How did so many people make ridiculous amounts of gold during WoD?

[Woobels]

Basically asking for a history lesson here, I never invested that much time into WoD and I often see comments of people saying they hit gold cap multiple times in WoD, with even some of my more casual friends saying they made enough that expansion to last forever and that it had a significant impact on the overall economy of WoW. Is this hyperbole or exaggerations? Was it actually that easy and what were the methods?

Please educate me, I love learning about quirky things in WoW's history.

[Exigaet]

It was the Garrison, specifically the mission table. They would just send followers out all day on all their characters and reap the rewards.

[Mokrath]

The mission table in WoD was extremely profitable if you had everything maxed out.
You were making tons of gold passively and every alt you added increased it by a factor of one.
You also had the Garrison providing you with most of the raw crafting materials as another way to generate some gold, but the missions were the real key.
If I remember right, a good day could be over ten thousand gold per character.
It did take time to get it all set up and leveling the followers, plus recruiting from the Inn for the right skills and stuff, but once you got it going it was self sustaining and with the addons to help you max success on a mission you were on easy street.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

the big thing was also the ships when they added them. Basically had two mission tables with followers all rerolled to +gold traits.

really just imagine current shadowlands missions but you could make all your followers have a triple gold reward trait. You'd be making 10k+ per day per character with no effort

[Ealyssa]

It's a long time ago now but mission table made 50-80K per week per character if I remember right ? Plus a few really nice buildings like tailoring and the meat thing.

I had every single classe to max level just to make gold on my server. Stopped at 5mio because "Who can need more than 5mio in their whole life", god was I stupid

[deenman]

I think they nerfed the 5k gold mission to not pop multiple times per account eventualy

also boosting in wod was extremly easy,another source of easy and fast gold for guilds

[Very Tired]

Legion was pretty much the same thing with mission tables. Actually what motivated me to finally get all my alts up to max just because of the gold I could make. Never once even had to touch the AH.

Made a ton of gold that I mostly spent on tokens. Even after those gold missions are gone years later, my sub is still living off the wow tokens I bought from back then. And I bought them when they were mostly 230k+. If I had waited until the next expansion, I could have more than doubled my tokens...

Blizzard offered the spider and long boi mounts as a gold sink in their attempt to reverse this massive inflation, I just didn't fall for it.

[Donald Hellscream]

In the inn building in your garrison you could recruit new followers, these followers had the chance to get the treasure hunter perk, which increased the amount of gold earned from a mission by 100% additively, so a 1k gold mission would net 4k gold instead, and then you'd just sending treasure hunting followers out whenever a gold mission popped up.
After WoD they nerfed that method by changing the perk to yield bonus garrison resources instead of gold, plus I think they also nerfed the amount of gold the missions gave in the first place.

[Izthak]

Short answer: Lots of tedium with lots of alts.

WoW just hasn't been a fun game in a very long time. Daily quests all the way back in TBC started the avalanche of changing the game from being a game into being a chore.

[Woobels]

Damn I forgot about the mission table entirely and never knew it was that lucrative, also somewhat surprised they never gutted it that much mid expac.

[Sting]

Damn I forgot about the mission table entirely and never knew it was that lucrative, also somewhat surprised they never gutted it that much mid expac.

It even got a buff halfway through with the addition of Harrison Jones as a follower. He had a trait that allowed low level followers to get the full experience from a max level mission, meaning you could powerlevel them insanely fast. With a level 3 inn, every week you could recruit one follower out of 3 offered with a trait that you wanted (like Treasure Hunter for the gold) and there were addons that showed which counters you still lacked to specific missions and calculated the optimal choice. Eventually you had a roster that could 200% every available mission so you'd always get the bonus reward (even more gold) too.

Then later on the shipyard was added with its own mission table. It was a pain to use since your boats could be destroyed so you actually needed to do some work to keep them going per character but the payoff was great.

[Battlebeard]

Yeah, I missed out on this as I never really had any alts.

[starkey]

Made about 4million selling parts for the garrison auction house.

[Cronovey]

On top of all this, the WoW Companion app at the time allowed you to complete and send missions out as well, meaning that even when not actively at your computer you could still keep the gold machine rolling if you wanted to. This made it even more lucrative as people who were out working or whatever could continue sending out missions as long as they had access to their phones.

[Nymrohd]

Gold making in WoD had many stages.

Early adopters who grinded an army of alts before the first patch profited from a combination of tavern-recruited Treasure finder followers and lack of limit on treasure missions to make insane amounts of gold that scaled linearly to each character. Given WoD did not really have much else to do and you could very much raid log, WoW players with a lot of time could afford to do so. There were other options as well (savage blood barn grind).

It's crucial to add that WoD had a very fast and fairly enjoyable leveling experience. The questing was solid, the zones beautiful.

After the first few patches, almost everyone had caught on the gold making abilities of the mission table. Even collectors run out of things to do in the 3-4 month mark so they also shifted to the mission table and alts. Most of them never caught up to the fortunes of early adopters given that we got major nerfs to gold income with the cap of treasure missions per account instead of per character but they still made much.

With the WoW Token entering the economy everyone now had a solid reason to make gold. Even non-gold makers intensified their efforts.

The shipyard did enhance gold income to an extent though it was much more finicky and required more time spent. Still it was yet another addition to the gold making portfolio.

A crucial factor for the army of alts was the Gorgrond world objective grind that allowed you to level alts at extraordinary speeds. Gorgrond was a zone that was redesigned at the last moment, with much of the zone left empty of quests. To fill in the leveling curve, Blizzard added tons of world objectives in the zone as well as a very xp-rich trophy hunt. It was easy to just nearly clear all objectives, complete the trophy hunt, then stack up every xp gain. With a very powerful xp-potion added at this time, you could gain 5-6 levels in a couple of hours.

And then late on we got flight to speed everything up even more.


To be fair, Legion also allowed for significant gold making. It wasn't at the same level as WoD but it was not that far behind. The Legion mission table had solid gold making options and most importantly had reputation tokens which together with the paragon chests could allow an army of alts (and people had a lot of alts in Legion since it was actually fun and unique to play them) to funnel rep to their main or if possible a human alt and just open paragon boxes at a very high rate.

[kranur]

Basically asking for a history lesson here, I never invested that much time into WoD and I often see comments of people saying they hit gold cap multiple times in WoD, with even some of my more casual friends saying they made enough that expansion to last forever and that it had a significant impact on the overall economy of WoW. Is this hyperbole or exaggerations? Was it actually that easy and what were the methods?

Please educate me, I love learning about quirky things in WoW's history.

WoD was generating at ton of gold, but Legion was even worse. In WoD you could get a 5000 gold mission per week IIRC. I think at that point I had 7-8 alts rolling that and the barn that was producing blood, which were also selling well, though to other players.

Legion was worse because towards the end you would get a 2-3k (for the life of me don't remember the exact values) mission every 1-3 days, continuing the army of alts from WoD, I was literally banking 10-15k gold every day from just starting missions from my phone when I was on my way to work and back home.

It was so insane, that towards the end of Legion, I had 2 million gold, max blizzard balance (think it was 250 euros) and 1 year of sub left.

[Easyclassictopkeklel]

Ofc garrisons but I made the most money by far by farming mats for the auction house module.
There were parts that could only drop in Ashran and I could solo the elite who had higher chance of dropping it.
Those sold for an insane amount of gold, especially on my lowpop pve server where I was playing.
Made around 300-500k almost every day only with those.

[Yunzi]

Gold cap was 1 million gold per character in WoD, raised in Legion to 10 million partially (probably mostly) because of wealth generated from the WoD mission table.

WoD's mission table wealth generation was a 10/10, Legion's 7/10, BFA was crap, and Shadowlands 6/10. WoD was the height of the passive Farmville mentality among Blizzard executives.

[Schizoide]

During WoD I made ~15k gold/day from table missions across 11 max-level characters. Right now in Shadowlands I'm making about the same amount across 12. Passive income, just log-in 2-3x/day to refresh missions.

That's nothing, though-- in Legion 7.3 I made 45k gold/day from missions. It was massively more lucrative.

Happily, Dragonflight doesn't have a mission table.