Limited Availability Recipes

A similar idea to buying manuals from vendors and selling them for a profit in the AH, there are a number of recipes that can make you even more money.

I regularly make a few gold a day from the manuals (see post below) but, sooner or later, somebody else get the same idea and the inevitable competition drives prices down. It can go for days without a single competitor then there will suddenly be three or four. A week passes and they all get bored with the idea and the market is mine alone for a while. Buying and selling recipes is a little harder to implement so generally has less competition.

These recipes can be vendor purchased but only in strictly limited quantities. vendors will usually have only one or maybe two of a particular recipe.

Here are some examples:

Pattern: Enchanter's Cowl You can buy this for 10 silver and sell it for 1 to 1.5 gold in the Auction House. It's sold by either of the tailoring suppliers in Booty Bay. It seem to have a reset time of around 30 minutes which means that once you have purchased the single recipe available, that vendor won't have any for sale for 30 minutes. All of the limited availability items work like this but the reset time varies depending on recipe and vendor.

There are many more recipes and patterns but not all of them are popular and can be hard to sell. Here are some of them that make me a regular profit.

Pattern: Icy Cloak

Recipe: Superior Mana Potion

Plans: Mithril Scale Bracers

Pattern: Gem-Studded Leather Belt

Pattern: Icy Cloak

Gnomish Cloaking Device

Mithril Dragonling

Deadly Scope

All of these can be purchased for a few silver, or a gold or two at most. Check the Thottbot links above for exact locations and prices.

Since these patterns are all limited availability it can be real work traveling from vendor to vendor just to see if they have the recipe, so here’s a much easier technique. Start 3 alts, or login to those you never play anymore, and run them to these vendors. I just ran an alt to Winterspring at level 2, yes, level two, so don't whine that these vendors are in mid-level zones and it's hard. Let me know in a comment if you want a post about getting low-levels to high-level zones.

Every hour or so, log into these alts, already sitting right by the vendor, and grab the recipes. Don’t forget to give the alts some gold for the initial purchases. Some of these vendors are near mailboxes for easy mailing back to your main or mule, or just wait until you have a bunch and use your hearthstone to get back to the city.

There are also a number of Burning Crusade limited-availability recipes that can be sold in the same way. I'll cover these in a separate post later.