Farming: Is it profitable? (time vs reward)

[Jaylock]

How many players still farm ores / herbs / leathers / cloth etc to make money in this game? Do you find it monetarily rewarding? If you dont farm anymore, what do you do to make huge profits in this game? Dailies? AH?

[Rivellana]

My main is an alchemist/jc right now and my alt is a miner/engineer. Basically any ore I've gotten while leveling my alt has gone to my main to prospect...from there I can either cut the gems and sell them (as well as the ones I get from doing my daily discovery of a jc pattern) or I can transmute if I wish and sell.

I'm also making tons of gold (what I consider a lot, anyways) doing dailies.

[Uriel]

There is no general answere. If the prices for Ore/herbs/whatever is high on your realm then go farming.
I kinda enjoy a farmingsession every now and then. Its kinda relaxing if you put nice music on and just farm without worrying much.
However in most cases farmimg alone isnt a great income except the prices are high.

In my case I prospect the ore, sell valuable gems and transmute the rest into something valuable or craft stuff for disenchanting.
Either I sell the dust or I craft enchantments and sell them, depends on mood and price.

Herbs become either flask, potions or Glyphs depending on the market. It really pays if you got each profession on alts.


Daylies are a way of steady income but they feel boring and annoying

[Spindelltrollet]

I'm selling low level leathers \o/ I can usually sell a stack of medium leather for 150g++ and other various low level leathers for similar prices. I suppose this varies a lot from server to server though. But in my experience this is seem to be the prices on a lot of servers, I make level 70 twinks on new servers all the time - and this is my main way of funding them.

[synchrosonik]

Low lvl crafting mats seem to be a good income

[Deleted]

I farm mostly cloths and turn them into bolts and bags, highest gold/time score I've achieved with farming was 13,000g in 60 min. But now spots are well taken by farmers and (most of the time) gold seller site bots.

[Millennía]

I don't really farm much anymore because I am living off of my gold reserves from Cataclysm but making money just depends on the server. On my server I can still get 400-800g for Embersilk bags for I just put a couple hours in a week to farming cloth and dust then make them. I don't do dailies so I get 0 income from them atm. Other than that mining and herbing is where I make some money as well. Selling ores can yield a good income if the prices are right and they don't take long to farm.

So I definitely think the time is worth the money but every servers economy differs so what works for me might not work for others.

[Kiry]

Funny, when I think farm I think Farming = Tillers. Decent money there.

[Savanni]

Funny, when I think farm I think Farming = Tillers. Decent money there.

Agreed - aside from producing motes of harmony, you can actually sell your crops for a tidy profit.

[Dirgon]

I never really found material gathering to be very profitable. Sometimes I'd do some herb farming in Cat on my druid, but it'd be a lot of work to make a thousand gold in a decent frame of time. I think ore farming probably was good in 4.3, but I was so busy with alts and needed a ridiculous amount of red gems that all my ore was prospected, and all my gems were used rather than sold.

When I farm, I farm rare items. I made a goodly amount of gold on black whelps during Cat, though pet prices seem to have dramatically fallen.

I made my MoP killing off Darkmoon cards, now that the market has crashed for them, I haven't come up with a worthwhile method. Gems seem to be awfully cheap right now (< 50g/cut gem) and several things tend to just sit and rot. Low level ore used to be a decent cash cow, too, but that's dried up.

I think my server economy is dying. I might have to just focus on creating new gold through dailies, leveling alts, and random dungeons.

[Marxman]

Consider this: the price of herbs has remained fairly constant for THREE EXPANSIONS now. Terocone was 80g a stack on my server in BC. Most herbs are cheaper than that now. The value of gold has dropped tremendously since then as well.

No, farming is not smart use of your time.

[DisposableHero]

While the value of farming time can vary wildly server to server, or even day to day, especially on low population servers, I have never found a case where the amount of money that could be made in an hour of farming came close to match an hour of efficiently and smartly playing the auction house.

[TheWindWalker]

On some servers it just plainly isn't profitable unless you devote days to farming. We're talking upward of eight hours a session. You then have to control the market to avoid someone else dumping a ton for a bit under yours and so on. Nothing like putting up like five Living Steel bars for 900g only to come on the next day and find a bunch for like 750g and not having the funds to buy them and relist at 900g. Nope...then they're 600g...then 500g... then you just do dailies to make a profit. Yep.