Shopping at the Darkmoon Faire

Every month the Darkmoon Faire offers its exotic goods for one week. But to be honest: How often do you really get something there? Whenever you talk to one of the vendors, everything useful is already sold out, and most often it seems obvious that it must have something to do with those level-1 characters standing around there day and night. The only way to play a trick on such “buying bots” is to bot back against them! (For the fainthearted: No, this is not really about true botting.)

Admittedly, this post comes a bit late. Eternal stuff, lotuses, furs, etc. are no longer as sought-after and valuable as they once were. On the other hand, a new addon is coming up soon, and who knows, maybe there will be new buyable reagents there again which people will be panting for, especially at the beginning.
However, even now you can still reap some good profits off some of the things. I’ve compared the purchase prices of some items to the average AH prices according to Wowhead:

Item	Purchase	AH value	Profit in %
Eternal Fire	2 40	30	1150
Crystallized Fire	24	4	1567
Eternal Air	2 40	20	733
Crystallized Air	24	1	317
Eternal Life	2 40	15	525
Crystallized Life	24	1	317
Eternal Water	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Water	24	1	317
Eternal Shadow	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Shadow	24	1	317
Eternal Earth	2 40	5	108
Crystallized Earth	24	50	108
Frost Lotus	4	30	650
Arctic Fur	12	50	317

Gold in a box!

As you can see, you can do quite good business, especially with fire, air and life, but also with Frost Lotus, the more so as their deposit costs are not too high. Depending on the server, prices will surely vary a little bit, so it might be worthwile to search through all the herbs, leathers, etc. in the AH and then decide which ones to buy best.
However, perhaps you don’t actually want to deal in them, but only buy certain reagents to skill your professions, or simply stock yourself up with certain items.

The method

There are two methods to farm these vendors. The first is to get the addon FreeRefills and add all the items you want to buy from the faire. Once you open a merchant window now, the addon checks whether the items are available and buys them if possible. To make the whole thing work automatically, you now need a program which is able to record mouse clicks and movements (e.g. Mouse Recorder Pro). Set it up so it keeps talking to the vendor and then closing the window again. This way, you can also farm two vendors that are standing side by side.

Although this method is quite simple and is probably more comfortable to most people, I prefer the second option: the use of purchasing macros. You can write as many macros as you need to buy everything you want. Then write a “master macro” that calls all these purchasing macros within a split second. Now set your Mouse Recorder to repeatedly talk to the vendor, click the purchasing macro and close the window again. Then go to sleep or AFK, and when you come back, your bags will be full of treasures!

Below you will find some sample macros that can of course be changed/extended at will – I think they are fairly self-explanatory. You just have to fiddle a bit to squeeze everything into the 255-character limit. (There is said to be an addon to override this limit. Never tested it though.)

The macros

Macro 1:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Crystallized Life",1) buy("Crystallized Shadow",1) buy("Crystallized Water",1) buy("Crystallized Air",1);

Macro 2:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Crystallized Fire",1) buy("Crystallized Earth",1) buy("Borean Leather",1) buy("Heavy Borean Leather",1);

Macro 3:

/script local function buy(n,q) for i=1,100 do if n==GetMerchantItemInfo(i) then BuyMerchantItem(i,q) end end end buy("Arctic Fur",1) buy("Frost Lotus",1) buy("Lichbloom",1) buy("Adder's Tongue",1) buy("Tiger Lily",1) buy("Talandra's Rose",1);

Macro 4:

/use Crystallized Life
/use Crystallized Water
/use Crystallized Air
/use Crystallized Fire
/use Crystallized Earth
/use Crystallized Shadow

Place these buying macros on your main action bar on the buttons 2–5. The first button is reserved for the

Master macro:

/click ActionButton2
/click ActionButton3
/click ActionButton4
/click ActionButton5

If you like you can add a /cast Stealth or /cast Shadowmeld to macro 4 – provided you play the according class/race for that. (On the other hand, merging crystallized stuff should usually not remove stealth anyway, so you could also leave it away.)

Nuisance leather ball

Once the surrounding Darkmoon customers, who desperately hope to snatch just a single mote, notice your cunning machinations, they will often try to fill up your inventory with balls. In theory, they could of course do this with Happy Fun Rocks, Voodoo Skulls, etc. as well, but since there is that nice little boy on the faire who sells Heavy Leather Balls for 20 copper, it will in 99.9 % of the cases be these balls that end up in your inventory.

But no problem, even for this there is a macro:

/run for x=0,4 do for y=1,GetContainerNumSlots(x) do l=GetContainerItemLink(x,y) if l then if GetItemInfo(l)=="Heavy Leather Ball" then PickupContainerItem(x,y) DeleteCursorItem() return end end end end

Simply put the macro on Button 6 and extend the master macro by a /click ActionButton6, and from now on, with every click, all possibly existing balls will be removed from the inventory.

And now have fun shopping!