The Art of Making Gold

The Art of Making Gold
Hey guys. I started thinking about this subject when a guildie and me started a contest to see who can make the most wow gold. I realize when I make this post that making gold is not difficult. Doing just dailies is probably enough to pay for consumables and repairs even if you don’t have the Netherwing ones. But there is honestly another whole meta game that involves manipulating the Auction House. This post is generally directed towards others who enjoy making wow gold and discussion about it. I think the subject is split up into a few main sections:I. FarmingII. “Playing” the Auction HouseIII. ProfessionsIV. OtherI. FarmingWhether or not you farm can vary with the class you play. The person who I am having this contest with is a resto druid and thus doesn’t farm at all but is still up to about 15k gold. For dps classes it can be more profitable to farm then do dailies if you can concentrate and farm the right things. A couple notes on farming:1. No mercy. If you have qualms about ninjaing that elemental from a different person then you aren’t cut out for farming. If you want to get things done during prime time on your server you are going to have to want it. Don’t be afraid to tag mobs aggressively.2. What to farm. This is kind of a big deal. I find farming primals the most profitable. Some good places to farm different primals:A. Kirin’var Village (Netherstorm) for primal manas. The mobs here respawn extremely fast and the area can probably support upwards of 5 people at a time. If you can’t kill things fast it can be nasty for casters as they spell reflect and mana burn. Wouldn’t recommend this area unless you are a dps class.B. Skald (Blades Edge Mountains) for primal fires. Usually there are a lot of people here and the respawn rate isn’t great. There are also a lot of mobs that aren’t fire elementals that you will probably have to do this. Can probably support 3 or 4 people. If you can get this area to yourself it can be great.C. Throne of Elements (Nagrand) for primal fires, primal waters and primal airs. This place is wildly over farmed. The thing that makes this area beastly is the fact that if you get it alone you can probably get 9 or 10 primals an hour if you are very fast. Anytime I happen to be online and bored at 4 AM I head over there and farm the shit out of it while it is empty. If there are a lot of people here, your better off farming elsewhere.D. The Hand of Gul’dan (Shadowmoon Valley) for primal fires. I am personally not a fan of this area but if the other places are packed it is going to be a better choice. E. Skettis (Terrokar Forest) for primal waters. This is generally the best all around spot for primal waters in my experience. The only downside is that they are all underwater which slows you down a fair bit. Usually there are few people farming these and the drop rate isn’t that much under the ones in Throne of Elements. F. I don’t really find farming primal lifes or earths particularly profitable at all. If you specifically need these primals you are far better off farming other ones, selling those and then buying the primals you need. 3. Generally in my experience primals are the best money maker when it comes to farming. But if all the spots are filled with people your better off farming something else. For humanoids I recommend Manaforge Duro in Netherstorm and Eclipse point in Shadowmoon Valley. If you specifically want to farm the Aldor marks, Legion Hold in Shadowmoon Valley is a good place to go.4. Other stuff: Come prepared with water/food (this should go without saying I guess). It helps a lot if you can stay focused while you are farming. Try to bite back the temptation to alt tab when you are drinking or turn around and start watching TV or you might not be able to get back into it. Turn on some music and concentrate and you will make a lot more money in the same amount of time.Depending on how crowded these spots are (it all really comes down to that) I can usually make anywhere from 80g (when I have to farm humanoids) to 200g (When I get Throne of Elements to myself) an hour. The key is to not lose focus. II. “Playing” the Auction HouseThe name of the game here is to buy low, sell high. Instead of spending an hour on dailies, I spend an hour combing the auction house looking for things that are a fair bit cheaper then the average. You really need to have a feel for what things actually cost for this to work. You need to be looking through the Auction House every day and know what is worth what. This section is kind of general and kind of has to be as I can’t really go over the prices of every item for every server. I can provide a couple universal tips though:A. Don’t nickel and dime. It isn’t worth it to buy something and then resell it for a gold more. You will hardly make any profit after the Auction House cut and if it doesn’t sell the first time you may lose money on the deposit. I usually shoot for at least 15g profits.B. Check items such as Primals, Shards, Void Crystals, Gems ect and familiarize yourself with their prices. Look for people who undercut by a lot, buy those items and relist at the standard price. C. Check things like boe blues/epics, Darkmoon Faire cards, ect. You can usually make a hefty profit on things like these when somebody underprices the item. These kinds of items price can fluctuate all across the board. Meaning I can buy an Apexis Crystal Mace for 40g and then turn around and sell it for 150g. The key thing to remember is there isn’t really a set market price for these items, YOU pretty much decide the market price when you post them (unless there are several on the AH at once, of course). D. Undercutting. You definitely want to undercut people. But you have to be smart about it. Things like gems and shards are not things that people are going to go without. If there is one gem on the auction house, unless the price is outrageous, if a person needs it they will buy it. Nobody goes without gems or enchants in their gear because it is too expensive. So the key is to undercut a tiny bit. You can usually undercut by 5 silver and your item will sell just as fast as if you undercut by 5 gold. So do the market and yourself a favor and don’t make big undercuts as they don’t help anybody (except for the person buying of course!).E. Don’t use Auctioneer. A mod can not really see the fluctuations in the market like a person can. It constantly undercuts too much and generally wastes your time/memory. You aren’t saving yourself any time by spending 20 minutes scanning and then having it do it automatically. Search the item that you are going to sell and relist it a tiny bit under the lowest price. III. ProfessionsIf you are out to make gold, there are certain professions that are just better then others. Jewelcrafting is an absolute gold mine. I don’t really have any experience with anything else besides mining. If you have mining and have the patience to mine constantly instead of just farming primals you will probably make more money. If you plan to mine a lot I recommend this addon: http://www.wowace.com/wiki/Cartographer_Routes It will let you set up routes between mineral nodes in a zone. So spend a few hours finding every node in a zone, set up the addon and then all you have to do is point yourself in the direction of the arrow and it pretty much trivializes mining. If anybody else has any experience with other professions please feel free to share. I’d imagine that alchemy can be profitable as well but, I don’t really actually know.Since I do know about Jewelcrafting, I’ll share. Basically what you want to do is get one or maybe two good cuts for each kind of gem (except Talasite, pretty much all Talasites suck and don’t sell well at all). Most all Noble Topaz cuts are good, Most all Living Ruby cuts are good. Glowing Nightseye and Royal Nightseye seem to sell the best on my server but it fluctuates between realms, obviously. The only good elune gem is Solid Star but it is quite good. Dawnstones all together usually don’t sell great but the Great Dawnstone, Rigid Dawnstone and Smooth Dawnstone are probably the best. As I said before Talasites are pretty worthless and I wouldn’t waste any money on their patterns if you want to make money. I am not going to talk about the epic gems as for one I don’t have any and for two, at least all the guilds on my server, people are generally using the better ones for their gear and not selling them. After you have your Jewelcrafting leveled up to 350 (that’s all you need for blue gem cuts, nothing past that is really worth leveling up for except the epic cuts) and you have your cuts it is extremely easy to make money. All you need to really do is buy the uncut gems off the Auction House, recut them and sell. Adamanatite ore can be profitable to buy and prospect usually have it is under 25g a stack. I usually have anywhere from 1-2k gold on the Auction House at a time. It is honestly the easiest way to make money with no effort involved all besides leveling it up that I can think of. I have almost 7k gold, my epic flying mount and I never do anything to make money except for this unless I am bored. It would be awesome if someone could comment on other professions so I could implement them into this post.IV. OtherThere are other ways of making money then manipulation the Auction House, professions and farming. Mainly dailies. Dailies are great if you want to have a steady income of gold with low effort. They are mind numbingly boring after doing them every day for months so I usually just do banish the demons for the darkrune. The darkrune event can be an excellent source of extra money if you can complete it. I regularly do the darkrunes for 3 people in my guild (they give me half of the money of the whatever they sell the item for) and myself. For the blues you can usually get 100g-200g every time you do them. When you get the epics or the badge of tenacity you can get 500g-1000g per item, which is great for 30 minutes in a fun event. I would definitely recommend trying to learn the event and complete it. Also there is the obvious stuff like looting everything and stuff. NEVER vendor things like netherweave or Marks of Sar’geras or even Light Feathers as you will make more money if you spend 30 seconds putting it up on the Auction House. I realize that making shit tons of money is in no way necessary but I find it kind of fun to have 7000 gold to spend on whatever the hell I want. I would like to have some “hardcore” discussion on how to make gold because usually that is relegated to raiding/pvp but this is a significant part of the game for me.