How to obtain rare AH pets without spending RL money

[Kiella]

Lately I've seen a number of posts on the pet trading forum in which people who say they are tight on RL funds still buy expensive TCG cards and collector's editions, or offer to pay for Blizz store items, in order to trade for rare pets. Now, if you have extra entertainment money by all means spend it however you like. But if money is tight, please do realize that there are other options out there.

Step 1: Assess your server's economy

The Undermine Journal (TUJ) is a wonderful resource for comparing AH prices across servers. First, look up your server: https://theunderminejournal.com/ Now, in the item/seller search bar, enter the name of the rare pet you would like to find. Once you reach the item page, scroll down to the middle of the screen where you will find a chart labeled "Other US Markets." Here you can compare your server's prices to those of every other server in your faction and region.

Do your server's prices compare favorably? Note that you can also see the average current market price and mean market price for the item for both your server and across every other server (in your faction and region) in the table at the top of the page.

If the item you are looking for is available on your server and your server's prices seem reasonable, then you just need to get some more gold Skip ahead to step 3.

Step 2: How to deal with a terrible server economy

Unfortunately after checking TUJ you realize that your home server has terrible prices or it is unlikely you will be able to find the pet you are looking for on the AH. Luckily, you still have several options.

Option 1: Transfer gold to the opposing faction. Go back to the realm selection page on TUJ and this time select the AH for the opposing faction. Are prices and availability any better? If you are simply on the minority faction of a high pop server a simple solution may be to eat the 15% neutral AH cut and transfer some of your gold to the opposing faction.

Option 2: Create a character on a high pop realm. Certain high population realms like Illidan-Horde, Mal'Ganis-Horde and Stormrage-Alliance are known for their massive AHs and great pet prices. It may be somewhat time consuming, but in the end, leveling an alt on one of these servers can be a great way to get the best possible prices for your pets.

Option 3: Trade goods, stones or pet leveling services. Even on a terrible AH you will occasionally find relatively good deals. Consider buying duplicates of pets you already have or TCG mounts to trade for the pets that you want. Or if you do not spend much time on the AH, consider offering pet leveling services or any extra flawless battle stones you may have in exchange for new pets. There are almost always people on the Pet Trading forums looking for stones and pet leveling, and it can be a great way to trade for pets that might be vastly overpriced on your home server.

Step 3: How to make gold quickly

There are many resources out there if you are struggling to make enough gold to purchase the pets that you want, or if you don't have much time available to devote to making gold. Check out the forums at The Consortium: http://stormspire.net/forum.php or look through some of the blogs featured on the front page of your realm's section on TUJ.

As a pet collector, you also may have particular expertise on the relative value of different pets and pet breeds, which you can use to your advantage to flip pets on the AH. Consider creating bank alts on various high pop servers to exploit differences in current pet prices cross-server. If you get to know what an item should go for on a given server, you can often quickly flip underpriced pets for several thousand gold profit. Then when you see overpriced pets, try listing your duplicates and see if someone will bite. Just be careful not to start flipping pets until you're comfortable enough with what pets will sell and at what price or you could easily find yourself stuck with six pets of the wrong breed that looked underpriced but actually were not.

Or, if your really hate dealing with the AH or grinding out gold, consider the suggestion at the end of Step 2 above about pet leveling and selling your extra flawless battle stones.

I know I may be encouraging potential trading partners to become AH competitors here, but it makes me very uncomfortable to see people suggesting they are spending money they probably shouldn't. Besides, I personally love playing the AH maybe even more than I love collecting pets and welcome any other "dual addicts" to the fold

Good luck!

[Azrile]

1. If you are on a low population server - Camp the BMAH, win pets and sell on high population server. Take money on high population server and buy current raid pets and sell back on your server. You will quadruple your gold.

2. If you are on a high population server - buy current raid pets, and sell them on a low population server, use that gold to camp the BMAH. Buy TCG pets and sell on your high population server.

I have every every TCG pet except the tuskar kite, and every blizzard store pet, and I never paid real $$ for any of it.

[Finnelis]

While the AH is certainly very convenient, I must say it is also imho the lamest way I can think of, of acquiring new pets.

I realize that from a pure efficiency point of view, doing what you both describe is really worthwhile, for me though, it's more or less the antithesis of what I'm looking for in this game. It brings me back to the sordid reality of our terrible free market economic system. I hate this system in real life, it's not to see it again in my games much less to profit from it and create the same kind of side effects.

[Denarian]

While the AH is certainly very convenient, I must say it is also imho the lamest way I can think of, of acquiring new pets.

I realize that from a pure efficiency point of view, doing what you both describe is really worthwhile, for me though, it's more or less the antithesis of what I'm looking for in this game. It brings me back to the sordid reality of our terrible free market economic system. I hate this system in real life, it's not to see it again in my games much less to profit from it and create the same kind of side effects.

Not sure how having the freedom to make as much currency in WoW as you want, (or in real life for that matter) is a bad thing. Having an open game and an open economy, means players can do exactly what they want. If you want to raid, go ahead. If you want to quest, go ahead. If you want to just collect pets, go ahead. If you want to sit in Trade all day, and "troll," by all means, pay your $15 a month and do it.

But if everybody was given everything in WoW, all the same, there would be no incentive to play a game like this. There would be no raids, seeing as all gear would be the same. There would be no titles or achievements either. WoW would be completely boring, because you could never be "unique." You would have the same gear, pets, weapons, achievements as everyone else. Making everything "equal" sounds good on paper, but not in reality.

Competition is a good thing, not a bad thing.

[Ishildur]

I just got my Viscous Horror after a whole lot of buying and selling and leveling pets. It was time consuming, but on Illidan (Horde side, US) I managed to buy all my missing TCG pets and that accursed Viscous Horror. It's also the only way I could get those pets since I'm hardly in a financial situation to be buying expensive pets for real money nor do I have a guild that has the inclination nor numbers to raid old content on normal when we have to team up with other guilds just to do current tier flex. So I'll just go ahead and be 'lame' but at least I get to acquire those pets so I'm perfectly fine with it if I'm playing the game wrong.

However I did get to do something I enjoy, I got to fight a whole lot of pet battles to get my pets. This got me a lot of stones that went on improving pets that then got sold. I sold a ton of spare children's week pets (stoned and often leveled to max), even more leveled Chrominius (popular pet to buy for tournament and tamers), stoned and leveled Gilnean Ravens and when I was lucky enough to get them... leveled Pandaran Water Spirits (I could not keep this in stock, not even with scouring my own server's AH for them). If I could find decent deals on my home server I'd get them, level the pet and sell it for a little bit more than what I paid for it - but the gold on Illidan was worth much more than my home server gold. Also I sold sooo many low lvl engineering pets for peanuts... but in large enough amounts those peanuts added up.

Sure, it took many many many months and yes a lot of the time stuff didn't sell and no I didn't have any of the big ticket things to sell like Dragon Kite or Spectral Tiger Cubs. I noticed people were a lot more willing to buy pets for 2-3k than higher prices, most of my sales came in the category between 500g-2.5k. For the amount of time it took it was very reasonable, took me around 9 months (I did luck into a bananas and dragon kite on bmah but rest came from Illidan's AH). The trick seemed to be selling max leveled pets that appears in more than one team for tamers and/or celestial tournament. So for a while I split my tamer fights 50% my own pets, 50% pets for selling and put almost all of my wild pet battling into the sale pets. As far as long term thing to work on, it wasn't nearly as bad as the grind for Insane. For one thing, no Dire Maul trips.

I think my favorite thing about doing it like that was not having any stress. I didn't have any massive 'omg no you didn't! that's my BMAH Tuskaar Kite! Bid! Bid!' nights like I had before then, nor did I have to search frantically for that one rare pet to try to get to someone's awesome trade offer. It was just a slow steady accumulation of xp for pets and gold for AH deals. Some days I just didn't bother leveling anything or even posting auctions. Sometimes I had no sales for a week, other times I'd come back to 20k in my mailbox. It wasn't fast, but it was predictable, fairly steady over time and I didn't need to learn any special things about different server economies to flip things. All I had to do was keep leveling tradable pets I used in my own tamer fights and keep selling them.

[Kiella]

However I did get to do something I enjoy, I got to fight a whole lot of pet battles to get my pets. This got me a lot of stones that went on improving pets that then got sold. I sold a ton of spare children's week pets (stoned and often leveled to max), even more leveled Chrominius (popular pet to buy for tournament and tamers), stoned and leveled Gilnean Ravens and when I was lucky enough to get them... leveled Pandaran Water Spirits (I could not keep this in stock, not even with scouring my own server's AH for them). . . . The trick seemed to be selling max leveled pets that appears in more than one team for tamers and/or celestial tournament.

I've also had some good luck selling leveled pets on the AH- I've just been more focused lately on leveling my own pets, but it's definitely something I plan to come back to once my own are all leveled. Unfortunately there are also a few other people doing this on my server so we seem to keep undercutting each other on a number of pets- I'd probably check the AH first before leveling. Also, I'm not sure how much success you'd have with this on a lower pop server where there might not be that many people serious about pet battling, since it does put your pets off limits to any collectors who may not have a lvl 25 pet. My advice to anyone attempting this would be to stick to higher pop servers and scan the AH first to try and find useful pets without much current seller competition. It's definitely a great way to get rid of those under-5k pets though

[Maizing]

I have an alt on Illiden-Horde for this purpose. I don't generally level the pets I sell to 25 though, not only does it reduce the pool of available buyers, but I don't really want to put quite that much effort into pets to sell (especially since I have not yet completed getting all of my own pets to 25). I don't just sell level 1 pets either though, instead, I level them to level 9. The pool of potential buyers is larger, and if anyone is in the market for the achievements for leveling pets to level 10, they only have one level to earn. Occasionally, I miscalculate, and a pet will gain one or more levels higher than I planned, but those pets sell too.

I have not yet gotten all the TCG pets, but I have been able to get a [pet]Bananas[/pet] and a [pet]Hippogryph Hatchling[/pet] for decent prices... I have also been able to get a [pet]Darkmoon Rabbit[/pet] (it is the "wrong" breed, but at least I have it). These pets are seldom (if ever) to be found on my home realm's auction house and I have neither the RL funds nor the rare pets to trade for them, so I am happy that there is one means of obtaining them that I can utilize.

[Ishildur]

Also, I'm not sure how much success you'd have with this on a lower pop server where there might not be that many people serious about pet battling, since it does put your pets off limits to any collectors who may not have a lvl 25 pet. My advice to anyone attempting this would be to stick to higher pop servers and scan the AH first to try and find useful pets without much current seller competition. It's definitely a great way to get rid of those under-5k pets though

Oh yes, absolutely this is something you would only ever do on a very high pop server where the pet market is huge. On a lower market like my home server's AH there's never a reason to sell a leveled pet, it just won't sell unless it's something like a dragon kite or spectral tiger cub. If it's not your home server you want to make sure you'll never have wasted gold, gold just sitting there with nothing you need available for sale, so if you do this always do it on high pop servers with bustling pet markets. Also make sure it's a useful pet. Look through the posts here where people post their teams for tamers or for tournament, any pet that appears in multiple teams may be a good candidate.

It is a niche market to be sure, but being able to get 1k-2k more for a pet because it's leveled helps a lot on the larger AHs where competition is fierce. My market was not at all 'people who collect pets' because all these pets I sold were fairly easily and cheaply available. I targeted frustrated impulse buyers. It was very much for people who were just starting out on the Celestial tournament or tamers who just needed to fill out their team of good 25th lvls but didn't feel like grinding out a few of the better carry pets. There's a fair amount of people who'd rather just pay 1-2k so they can get started on their tamer carry/tournament grind immediately. Especially once frustration sets in because you were just missing that one pet needed to beat that one fight in the tournament.

Getting that extra 1-2k on a high pop server offset the extra time to sell and certainly offset the exceptionally low prices for most lvl 1 pets of the type I was selling. Since I was in no hurry I'd sometimes pick up lvl 1s for 400g or so on Illidan, level them, then sell them for 2.5k. I did sell a fair amount of lvl 1 pets too (mostly pandas and engineering pets), but the bulk of the money came from the leveled pets. Never underestimate how easily the frustrated will spend to fix their frustration.

[Ishildur]

I don't just sell level 1 pets either though, instead, I level them to level 9. The pool of potential buyers is larger, and if anyone is in the market for the achievements for leveling pets to level 10, they only have one level to earn. Occasionally, I miscalculate, and a pet will gain one or more levels higher than I planned, but those pets sell too.

See I think that's pretty great, you found another niche market - people who are still leveling their pets and/or want the level pets to lvl 10 achievement easily. I think that's the key really to getting anywhere at a reasonable pace, finding some niche market and making that work for you.