Tips for Making Gold

[Emaias]

Hello all! I wasn’t actually sure where to put this (either Professions or General), so I opted for General since I figured it would hit a wider audience. I’ll cut right down to the nitty gritty:

Question: How is it you make your gold?

A small backstory that you can skip if you want:
I’ve played WoW since 2005 and after all this time I’ve always struggled with one thing - Making Gold. I think patience is the main problem with me or perhaps the starting bits (everyone knows flipping is where you’ll make the most gold, but that requires a hefty amount to start up). I remember back in BC I used to come home from school and immediately do all of the dailies in Blades Edge, Isle, Terrokar Forest and in SMV (The Drake place); all in an effort to have the gold needed for raid that night (I was in a very established guild and was pushing cutting edge Sunwell, we actually downed it right after the flame dart nerf but pre patch 3.0). I remember spending pretty much all of my gold on Flasks of Distilled Wisdom, Mana Potions, Golden Fishsticks and Blessed Weapon Oils, only leaving enough for repairs. This trend happened every single day. I played at that level till the end of Cata, but always struggled with gold.

Come WoD i took a break from the game for the first time, my guild disbanded at the end of Cata after drama ensued (I believe we were US First 10 man Heroic Spine of Deathwing but went on to get like US 4/5/6 on Deathwing himself - which is where the drama started. Mainly the GM and Co GM sold their accounts which had two of our legendary staves) so I decided maybe a break was needed. So I’m essence I missed out on the huge goldmine of Garrisons and only came back in like the last month.

About the time Nighthold came out in Legion I was deployed for 8 months and ended up missing out on the mission table gold for most of the expansion. At the start of the expansion I had the most gold I had ever had at 200k (many many many of you are laughing at that small amount.) but now it’s dwindling down slowly and I’m at about 50k on my server.

So! My question again, how is it you guys make gold! I do a lot of research, but mainly time is a big factor for me. I’m currently still Active Duty Navy and I work a pretty hefty amount of hours so my time is limited (so stuff like mount/BoE farming is an option but then it just feels like I’m not even playing WoW since all I do is grind, pretty much like my classic experience). Herb farming is another option and something I’ve been doing but it’s not yielding near enough profit for me to be able to actually enjoy the game.

If anyone has any suggestions please don’t hesitate to suggest them! No idea is a dumb idea! If anyone wants to reach out in game my character is Emaias, a human Paladin on Sargeras! Thank you all!

[XDurionX]

That depends highly on your servers' economy and players, the more people do the same thing the less efficient it is. What works for me might not work for you. It has become a lot harder to eran gold with BfA.

[Briselody]

Herbs

10char

[Jason498]

I’m in the same boat I quit before legion and came back this expansion new character/server/factoion to play with IRL friends. I started with the 30K from character boost. This expansion seems to be blizzard’s response to the free flow of gold from last expansion so the gold sinks are a lot more than what you get passively. First few weeks of expac if you leveled fast you could make gold selling BOEs from your professions, but that’s long gone on most servers. I think the best professions are herb/arch. Herbs are the only trade good stil selling and you’ll at least cut your flask cost in half due to the double length. I’ve personally had flasks proc up to x15 with the rank 3 talent which is great for some free income.

Other than that have you already done the shadowmourne quest? If I had a plate wearer I’d go there first. It takes a couple months of doing ICC (which for a 120 can be solo’d in 30 minutes), but the rewards are well worth it. You get several BOEs that sell on the AH for about 1MM gold total (depending on server)

[Deleted]

Of course it depends heavily on the server and of course you will make much less now than at the very start of the expansion, but there are still quite a few wayes to make gold:

Professions

skinning (&leatherworking): Depending on the farm spot (and your class) you can farm ~800 blood-stained bones per hour and either directly sell them for 20-50g or make them into the green wrists via leatherworking and sell those (people buy them to make expulsom)

herbalism (&alchemy): I find this to bring in less per hour than the bones but it may depend on the server. Make sure to farm the much needed herbs (e.g. siren's pollen). It may or may not be proftiable to make them into pots/flasks directly on your server.

fishing: I'd rather shoot myself in the foot before doing this but the fishes used for feasts go for rather high prices usually.

Pets

on some servers rare pets go for high amounts of gold, some of which can be farmed from e.g. old rares or the old raids etc.

Transmog

a pal of mine did this during the last add-on so I'm not really well informed on this one but basically some green/semi rare items can go for absurd prices

Old raid

while not nearly as profitable as it once was you can simple solo old raids for directly sellable stuff and some specific perks (icc shadowmourne was already mentioned in this thread, pets I already mentioned and then there is stuff like sulfuran ignot and so on)




All these methods include only "farm and then sell on the ah" stuff without any need to buy things on the ah first (either to craft and sell the manufactured product or to resell directly).
Of course in the long run doing exactly that will be much more proftiable....

I personally mostly use the blood-stained bone farming when i need gold currently but that's personal preference

PS: A good way to make some gold on the side while simply playing the game is enchanting. You'll get ton of loot doing WQ, dungeons,raids or whatever and net yourself much more money than vendoring it with nearly no extra farming required.

[Noxina]

Well, it is actually as simple as - buy low, sell high. See something cheap? Buy it, and resell it for higher. A good example of this is materials being dumped on the AH for lower than the MV(market value), buy it up, relist it higher. Might seem small with a couple of gold per item, but when you flip thousands it adds up quickly.

Check professions - is there a market somewhere that people aren't invested in? Take it over. For instance at BfA launch there was one other player doing BS crafts, so I earned a gold cap in two days from crafting BS gear instead of gearing my self. Pay attention to what quests hand-ins are for the Warfront (even better, do some research and find it out before it begins) and hoard materials needed, the prices usually rise with demand (unless there are too many doing the same thing). Made some nice gold by selling the enchants for this on a full pop server.

Another thing is to snipe, for this you will need to set up a TSM sniper, should be guides out there for it on youtube or their own website. Then when everyone is raiding on reset day, you sit and snipe. If you are lucky you can snatch a nice little BoE for way cheaper than what they usually sell (people do sometimes actually forget to add the three last zeros when posting an auctions, thank you lazy people who write 'K' instead of '000'). This is like the lottery though, and there will always be someone else doing it. But IF you manage to snatch a good BoE, you suddenly have made that months game time in one flip.

Now, for both these you would need to have some gold to even get started (flipping materials, not so much. Flipping BoEs a lot more). So unless you allready are sitting on 500k+ I wouldn't even touch BoEs unless you can get one for like 10%MV, but the chances for that are rather slim.
So then there is the option to actually farm. Now what do you want to farm? Herbing is a pretty steady income all around, Do an hour/day (30 minutes when you drink your morning coffee, then 30 minutes when you get home from work/school), then sell it all on reset day OR have a goblin that purchases everything you farm, but this is usually at a small discount (though remember, AH takes a 5% cut aswell, so might not be as bad as it seems).
If you find herbing a bit boring, you could try out Tmog farming. Personally I'd not recommend it, because you will need several thousand unique tmog pieces on AH to start seeing decent sales (check out Studen Albatroz, I believe he is called, on youtube, he does farming only and earns millions). So it might take you weeks to build up a storage big enough before you start noticing sales and a steady income.
I've done a ton of tmog sales over the years, mostly from crafting (got some rare recipes), and I see those sales as more of a bonus than anything else. My steady income is from current expansion consumables and enchants. And pets right now, because I hoarded them like a mad man late Legion/early BfA when people dumped them on AH.


Now, this might seem really basic. And it is. There is no right answer to what you can do to make gold (except herb farming, literally the most steady income for you). You need to do research, find a market that isn't overcrowded by other gold makers, then settle down. Build up your 'empire' slow and steady, before you start investing in crazy shit like pets, tmog and BoEs. They might seem really tempting, but usually you need to do extra work to get sales - have a huge stock and/or relist 10 times/day to get sales.

[Djuntas]

Dont wanna whore my YT out, but feel free to see the lastest video I did on AH. Wont provide link, you can see signature.


Basicly AH play with proffesions, 1 addon only...Auctionator. Currently I aim to make at least 25k pure profit a day.