How to Make Gold from Battle Pets (No Leveling or Farming)

[Romath]

My story

Back in MoP before the start of ToT I was getting bored with the game and needed something to do, so I decided to try out this “Pet Battle” thing. After a week I was addicted, had some 25’s and was already spending gold to buy ones that I didn’t have. A few weeks later 5.2 releases and the addiction begins to fade some, but I had already spent tens of thousands of gold.

Some months later I saw someone advertising in trade selling an X-51 Nether-Rocket for 180k, a mount that I’ve wanted since the Burning Crusade, but I only had 10k. I really wanted this mount so I looked at my battle pets and realize that I could maybe sell them, but it wouldn’t be enough… Then I remembered, I had 100k gold on the server I used to play on in Cata and came up with an idea: what if I bought pets on my old server and brought them over to my new server? I whisper the guy selling the mount and ask him if he can hold if for a week or so but he said he can only give me 2 days before he will post on the AH. I had my goal.

I logged onto my old alt and looked through the pets buying them in the regular AH UI, and just guessing at what seemed like a reasonable deal with my limited knowledge of what I had seen the few weeks I had bought pets. I spent nearly the entire 100k in a short time, logged back to my main server, posted them on the AH, and began to wait. At the 2 day mark I had reached my 180k goal, somehow making profit on these pets, getting a mount I wanted, and finding a new market to control.

How to do it:

Step 1: Learn the Prices

The key to buying battle pets is: you need to know general price off the top of your head. There is no easy way to get reliable battle pet data in-game so you need to take a little bit of time and learn about the pets.

How should you do this? https://theunderminejournal.com/ click the “Battle Pets” Category and view the “Mean” and the “Regional” prices of each pet. TUJ - Album on Imgur This way you get an idea of your specific server and you can learn regional averages too, this is very accurate on most low-medium pop servers. For higher more saturated higher population markets you will need to pay more attention to the individual servers mean price or look for times when certain pets are more rare, it can take more effort but the general lower prices on pets and mounts can be worth it if you manage to make gold here.

Now that you have some idea of prices skim the AH and test yourself. If you get confused simply alt-tab and refer back to TUJ, and maybe find some low priced pets to grab or acknowledge that some pets on your realm go for higher than the regional average, and invest in them.

For pricing level 25’s

Level 1 Price	Level 25 Price
<2k Gold	3k-3.5k Gold
>2k Gold	+1k-3k to value

I’m sure some of you are wondering about TSM3’s pet prices and if they are an acceptable substitute for TUJ. The answer is not really, TSM seems to do an average price of all the breeds instead of the average price of the pet itself. Meaning if there are 10 B/B Gilnean ravens posted for 2,500g average and 1 S/S Gilnean Raven posted for 30,000g then it will show the Market Value as about 16,000 gold for a Gilnean Raven on your server instead of a more reasonable 5000 gold. In most cases this is not a large issue but as you can see with this example it can be quite a large difference in some cases.

If you wish to understand how and what pet breeds are read this guide here WoW Pet Breeds and Breed IDs - WarcraftPets and if you are just generally interested in more information on what pets people use and that sort of thing check out the rest of WarcraftPets.com - WoW Battle Pets, Companions and Vanity Pets it is an amazing site.

Step 2: Learning to Search the AH

I’m willing to bet a lot of you TSM users are used to group searching for items, well that’s not how we are going to do it for pets. There are HUNDREDS of battle pets, and they neatly have their own category in the AH all to their self! This means something great, instead of searching for each pet individually and taking a week with a group we simply type /Battle Pets in TSM’s Shopping search https://i.imgur.com/C8IyZsP.png or Battle Pets/ in Auctionators Buy search https://i.imgur.com/NCL7W1h.png to get a list of every battle pet for sale without having to do anything special.

I simply skim from cheapest buyout up looking at the names/icon glancing over to the price every few auctions to see if any of the pets are out of place in the price order. An example would be seeing an [Anubisath Idol] near a [Fishy] and an [Ashstone Core], an idol is quite a bit more expensive than those two.

If you want to search specifically for level 25 pets you can search /Battle Pets/i25 in the Shopping tab of Tradeskillmaster, you can also search /Battle Pets/i24/i25 as level 24 pets generally sell as well as 25 ones.

If you use Auctionator there is no simple way but you can look for the cheapest level 25 pets to the right of the name when searching for Battle Pets/ https://i.imgur.com/KmZUiUX.png


Step 3: Getting Pets

Now that you have an idea of prices and know how to look for pets you should be able to check for some deals.

When you’re first starting out, willing to invest some time, and need to get a decent inventory you can bark in trade. Say you’re looking to buy Battle Pets, offer to look up their collection on the armory and that they may be sitting on a pile of gold. This really attracts a lot of people as they are interested to have some appraise the value of their pets that they have never thought about selling before. You will often sort through many collections of junk, but you can find great deals and people willing to sell tons of pets cheap as they had no idea they were even sellable prior to your message. I don’t recommend doing this once you get a good supply of pets and have a good income as it can take a lot of time.

Visual instructions if you’ve never viewed another player's pets on the armory: https://imgur.com/a/JhBsu

Here are a few tips:

• Anything over 10,000 gold takes a long time to sell, and the time to sell increases greatly the higher you go.
• Pets from 2k-5k are the perfect zone, they sell the fastest. You want the majority of your investments to be made into this category if possible.
• The majority of pets I buy are half region price or so, it really depends on what you feel is comfortable profit for you, the higher the better. If you’re looking at a 10k gold pet you might sell for 12k, it’s likely not the best choice.
• I suggest not dealing with most pets worth less than 500g, this is more of a personal choice, it may be worth it to you. For me when I’m already posting 300-400 auctions at once and my pet journal is around the 1000 pet cap at all times I don’t have time to deal with them.
• Look for level 25’s, way better than leveling them yourself! I usually only buy them <1k.

If you have no gold and want to farm some easy pets that sell for good gold I recommend going for these:

• [Anubisath Idol]
• [Chrominimus]
• [Coilfang Stalker]
• [Fiendish Imp]
• [Fragment of Anger] [...Desire] [...Suffering]
• [Hyjal Wisp]
• [Netherspace Abyssal]
• [Stinkrot]
• [Tainted Waveling]
• [Viscidus Globule]

Step 4: Picking a Second Server

I’m sure not everyone plays on multiple servers, or if you do it may be a full pop were this works the worst on so let's see how we decide to pick a server.

I’m going to be using the data from https://realmpop.com/ it’s not 100% accurate, or completely up to date but it is the best gauge I have to measure server size and it’s pretty decent for battle pets. The best servers for me are medium populations between 170k-270k in the “Total” tab. 8 out of my 10 servers for pet flipping fall into that range. One of my other’s being a full pop that is a pain to sell on but pets are constantly cheaper than all other servers so even if I only make 5k it can be big profits. The second server is one of the 3 smallest in the US I make gold on it pretty well but it can take months to spend that gold on new pets as the AH is so small, good for buying WoW Tokens.

Step 5: "But How Do I Move My Pets from Server A to Server B?"

Now that you have some pets, simply learn them. Any pet* that can be bought from the AH can be re-caged from your Pet Journal on ANY server and sold again on the AH. Just go into your journal, right-click the icon for the pet and select “Put in cage”. https://i.imgur.com/erPAv45.png
Wild pets, Store pets, Promotion pets, most quest pets, and Collector's Edition pets are not able to be caged and thus can not be sold on the AH.
*The only exception to this rule is the [Mechanical Chicken] companion pet, once the item is learned the battle pet can not be caged from the journal. This is likely an oversight that has never been corrected.

Step 6: Selling Your Pets

Time to get some gold to your new server. Basically you want to look at the regional price of https://theunderminejournal.com/ and base your price off this. Sometimes you’ll want to go down a little if both your servers constantly have been cheap or if you have quite a lot of this specific pet and want to unload it. This is what my TSM settings look like on an [Anubisath Idol] Regional Price 4327g. https://i.imgur.com/BXg1GiH.png

Now I know all your previously learned AH experience from selling anything else has been to keep your auctions posted 100% of the time, but that's not what I suggest with battle pets. In my experience battle pets sell far better when people have the illusion that the pets are rarer, they are more willing to pay higher amounts of gold and buy it as an impulse buy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_purchase .Now this is theoretical but it also keeps prices higher as you and your competition, there likely isn’t much on medium population servers, are not constantly undercutting.

TL;DR you have multiple servers now, don’t flood one of them with your pets let it settle between postings.

One thing I’ve learned recently is that posting multiples of the same pet but having different breeds can be helpful. Sometimes a battler is after a specific breed and won’t buy the pet unless it is that one. Having multiples of the same pet also makes you seem like you have more auctions posted, it gets your name out on the server and makes you seem like a more prominent seller.

Advertise in trade, make a macro to click after posting saying you’ve just posted some pets in the AH. If you’ve posted a lot brag a little, if you only have a couple be vague and suggest they simply search for pets in general. Be creative with your message, don’t make it too long, don’t make it boring, and don’t be afraid to feed the trolls!

Step 7: Getting More Pets and Selling More pets

Now that you have gold on multiple servers you are set. You just need to log in from time to time and search for more deals on your main server and your alt server as you did in Step 3.
To sell pets, you will alternate between your main and alt server posting only on one at a time. Constantly buying and selling expanding your inventory and your gold supply.

Once you get the hang of 2 servers, have a good supply of pets, and you’re making more gold than you spend it’s time yet again to branch out to another server! The more servers the better, you just spend a few minutes per character searching pets each day not much longer than maintaining garrisons but can be much more rewarding.

About me:

After doing this for quite some time I am up to 10 servers. I log in once or twice a day and spend 3-5 minutes per alt searching each AH for pets. To choose what server I post my pets on for that 48 hour period I simply choose the server that is nearing the closest to 0 gold or the server I haven’t posted on in the longest.

I post 300-400 auctions at a time varying from 1 million to 2 million potential gold, after the 48 hours I get between 50k-500k gold, with 250k gold being the normal. I try to post on my main server ever 3 weeks as doing so more often reduces the number of sales. I know gold earned means nothing but I’m sure some people are curious of it(Servers edited so people don’t try mine simply because that’s what I did, other servers will work the same!) https://i.imgur.com/uuq6nh8.png

I buy any pet that is cheap, and I go absolutely crazy with investing, I have over 5 guild banks with battle pets. Guesstimates using TUJ/TSM have put the value at 10-20 million gold I’m not sure why I still buy pets but I just can’t stop when I see a good deal.

Addons:

• Tradeskillmaster(Version 2 works with battle pets, just not as well as 3) or Auctionator if you’re not as familiar with TSM as I started with Auctionator as well.
• PetJournal Enhanced, it allows you to hide all not tradable pets in the filters and displays breeds and rarity in the journal list.
• PetTracker, displays breeds in the tooltips of caged pets in the AH and inventory as well as adding a lot of other great features for catching wild pets if you’re into that.

TSM Grouping Tips:

• Make an individual group for nearly every pet
• Make a group for ALL level 25 pets worth 3k
• Make an individual group for each level 25 pet worth over 3k
• Make a group for ALL pets worth <500g
• Make a group for ALL pets worth 500g-1k gold

[Kuba Balo]

maybe u could upload for us your TSM groups anyway great guide. Thanks

[Romath]

maybe u could upload for us your TSM groups anyway great guide. Thanks

My groups are a mess of hundreds of subgroups typed in shorthand that would be a pain for anyone else to decipher. I need to take the time to clean it up for myself as well and when I do I'll likely post it here, just wanted to get this posted before next Pet Battle Event!

[devilwearsprada]

Pretty cool guide! Thanks for sharing it. Will you attach your tsm/auctinator shopping lists/operations?

[stefan745]

hey i'm curious did u tried to work with pets with TSM 2 ? because i use it for transmog selling and its perfect , but for pets it won't undercut ?