The Resale filter that we looked at in the last chapter finds items that you can resell at a profit without modification. The other profit searchers in SearchUI find items that you can buy, modify in some way and then sell at a profit. Most of these require your character to have a certain skill, like disenchanting or milling. The exception to this is Converter, which finds items that can be converted in some way with no special skills. For example, motes that can be combined into primals.
Auctioneer Disenchant Filter
Using Searchers for Fun and Profit
The complete list of profit searchers is:
- Converter: convert items for profit without using a specific skill
- Disenchant: Disenchant items and sell results for a profit
- Milling: Mill items and sell results for a profit
- Prospect: Prospect items and sell results for a profit
All of these work in a similar way and their settings work just the way resale does. Just like resale, you need to set it up to work with your own situation. In general, you should use all profit searchers that you have the skills for for maximum profits.
One setting to be aware of is the ‘Use custom levels’ option. This lets you search for items that you can convert using a skill that is in a specified skill range. For example, if your Disenchant skill is at 300, you can select Use custom levels, then set the Minimum skill slider to 0 and the Maximum skill slider to 300. Now the search will only return items that you can disenchant at your skill level. You can also use the Minimum skill slider to eliminate low level items from your search (although setting an appropriate minimum profit will take care of that more effectively). Once you are happy with your configurations, click Search to see your results.
Purchasing and ignoring works in exactly the same way as Resale.
Using Arbitrage Searchers to For Even Bigger Profits!
An additional profit searcher which works a little differently is Arbitrage. What Arbitrage does is find items that you can buy on your current faction and sell on auction houses of the opposite faction. This can be one of the best money making strategies you can use if you do it right.
You will need to use the neutral Auction Houses in Everlook, Booty Bay or Gadgetzan to transfer items. You will also need help from a friend or a second account because you cannot buy auctions that were posted by a character on the same account as the purchaser. The neutral AHs take a 15% cut so post your items at a low price and be very quick about having your friend or character on a second account purchase them. Leave it up too long and another player might come along and buy it. There are so called ‘Auction House Snipers’ who spend time doing just that. I suggest making your transfers at a quiet time for your server to reduce this problem.
When you use the Arbitrage searcher for cross-faction selling, you will need to make sure that you have several days of scans for BOTH factions if you want to get accurate results. While the whole process seems a bit involved, this is really a great way to make gold on the Auction House. Make sure that you have alts set up at all the Auction Houses that you want to trade on to save you time!
Save Time Using Snatch
If you really know the market for some specific items, such as certain crafting components and you know that the price can really fluctuate throughout the week, you can use the Snatch searcher to automatically find those items when they are listed below a certain price. You can add items from your bags to the snatch list and then set the price threshold or you can add an item from a search results list created by any other searcher. Just select the item in a search list and click the Snatch button. To run the Snatch search, click Search on the Snatch page to show any item in your snatch list that is below the price threshold. Then alt+ctrl+shift click Purchase to buy all the items that it found.
Applying Filters
Filters are useful because they let you exclude classes of item that you never want to see listed in your search results for any searcher.
- ItemLevel: Filter the list by item level. Use to exclude low level items that don’t sell well or make much profit
- ItemQuality: Filter by item quality. Use to exclude gray items for example
- TimeLeft: Filter out items by auction time remaining. Useful if you are going to bid on resale items etc instead of buy out and you don’t want to have too long remaining when you can be outbid.
Saving and Loading Searchers
If you have created a search that you want to run over and over, enter a name for it click the Save button at the top of the Search tab.
When you want to run the searcher again, select the saved search from the drop down menu and click Load to load those search settings. Click Search to run the search as usual.
If you want to learn more about Auction House gold making strategies, Mayley Winters has launched a complete video series that shows you how to master the Auction House. Check out my review here.
