what professions are very helpful to make gold?

[Deleted]

One of the most used phrases on these forums are that all servers are different. If you have one major competitor who knows what they are doing then they can severely damage your profit making prospects.

Just make sure you sell what people want and be the cheapest. The more different items you can maintain selling then the bigger your profit potential. Lot of making money on the ah isnt hard, know your market, have a supply of goods and then be prepared to undercut.

People who make money tend to understand this, put the effort in and are well organised. Choosing the supposed best profession is not enough as you need to look at what makes you a better seller than all the other shyfflers or people who picked the same professions.

[vian]

I hit the gold cap this expansion with Alchemy alone.

[Deleted]

All available data points that Inscription is always the leader in wow economy, with JC being the second.
I prefer JC because earning money with Inscription is sooo much work!

Of course, local realm competition should always be taken into account - few hardcore AH players can easily make a certain otherwise attractive profession a complete waste of time.

[Wildtree]

Mining - old mats.. Khorium above all ore is the most profitable.

Scribe - not that good anymore, and for some unknown reason that profession sales is the most ruled by Tradeskill Master addon users.... List and zap relist tons of actions in minutes.. I mean sure. if you got the time and convenience to play the auction house with it all day long. You will get rich. But if you don't then don't even bother trying.

Engineer if you focus on not so common stuff, you can make nice profits.

Alchemy is entirely dependent on your realm economy. You could easily run into the situation where your final product is sold for a lot less than the materials cost to make it.
So selling the mats would make more profit.... Included already the 20% proc benefits.

JC... Very competitive... Depending on the realm there is however a chance for twink gems. Very few new JCs have all the TBC or all the epic Wrath gems. Limited market, but with good profits per sale.

Enchanting - Most profitable profession when you focus on the vanilla enchants.. All BOA's can only be enchanted with those enchants. Plus all low level twinks are wild about em. However, as with JC, but even worse to get, very very few enchanters have them.

Blacksmith and Leatherworker are rather of much less value. You are either on your toes and are capable to produce the starter gear at the beginning of an expansion, or you will make very little business if any at all, down the road. maybe a few transmog items here and there, or a few twink things.
Belt buckle and leg enchants selling of course, but the profits decline with the aging of the expansion.

Taylor - pretty much in the same boat with Blacksmith and Leatherworking.
Bags are nice sells tho..

---------- Post added 2012-09-12 at 11:33 AM ----------

All available data points that Inscription is always the leader in wow economy, with JC being the second.
I prefer JC because earning money with Inscription is sooo much work

Try engineer, then you know what work means when you want to craft an item.
For most shit you gotta craft a gazillion other things first, so you can finally combine em into your final product lol

[Daveman]

how many moneys you make?

I like how u talk, u must play a lot of orcs.

[Deleted]

Any profession can make you tons of gold if used right. Some players believe that it's easier to make a lot of profit if they have an army of alts - but it's not the case if you don't take it every step of the way.

The first 24 hours of Cata I made 70k+ with herbalism. The next weeks I made even more with alchemy.
Into FL I changed my herbalism to inscription and that's when the gold started rolling in... and I don't even do glyphs.

[Deleted]

If you are not skilled with them, any gathering profession (you cannot do operating loss with them).

If you are skilled with them, any crafting profession+mining because of smelting possibility.

[Endus]

It really depends on how much effort you want to make, how much time you have to invest, and how much homework you want to do.

The best bang-for-buck is probably Transmute alchemy; there's usually something you can Transmute once a day for relatively decent money, particularly earlier on in expansions. This takes almost no time investment or effort, but it's hard-capped at once/per/alchemist; there's no way to invest more time and increase the profit potential, outside of leveling another Alchemist.

Aside from that, if you have time but want to make little effort, farming with herb/mining is effective. You can watch a movie or TV while you farm; it doesn't take much attention, hence the "low effort", but it does take time.

If you are willing to make an effort, but lack time, Enchanting/JCing is the way to go. It takes knowing the markets and how to get the resources most efficiently to reduce costs, but you can make a lot of money off gems/enchants, even just using the AH rather than barking in Trade.


If you have both time and are willing to make an effort, you've got other angles like ore shuffling and AH profiteering, which take significantly more investment in both training and educating yourself, watching the markets, and maintaining the professions necessary to capitalize properly. Proper ore shuffling requires having Enchanting and Jewelcrafting at a minimum, possibly a farming toon to generate resources when they're listing high on the AH (which generally means product values are high too, so this isn't "bad"). You need to know what cuts are selling, and whether it's worth listing on the AH or just vendoring, and a host of other factors to maximize profits with the ore shuffle, but you can make ridiculous amounts of money with it.

[PBitt]

Well...the *easiest* way to make gold in the long run, IMO, is with alchemy. Everyone needs elixirs and especially pots in bulk, particularly with new raiding content. Transmutes are nice as well...just a couple weeks ago I had a 5x proc of Truegold which got me about 1,500 gold with about 100 gold of mats I bought from the AH to make a truegold (that's with xmute master, of course), and it took me all of 45 seconds to click one button and wait for the bar to fill up, throw them on the AH, and then just repeat the next day. No science to it at all, yes not every day is that nice but these are basically the kinds of things I do to make gold. That being said, Alchemy is also the easiest and fastest profession to level, I did 1-525 in about 2 hours having almost no mats ahead of time just buying shit off the AH, it cost me about 5 or 6k maybe but that money was very easily made back, some of it with stuff I sold from leveling anyways. I have a pretty comfy amount of gold and I've never played the AH in my life and never will. Crafting professions will net you the most amount of gold per time spent by a huge margain if you know what you are doing. Sure, you can make more playing the AH but it's like a full-time job.

Gathering professions make you a crapload of money in the initial stages of an expansion, don't get me wrong...you can probably make money easier than anyone else because you don't need to spend any money to level it to get to the good stuff (a friend of mine sold one stack of Obsidium ore for 900g the first day of Cata, for example). I very rarely farm anything from my gathering professions, especially when prices settle down, I'd rather let some other sucker spend their time gathering for me and I'll just buy in bulk when prices are right and I'll make a lot more money than they do in less time. But I'm thinking I'm just going to drop all of my gathering professions because I don't need them and the benefits are meh compared to crafting profession bonuses, even if they are only for alts...though I may keep a miner for smelting purposes, but to each their own.

For the record, I have 4 alchs, and probably a couple more to come, including my Panda monk.

[Domaradsly]

Inscription/Alch will be huge when MoP is released. Making living steel and darkmoon cards is gonna = a ton of profit. Especially if you have more than one alch/inscriptionist.

[Deleted]

if done correctly then JC will net you the most

[Eroginous]

Historically, the most universal money making materials have always been enchanting mats and gems. The best route to go (since BC) has always been to go Mining > Jewelcrafting > Enchanting across two high level characters, which makes a ton of in game money over short periods of time, even on low-mid population servers. High population servers are usually much more competitive and harder to move materials on at a more profitable price range. To a lesser extent, darkmoon trinkets, crafted BoEs from LW, Tailoring, and BSing, and alchemy potions and elixirs are a decent way to make money, but those professions usually depend completely on demand from active raiding guilds and often times, the mats are more expensive than the crafts, so it's better just to sell mats.

The demand for gems and enchanting mats is always high as every character seeks to gem and enchant their gear, even when not participating in raiding content. This is why gems and enchants make the most money. Higher demand usually means a higher turnover of materials, and the process of creating those materials requires a bit more effort and time investment than other professions do. It also requires 3 different professions across two characters, which isn't always an obvious path for many players. Often times, it's enough work just to cap professions on one character.

However, with just a few hours a day of mining, you can amass enough raw ores after a week to get a healthy start on making cash. Here's the method that works best at the start of every new expansion:

1. Pick two characters to level in succession to the new cap. Have Mining on each one (preferably at the old cap) and while you are questing through the new zones, collect minerals you happen to come across while traveling around for quests. This doesn't take much time at all and allows you to get a head start on professions without really trying.

- Make sure one of your two characters has enchanting, while the other one has jewel crafting (both should have mining).

2. After you've leveled each of you characters to the new level cap (and subsequently leveled mining to the new cap on each one) take all the ores you've accumulated while leveling, and prospect them down into gems using your JC character. Then take those mats and use them to level JC to the new cap (or as high as they will take you). Once you've leveled JC up, you will have quite a bit of things to DE.

3. Disenchant all the stuff you crafted with JC, and then use the enchanting mats you accumulate to level enchanting. Hopefully, after everything is said and done, you will have spent very little money to level JC and Enchanting to the cap (though you might have to spend a little more time mining in order to max everything out), and you will have some gems and enchants to sell on the AH.

4. The expansion will still be too new for you to be able to buy ores for cheap, so you will have to spend some time mining until demand for ores settles at a reasonable price. However, you can just mine ores you come across while doing dailies and other stuff on your two level 90s, which will lessen the time you have to spend mining in order to continue the process of making money.

5. Eventually, you will reach a point with the market where you have a ton of gold and the yield of enchanting mats/gems will exceed the cost of the ores to produce them, and you can just buy ores from the AH or other players without having to spend any time mining. This process of making cash works best while having your characters in a level 25 guild (for the perks that give extra mats while mining, prospecting, and disenchanting), and can be done even with your professions at level 1.

It might seem like a lot of work, but there are macros you can make to speed up the DEing process and the yield of mats will always be profitable throughout the entire expansion. During the Firelands patch in Cata, I took 3k gold and turned it into 150k gold in just a couple weeks using this method, and I spent zero time farming ores. This was on a low pop server with a bad economy, and I would literally spend just a couple hours every 2-3 days buying ores at a good price. I was even able to purchase a 5 tab guild bank which was completely full of Elementium Ore stacks for 10k gold, and then turn around and profit 40k gold from the mats.

Good luck!

[Danshot]

Make sure you level up your profs fast. the supplies are disappearing, and prices are going up.

i'm up to alchemy, lw, tailoring, enchant, alc, jcx2, mining, herb and skinning. i'm prob done here. two jc because one is my main, and I'd prob drop this for either engineering or blacksmithing down the road

[Christan]

New characters need enchants and gems and all that too - and have to buy them repeatedly.

Regardless, I have one character - same one since 2007. If I get bored, I change it's race or faction. I don't understand why people make alts. Leveling is boring as hell, and they can make you poor.

Glyphs are cheap as dirt on my medium pop server. I don't know how anyone would make money selling glyphs on it.

odd i usually make 20k or so leveling an alt. dual gathering.
then i'd switch to something useful.

part of making gold is never having to spend any on the AH because you are self sufficient for gems enchants glyphs buckles LW / tailor leg enchants etc.

plus having extra chanters / alchs for dungeons and cd's are so amazing for making gold.

[Giev]

Correct me if I am wrong, but you wont be able to make money from darkmoon cards in MoP like before. Scribes wont be able to turn all the herbs on the AH to cards anymore, as one of the mats for the card is BoP and can't be obtained in masses (Scroll of Wisdom). This effectively prevents making decks in masses.

Unless something has changed from beta ...

[kbmxx]

I've been collecting low level mats since Patch 4.3 dropped in November, in preparation for Monks and other profession power levellers in MoP.

I've already been selling some eternium ores, leathers that I paid 2g/unit for up to 25g/unit even as today. I expect as MoP approaches, people will pay 20+ gold per low level ore/leather/cloth. Each server may vary, but I have 18 characters on two accounts, each with a guild bank with stuff stocked up to the max.

It's a great way to hedge against inflation over the long run. It may not be too late to collect items like righteous orbs, leathers, bags/cloths, ores.

[craigp100]

The short answer is all primary professions tbh - it depends on economy, supply, demand, etc and a bunch of other factors. However, some professions can make gold more effectively "alone" while others require input from other sources (herbalism, auction house, mining, grinding). For example,

I have mining as a primary profession, here are my options:
1) sell the ore directly or make bars to sell (only requires mining)
2) use the ore alongside other materials to make bars and items such as belt buckles with blacksmithing (requires blacksmithing as well)
3) prospect the ore into gems which can be sold and/or cut and then sold (also requires jewelcrafting)

from option 3 I could also
1) make the gems into jewellery and then sell it (also requires jewelcrafting)
2) make the gems into jewellery and then disenchant the items (also requires jewelcrafting & enchanting)

then I could sell the enchanting mats or make scroll enchants to sell on the ah.

Note: I'm sure I've missed some points here and there.

This is just an idea on some things you can do to make gold and the option which makes the most depends on your economy, your best bet is to expand into as many areas as you can to maximise gold income. other options include
1) getting tailoring and grinding cloth to make items, sell the cloth directly or make bolts to sell
2) getting skinning to sell the leather, make it into hides, etc which can be sold or use the leather together with leatherworking to make items which can be sold
3) getting herbalism to sell the herbs, or use together with alchemy for flasks/pots or using the herbs with inscription to make inks to sell and/or glyphs

and the list goes on

[Djuntas]

become a scribe... sell glyphs for huge prices

Unless you wanna heavy camp the AH, ALOT, dont exspect to make money at all. Glyph market is so competitive.

Id say JC + enchanting is great together. If you got alchemy its even better.

[Deleted]

I use a combination of JC + enchanting + alchemy to make loads of gold possibly add mining if the price of ores is high.

[magazz]

All professions can make gold it's all about "how are you into your profession"? My main is enchanter/JC. I don't have a miner and therefore I did not do the big "BANG" with JC gems when they were hot. However I grinded so far 48 reputations to exalted and obtained almost all enchanting recipes in game (-6 I am missing).

Therefore, I've been farming dungeons and raids as a druid tank/enchanter and disenchanting whatever I could. Then I made scrolls and made most of my gold selling enchanting scrolls. Sometimes you can find cheap enchanting materials on Ah and you can make up to 100g per enchant of pure profit. It takes a bit of time to research, find out what scrolls are wanted most/sell most etc.

Herbalaism/Tailoring/Leatherworking/Skinning/Alchemy/Blacksmithing - are best professions at beginning of each expansion. Drive of people to gear up fast and obtain gear is another factor. Therefore crafting tailoring items (cloth) and Leather-working can be very profitable at beginning of expansion

---------- Post added 2012-09-17 at 05:22 PM ----------

I have to also agree with poster 1 above me. Glyph market is CRAZY competitive and I have an alt who's an alchemist and I've been trying to sell same 8 glyphs for a week now. Getting constantly outbid (maybe because I don't log on that alt as often as I log on my main to monitor my enchanting scrolls)