Addons are what makes World of Warcraft incredibly easy and convenient for everyone: raiders, farmers, gold makers and PvP'ers alike. If you don't have the following addons installed you will be missing out on taking advantage of the Auction House and making things easier for yourself, which in turn makes you a lot more gold.
Market Watcher
Market Watcher allows you to track item prices over time and shows you a graph of price trends. It will help you identify the actual value of an item opposed to what it's selling for an any given time. I will teach you how to use this in much greater detail in Chapter 1 - The Auction House. For now, install this addon and familiarize yourself with it.
Auctionator
If I had to make gold with only one addon I would choose Auctionator. It provides an extremely intuitive and simple interface for scanning item prices current and historic, posting auctions, buying items and checking up on existing auctions. I have an entire section dedicated to the use of this addon in my next article - The Auction House. You should install this addon now, though, and familiarize yourself with it as much as you can.
Auctioneer
Auctioneer Suite provides you with the tools and data necessary to make those difficult auctioning decisions with ease. From purchasing to posting, the Auctioneer Suite provides time-tested tools to allow you more time to actually play your characters or play the market. As you will soon discover, it is much more than a simple "Auctioning AddOn", the Auctioneer Suite also shows in-depth information for all game items, such as those used in quests or recipes, and much, much more. Several other addons will also use the Auctioneer statistics you gather via scanning. This is especially true for many of the popular crafting addons, such as Little Sparky's Workshop. Install and familiarize yourself with this addon if you intend to buy and sell items on the Auction House.
Postal
Postal is an extremely helpful addon that lets you retrieve all your incoming mail with a click of a button. You can use the option 'Open All' to have all your mail opened and placed in your inventory. It will report in your chat window what item you received or how much gold was in each message. After your inventory is empty it will summarize how much gold you made in total. This makes buying and selling tons of items off the Auction House very easy.
It has some options worth exploring. They are accessible by clicking the down arrow in the top right of the mailbox when Postal is installed. Take note of the OpenAll option as it will let you configure which mail is automatically opened and which mail will be left alone. Sometimes it's beneficial to leave mail with attachments alone so that you can use your character's mailbox as additional storage.
TradeSkillMaster (TSM) - used to be called AuctionProfitMaster and Quick Auctions
TradeSkillMaster (TSM) is one of the most powerful addons for posting, canceling and managing a large number of auctions. It's used to manage groups of items that you want automatically posted above a specified price. For instance, if you are a Jewelcrafter and want to make sure you are posting all of a specific gem cuts above 10 gold but at the best price possible, TSM will do it for you automatically. I will explain in detail how to apply the features of TSM in another article in the next few weeks. For now, here is an overview of its capabilities. You should get a good idea of how these work before reading the Crafting Professions chapter.
When you install TSM, make sure you download all of it's modules:
Configuring TSM
You can configure TSM by typing /tsm. You will see a window with some buttons on the left and right
like this:
The most common way to use TSM is to configure Item Groups by selecting 'Auctioning Groups/Options' on the right, then by selecting 'Categories/Groups' on the left and finally by creating a new group by selecting the tab 'Create Category / Group' and typing the name of the new group. Once the Item Group is created, you can select it on the left. TSM might prompt you asking if you want to use advanced configuration, we won't use advanced features at this time so you can select beginner for now. Next we want to select the tab at the top that says 'Add/Remove Items.' This will bring up a list of items that you have in your inventory on the left. You can add as many items as you want to this item group (on the right) by selecting them on the left and clicking 'Add >>' in the middle. In this example, I'm going to create an item group to auto-post Borean Leather for me, so all I will add is Borean Leather.
Finally, it's time to configure how the item is going to be posted, how much it will be posted for, etc. Select the 'Group Overrides' tab at the top. Now you'll see several options including Post Settings, General Price Settings, and Minimum and Maximum Price Settings. We will use these to define how we want to post an item. Here is what a default configuration looks like:
In order to change a field, you must right click it. Hold your mouse over the field for a description of what the field is. When changing a field make sure you hit the enter key on your keyboard to tell it to save the value you typed. The most important values are Per Auction, Post Cap, Threshold and Fallback. Per Auction is the number of items in a stack, for Borean Leather I would use 20. Post Cap is the number of posts at once, for Borean Leather I might do 5-10. The Threshold is the lowest price you will sell a single item for, for Borean Leather I might use 2 gold (which is the same as 40 gold a stack). Finally, Fallback is the price TSM will use if no one else is posting the item. Read the sections below on posting and canceling for a better idea of how these values are used.
Posting with TSM
To post, visit the auction house and select the TSM option on the upper right of the window. It will load a TSM window which has an option to Post in the upper right:
When you select 'Post' TSM will go through your bags and find any items that you have assigned to a group. It will scan the auction house for those items and if you can undercut without going below your threshold, it will queue up the auctions to be posted. This makes it very simple to post a large group of items at the competitive price. Once TSM determines what to post, you will have to manually select the 'Post Auction X/X' button for each post. The designers of TSM were forced to use this mechanic to avoid automating the game too much. All you have to do is close your eyes and click the button for 20- 40 seconds, depending on how many items you're posting.
Canceling with TSM
The 'Auctioning Cancel' option works just like the Post option except it scans for auctions that belong to you that you are no longer the lowest price for that item. It can be found directly below the 'Post' button in the TSM auction window. This is usually one of the first things I do when I log onto my main auction character. It will cancel all my auctions and then I can empty my mailbox and repost them at the best prices.
Auto mailing with TSM
Auto mailing is another extremely powerful feature of TSM. To create an auto mailer, type /tsm and select the 'Mailing Options' in the bottom right. Create an mail target and assign it items exactly like you did when you created the item group above. Once setup and assigned items, all you have to do is visit the mailbox and select 'Auto-Mail' and it will fire off all the mail to that target. This makes managing tade materials and crafted items very easy.
KevTool Queue (KTQ) and GnomeWorks
KTQ is an addon made for a very specific purpose: queuing up the creation of a large number of crafts. It's used mostly with crafting professions when you might craft 20-200 different items in a row. GnomeWorks is a profession UI that replaces the default Professions window, it's required to use KTQ. These two addons will be used in conjunction with Altoholic to do some extreme automation later in this guide. You won't need to use them until then, but they are worth installing and learning about.
Altoholic
Altoholic is an addon that stores information about what each of your characters are wearing, have in their inventory and have posted on the Auction House. This is an extremely valuable addon to have when using multiple characters to make gold in WoW. For example, if you are crafting items on your Tailor and need to know how many Brilliant Spellthread your alt has, all you have to do is move your mouse overtop of an existing Spellthread and it will tell you how many you have on each character in their bags, mail box and posted on the Auction House. KTQ requires on this addon.
Gatherer
Gatherer is an addon for herbalists, miners, and treasure hunters in World of Warcraft. It's very similar to Carbonite and most people use one or the other. Gatherer is simpler and not as involved, it's easier to learn and use. It's main purpose is to track the closest herbs, deposits, and treasure locations on your minimap. The addon does not track like a tracking ability does, rather it "remembers" where you have found various items in the past. It does this whenever you gather (perform Herbalism, mining or opening) on an item, and records the specific map location in its history. From then on, whenever the item comes into range of being one of the closest 1-25 (configurable) items to your present location, it will pop up on you minimap. When you view your world map, you will also see the item locations marked on the particular map you are viewing there.
Combuctor
Combuctor makes it extremely easy to organize and search your bags. It puts all your bags into one big view, allows you to filter by item quality (the colors on the bottom), item type and search for the item you are looking for. This will help you keep your main's items organized, help you sell gray items you would otherwise overlook and keep your auction house alt's inventory nice and clean.
