Bottom Scanner guideFollow

/percentless 50 has been a godsend to me. I've paid for two complete sets of mounts, purchased some killer epic healing boots, helped finance a guild vault tab or two and still have plenty left over. All through using /percentless 50 (and it's variants)

Until, that is, patch 2.4. For some reason, /percentless stopped working. I went to the enchantrix boards and was told that the percentless and bidbroker commands were being folded into BottomScanner. Ugh.

Well, I had BottomScanner, and after playing around with it some, I think I like it better than percentless. I find I'm buying more items and the process takes less time overall (no more shift-clicking individual items!). I know some folks can still use /percentless and there is a process I can go through to make it work for me, but I decided to go with the flow and get a jump start on the next big thing. I'm happy with what I've done, it works very well for me, but I wanted to share it and see if anyone else has ideas/suggestions to improve my setup.

Two prerequisites.

You MUST be an enchanter (duh). But you don't have to be maxed out or even at 300. You can use this system to make cash AND level your chanting at the same time.

You MUST have the Auctioneer suite of addons (I have the Advanced model. The Classic model may work as well but I have not tried it.)

These are the settings for Bottom Scanner (btmscn) I currently use. Feel free to tweak them to fit your needs, but they should be a good start.

Open the AH and click on btmscn (should be the last tab on the right). Click on the Configure button. On the left, is a list of 'Core Options' click on General. Put check marks on 'look for bargains while browsing' and 'enable automatic last page reload.' Leave the next two boxes blank. Check the 'display evaluatino in tooltip' box as well as the last 3 boxes (about buyouts, bids, and playing a sound).

I have my reserve amount at 50s. Thats the least amount of cash I'll let myself have. Which means, basically none. Enter whatever amount you're comfortable with.

I also have my maximum price set at 1000. That means I won't see any items that cost more than that. But that's OK since I don't plan on buying any.

Next go back to the left part of the window and click on Evaluators and then Disenchant. It's a simple box, but here are my settings:

Check the first 3 boxes (enabling disenchant, and allowing buyouts and bids). This basically tells btmscn to search AH items with disenchating in mind (as opposed or in addition to the other options at left, like prospect). It also looks for items that fit my criteria for either purchase or for bid. If I bid on an item, it's likely that the buyout price is above my profit threshold. I win a good amount of them, but I also get outbid alot. That's fine, I don't lose any money in the transaction. It's all returned to me.

Check the Use Custom Levels box. Since I'm at 315 with my chanting, I can DE anything in the game. I also don't mind working with Strange Dust - profit is profit. So I have my minimum skill level set to 0 and my maximum skill level set to 375. Adjust these accordingly. If your enchanting is 250, you don't want to buy items requiring 275 to DE. Some folks may only want to focus on high end items that offer a smaller profit percentage, but more gold (I'd rather buy a 20g imbued netherweave tunic and DE it into a 22g prismatic shard (10% profit) than a 10s woven copper band and sell it for 50s (500% profit).

I set my minimum profit at 45 silver. It's an arbitrary amount, but does filter out most of the extreme low end items that just don't produce much cash.

I have my minimum discount set to 51%. Why 51? Because I couldn't get it to settle at 50. It'd go from 48 to 53 to 49 back up to 52. A real pain. In any event, you can adjust this. If you're just starting out, with limited funds, set it at a higher level - like 70 or even 80%. You'll get the biggest bang for your buck this way.

Or, you can set it at 10% with a large mimimum profit (say 5G) and scan only for the big ticket items.

Finally, click on the box that subtracts the auction fees from projected profit. The man's gotta have his piece of the pie, but I'll make the other fella pay for it.

Next, click on each of the other Evaluators and make sure they are disabled.

All set? Great.

Click back to the Browse tab and click scan the AH. Depending on how often you do this, it should take between 5-10 minutes. Once it's complete, click back to the btmscn tab and start scanning. Click back to the browse tab and scan the AH again. Yes, you have to scan it again.

This is why. Btmscn normally checks the last four pages of the AH (which are the most recently posted auctions). That's well and good, but there's over 100 pages of auctions most days - I want in on that loot too! Well, back when we were creating our settings, under General, we told btmscn we wanted it to work while we're browsing. That means it will look for bargains as we do our normal searches. An AH scan is considered browsing, but only of the entire AH. So while the scan is running again, btmscn is checking each item for profitability.

Anyway, you'll soon hear dings and a small window pop up asking if you want to buy/bin on an item. It'll tell you how much it'll cost you as well as the anticipated profit. You can mouse over the item to see what it'll DE into as well. You have several options, the easiest ones being Yes and No. I click on Yes everytime and mostly don't even mouse over or pay too much attention to what the item is. It fits my profit margin, I'm buying it.

Whereas when you scanned the AH the first time, it took maybe 6 minutes to complete, when you re-scan with btmscn, it'll take a few minutes longer, but it's still not too bad.

After the second scan is finished, go to the mailbox and DE your new purchases. Then head back to the AH and put em up for sale.

To do this, I suggest you use the Appraiser tab instead of the Auctions tab. Appraiser lets you put up bulk auctions quickly. On the left are shown the contents of all your bags. The main part of the screen lets you customize your auction for that item.

Say you have 200 Strange Dusts. You click on it from the list at the left and it appears in a small box on the main section. Below are slide bars representing how many you want posted in each auction (1, 5, up to 20) and how many 'lots' you want to sell (1, 5, all full lots, or all). It'll also have suggested bid and buyout prices. I change these so my bid and buyout price are the same. I don't want to wait around for some lowballer to hope he's not outbid. If you want my stuff, you'll get it immediately.

Finally, there's a slide bar that lets you set the duration of the auction (12, 24, or 48 hours). Put it to 48.

Once that's done, click on Post Item in the bottom right of the window and your Strange Dust auctions will be sent. While that's happening, you can move on to the next item and start the process over.

Well start it over somewhat. The best thing about using appraiser to post your auctions is that it remembers the settings you have for each item. So the next time you want to sell Strange Dust, the computer remembers that you last sold them in lots of 10, for 10s bid/13s buyout each and 24 hour auctions. If that works for you, simply click on Post Item again and you're good to go. Or if you want, you can adjust any settings. The new set will be automatically remembered as well.

Well, that's about it for the guide. I hope it works for you as much as it has for me.

Wonderful. I've always used the percentless method, but this adds an easy way to get all those bids as well. Of course I will be outbid on most of them, but that's ok. Besides the buyouts that I would have found with percentless, my first session I bid on about 60 items.

I followed your instructions to the letter, and it worked great. After using your method, it had bought every item that percentless would have found. Another test scan and a percentless 50 listing showed no items, so it has passed my test.

I believe you are doing the 2 scans so that on the first, you get the very latest enchanting mats prices for your server. I'm thinking a quick search of the enchanting mats only would accomplish the same thing. If not, I'll just live with the data being slightly older, provided I've done a scan in the last 12 hours.

I also go into the enchantrix options and enable automation, so that I am prompted to hit yes to disenchant as new items go into my backpack. As the addon says, use this with caution, but I find it speeds things up.

Other than that, I use batch posting on the appraiser tab, for one click posting of all my common auctions.

Once again, great guide for bottom scanner use, thank you. I'm going to use it from now on.

Edited, May 25th 2008 9:29pm by dadanox

Thanks a ton, rated up. I just started messing around with it a week or so ago, but glad to see someone put together a guide!

I'm glad this has been of help. It can be intimidating as you're learning, but I will say the help panels are well set up. Click on the "?" in the upper right corner of any configure window and you'll get an item-by-item description of the options available.



I didn't see this option, but I'm definately going to try it out. It should be used with caution, but I've yet to not buy/bid on a suggested DE item.

You have to go back to the btmscn tab and click on the big yellow triangle/square (one indicates it's on, the other indicates its off, I forget which is which).

In the log below, which tracks your purchases and bids, it should show

bottom scan has stopped or something to that effect.

It's a simple thing to miss. After scanning, I often run out to the mailbox to buy/DE/sell my stuff. Then, the next time I scan, I get rapidly flashing pages or something odd - d'oh! I forgot to turn off the scan.

Amazing guide and it has already served me well. Just want to put my two copper out there.

Don't underestimate the usefulness of buying for vendor sales too, sure its not gonna be big money but take my server for example: the average AH price for a stack of heavy netherweave bandages on the AH is a little over 5g. I can buy those bandages and run a few feet to a vendor and sell them for somewhere near 8g. thats almost 3g profit for a few seconds of work and clicking one more option in bottom scanner, not bad at all in my opinion :)

Interesting guide, I tried it out today. I'm going to preface this by saying I am a complete noob when it comes to bottom scanner, so I thank you for the info. The guide has helped me figure it out somewhat.

I was wondering about the bids/buyout. When an item pops up in your window does it automatically do a buyout if the seller has provided that option? How does it determine whether to buyout or just bid? I made one pass through the ah and got about 2/3's bids. Then, about 10 min later I got about 30 outbid messages, so I would assume somebody else was bottom scanning right after me??

Thanks for the guide and the help!

First off, great post and I was getting a bit tired shift clicking the list enchantrix put up.

Problem I had though was it seemed to take ages. usually it takes me like 20 mins to scan AH then obviously shift clicking all the links took maybe another 5-10 depending on what showed up.

Using bottom scanner it will take the same to scan but I sat and waited like an hour on bottom scanner to finish then got called away for a dungeon. in that hour I got tons of bid options but only 5 or 6 buyouts.

It was definitely easier being given the option to just agree to buy/bid on it but I dont have the time to sit for an hour while it scans. I followed your guide to the letter and even added a slightly bigger profit which should have reduced the amount I got offered.

Would scanning the auction house more reduce this? I usually scan like once a day to get my de stuff but even scan twice after I have played around for a while if I have time.

Well its an 8Meg service and i have a 3.2Ghz dual core cpu with 4g ram. Really doubt its my internet or PC. I am on Quel'Thalas EU but I have no idea of the server population so it may be that.

I dont get much if any lag and my FPS usually sits around 90+ in shat.

First make sure only the Disenchant evalulator is active. Running more than one evaluator can seriously drag out the process - especially the appraiser one.

In my experience, scanning my AH takes about 5-8 minutes and then scanning again with btmscan active takes around 10-12. So I'm not sure if that's a proportionate increase or a consistent number of minutes. My server has a decent population and I have what, between 15-1800 180-190 pages. (Is that too many? I'll pay closer attention next time). Anyway the more frequently you scan (without btmscn), the quicker it should go because your personal database of price information is growing.

<edit>
corrected number of AH pages on my server.

Edited, May 30th 2008 11:10am by actodd

Ah. That makes a bit more sense. I was still getting offers to bid or buy right up until I left.

I am at work at the mo so cant check how many pages/items I get on the scan but up to 1800 doesnt sound unreasonable.

I will play about a bit more on my days off.

Ok so I worked out how stupid I really am.

I was running bottom scanner and thinking it was searching the ah for me. I missed the point of the rescanning ah thing.

Scan ah then start bottom scanner and run scan again. I was just starting bottom scanner then waiting!

Is there a way to tweak auctioneer's scanned values to ignore outliers? For example, large prismatics are 20g each, but there's 10 up for 400 and one for 500 gold that have bumped it's addumed price to 25g. That throws my scans off.