crafting commodities, skyrocket temporarily in price. Anything related to the expansion will be inflated in price due to something we like to call supply and demand.

A lot of players will be looking into making alts, trying jewelcrafting, and powering through the new levels to get to level sixty. However, a situation arises where there will be more demand for items then there is supply. When this happens prices begin to rise, kind of like what happened during the war efforts campaign.

During the war efforts campaign players could turn in cloth, metal, herbs, etc. in exchange for tokens that can be turned in for green quality items or reputation. During this time all of the various turn-in items skyrocketed in price while the green items fell. When enchanters found out how much supply in green items there was, the green items began rising in price (as enchanters began buying them out in bulk) and the enchanting shards, dusts, and powders fell in price (as enchanters put more and more on the market).

When everything fist went live with the war efforts campaign, things were really unstable. Copper went as high as several gold for twenty bars which is beyond outrageous! As things went on, it settled down and prices returned to somewhat normal (but still inflated). When the war efforts were over, the prices settled down to what they normally where.

As you can see in this example, the same will most then likely happen. Youll find a lot of items on the Auction House for way more then theyre actually worth and the extra amount of gold the expansion will be placing into circulation wont be helping either.

Thats why its a good idea to get farming skills ready to farm crafting commodities and to go ahead and obtain anything youll absolutely need for the expansion right now. For about a week or so after the expansion the market will be topsy turvey with things going really high then really low and all over the place. Its a really good idea not to get caught up and spend more money then you should on items that just arent worth it.

So in summary, stock up on items youll absolutely need and if you want to take up jewelcrafting then pick up mining, if not then make sure any professions youre serious about are as high as they can go.

Dont Buy Gold!!

Lets pretend for a minute that we here at Ten Ton Hammer dont despise the secondary market and the damage it does to in-game economies. Okay lets not, thats too much work. Instead Ill just deliver the facts to you straight up:

DO NOT BUY ANY GOLD FROM THE SECONDARY MARKET!
DO NOT BUY PURPLE ITEMS FROM THE SECONDARY MARKET!

Dont be tempted by their evil! Here is why: When the expansion launches you will find tons of quests, enemies, and instance bosses who give large amounts of gold as rewards! Flying mounts start at 1,000 gold and that will be no problem with the expansion!

Knowing this, DONT BUY GOLD!! Blizzard has made 100% sure that youll get all the gold youll need through questing, instance running, and other activities. Youll be able to get money for a flying mount easily and youll have plenty left over to do over things!

Quest rewards at level sixty start out at somewhere around 5-10 gold a quest. Trash enemies in the level 58-60 instances drop something like 20-40 silver each. Nethercloth sells for a ton to the NPC and drops like crazy! There will be tons of new ways to make cash.

So if you go out and buy gold thinking you need to in order to stay competitive, stop and think for a moment. There is a lot of better things you can do with that cash then go out and give it to the secondary market. That and its a complete waste!

Dont buy items either, most all of the BoE epic items available now are nothing compared to the new drops in the 5 man instances. See our loot preview for examples!

Outside of all of the advice given, the best tip possible is to use your head. Dont get scammed with overpriced items and dont fall for the secondary markets tricks. Get your inventory and quest journals cleaned up and if youre the impatient type begin farming items to level up jewelcrafting.