Gold Tips

One of the staples of making gold at lower levels is to take up gathering professions. Even though I primarily earn most of my gold through the Auction House now, I am extremely excited about the effect that the upcoming Cataclysm update will have on the ore economy.

A lot of players may not be aware of this, but the prices of freshly introduced herbs and ore from expansion packs with go for ridiculous prices for the first two weeks or so.

This means that anyone who has a gathering alt or main can net several thousand gold easily–especially if you’re dedicated enough to be one of the first players selling.

Why Should I Waste My Time Gathering Instead of Leveling?

Cataclysm brings some exciting content for endgame players, so I understand that a lot of people are more interested in getting their toons to the level cap instead of making gold. However, choosing to gather during the breaking hours of Cataclysm won’t set you too far back on your leveling plan and will net an undeniably large profit. The entire trick to making gold is to be ahead of the curve–by the time you finish leveling, the gold rush will already be gone and you will have missed the greatest part of new items being introduced into a market–being able to name your own price.

Immediately after gathering, your primary target will be the players grappling for the Realm Firsts–and these players are willing to pay absolutely anything to succeed. These are your big customers because you know they have the gold to pay whatever you want to charge them.

These big buyers will only last the first few hours until the Realm Firsts rush is over–the next audience you’ll be taking aim for is the general buyers, or the average WoW player. They won’t pay as much, and your merchandise won’t sell quite as fast–but they will still be selling for much higher than normal.

This All Seems Pretty Theoretical….

It’s not as voodoo science as it seems. WoW has a very real in-world economy, just like the real world, and it follows a logical pattern that is easy to predict during major events. A great example of the “Expansion Effect” is Cobalt Ore shortly after the release of Wrath of the Lich King.

When Cobalt Ore was first introduced, we saw prices per stack rise above 300g. With Saronite Ore, it was almost 600g/stack. The prices only lasted for a short period of time because after players leveled and started mining the ore, a much larger supply hit the market. For those first lucky (or intelligent) sellers in the market,   they had more than enough gold to sponsor all their character’s guilty pleasures in the new expansion.

I would urge anyone who wants to make a quick profit to spend the first few hours of Cataclysm’s release farming herbs and mining nodes. New content can wait, and your characters can be leveled up the next day. The opportunity to make yourself this wealthy will happen very rarely, and I will be taking full advantage of it on every server that I can.

Sometimes it seems like all the techniques and tricks you hear about only work for people who are already at the end of the game. Farming gold at lower levels has become very frustrating and discouraging because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. I know that I spent most of my lower levels questing for just a few pieces of silver and selling trash to vendors—and every bit of that went back into repairs and equipment.

When I first started playing, everyone basically gave me the advice of “Don’t worry about it, because you can’t really gold farm until you’re at least over 40. Just use the crappy quest gear until then.” This is absolutely NOT TRUE!

The truth is that—believe it or not—you can be rolling in some serious gold as early as level 10 onwards whether your are Alliance or Horde! If you want to, you can actually outfarm most of your level 80 friends (in fact, I won a few funny bets in my guild for it).

These are some basic tips that I follow on lowlevel farming characters:

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1. There is a “too early”

Okay—don’t get me wrong here, you can definitely gold farm at any level fairly efficiently if you’re good at it as long as you have a few startup silver for the auction house. But, for most players, it’s a good idea not to try to farm until at least level 10. By that time, you should have a good bit of startup coin, and you also don’t have to make a suicide run through the starting area to get to a major city for the Auction House, either.

If you’re planning on grinding for gold, you’ll start seeing some better results if you know the profitable hotspots at around level 10-12.

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2. A Full Bag = Empty Purse

A common phenomenon that plagues lower level characters is packrat syndrome. Unless you’ve already made another character, chances are you have a pretty small bag, and space can be very valuable. Make sure you’re vending everything that you can, because you don’t wanna be stuck without slots in your bag while you’re out grinding.

Likewise, if you’re out grinding and your bag just filled up, don’t hesitate to drop cheaper-value items to pick up the good stuff.

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3. Gather up Some Gold at the Auction House

The general idea of getting profession is to make some extra gold as you’re leveling—so it’s important to pick a profession as a lower level character that will actually generate decent gold!

There’s no point in picking a profession that’s going to take more gold to level it than it actually pays back. The best profession for lower levels (I’d say up to about level 70) is a gathering profession—herbalism, skinning, and mining are all great gold fetchers.

You can make great gold at the auction house by selling stacks of gathered items (Tin Ore and Copper stacks can sell particularly good right now) for a few gold a stack.

If you’re a serious gatherer, I’d suggest strongly to install the Gatherer addon so that you can view both plants and veins on your mini-map for easy gathering.

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4. Grinding Defias Trappers (Alliance)

Found in groups around the Westfall Windmill, these mobs drop some pretty nice armor but—most importantly—they drop insane amounts of linen cloth. Grind here, stack it up, and make an easy killing over at the Auction House.

If i’m leveling up a character quickly, I’ll grind here for a few levels and easily make around 6g per hour.

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5. Light Feather Farming (Horde)

Light Feathers are one of the more lucrative farmable items for lower levels as Mages buy them by the stack at the Auction House (on my server, they can sell for a little over 1g per stack). You can get them from the Great Plainstriders who roam near the Crossroads. You can start farming them at around level 10, and since the drop rate is a little over 90%, it’s a pretty nice grinding spot.

Every now and then, you’ll get the odd leather and recipe that you can resell for even better profits.

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While these are just some basic tips, every little bit can add up especially during the lower levels. The important thing to remember is that gold farming is always changing, and it’s important to always take every opportunity you can to learn something new. If you want to learn how to make gold more efficiently in later levels, you should check out Warcraft Millionaire. This comprehensive guide describes everything from the best grinding spots to utterly dominating the Auction House.

Brad Johnson was the first WoW gamer to reach the gold cap (214,748 gold 36 silver 47 copper) for a single player and documents his techniques in his 200+ page guide. It is widely regarded as essential reading for serious gold farmers and was recently upgraded to cover all new content in Wrath of the Lich King.

You can learn more about Brad and Warcraft Millionaire by visiting his official web site.

The Auction House is the foundation of any real gold farmer’s bankroll—it is the bread and butter by which every experienced farmer lives and breaths by. There is simply no better method for making gold in the world of Azeroth. Every moment, thousands of transactions are taking place for both the most precious and mundane items. It is the pillar of a server’s economy, and without knowing how to use it to its greatest potential—you will never reach your greatest potential.

The greatest thing about the Auction House is that it doesn’t matter what level you are when you start—each and every player can use the Auction House. The only thing that the Auction House requires of a player is to make an educated decision on when and what to buy and sell.

Here are some basic tips that every Auction House player should know BEFORE starting:

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The Auctioneer Add-on

If you use the Auction House, you need to be using Auctioneer. It is essentially an analytic tool that will allow you to maximize your profits by capturing, sorting through, and interpreting Auction House data from your server. By using regular scans (at least once a day) via Auctioneer, you will compile a profile of your servers economy—including all the buying and selling trends that will help you decide when and what to buy.

Auctioneer has many useful default functions that will help your quest to master the Auction House just a little bit easier. It can easily search for underpriced items in player’s shops and even suggest what you should resell them for.

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Timing Your Auctions

Whether it’s an auction on a priceless painting or a listing for linen cloth in a virtual world, timing is everything. It’s important that a player be able to recognize an item priced at bottomline and then be able to turn them around and resell them at a peak profit.

A very easy example that most players notice is the price of cloths, which fluctuate violently day by day on most servers. A lot of times linen cloth will be priced fairly expensive during the “slow” time on your server (those dead weekdays and early mornings where only the most hardcore are still playing) but they will abruptly take a dive in price after the server gets busier. This is the law of supply and demand, and it absolutely rules the Auction House.

By observing the law of supply and demand, you can learn how to make insanely large amounts of gold with only an hour or so dedicated to gold farming per day.

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Knowing Your Wares

You don’t always have to be the lowest price on the block to turn a great profit. If you know what you’re selling and know the players that are buying it, you may be able to get away with a little bit of a price hike for the sake of convenience. I know I have visited the Auction House many times and bought overpriced items knowingly just because I wanted it RIGHT THEN.

The trick to overpricing items is knowing why and what people will buy on a price hike—and to what extent you can raise the price. There’s a lot of research time that can go into this, and most gold farmers spend quite a while learning just what they can and can’t practice this technique with.

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Becoming a Successful Auction House Player

The Auction House can be a tricky place. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re rolling the dice that could bring you great fortune or could quite likely blow up in your face. It requires strategy, knowledge, and trust in your own ability to pick out trends and follow them. There are very few Auction House masters willing to share their techniques with you—most of them just feed you some regurgitated crap that you’ve heard a million other places before.

Mayle’s Auction House Mastery is a goldmine for new players who don’t have gold to spare in the learning process. By taking the guesswork out of the Auction House, she teaches reliable and powerful Auction House techniques that most power sellers shy away from divulging.

If you’re serious about making gold and grinding mindlessly doesn’t appeal to you, I recommend you to visit her website to find out a little more about Auction House Mastery and what it can do to help you make the most out of your Auction House experience.

Okay, so most people wouldn’t say that gold grinding was their favorite thing to do. Even though Azeroth can be a huge place and there are plenty of places to farm gold, sometimes certain spots can be pretty overcrowded—and let’s face it, gold grinding isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. A lot of guides will tell you to leave the gold grinding to the pro Chinese gold farmers that seem to have grown roots in certain highly profitable areas, but I won’t judge you if grinding for gold is your secret dirty pleasure.

I leveled my first character entirely gold grinding because I was more focused on the fast track to 60 than gold farming. If you’re trying to speed level you character or just in the mood for some relaxing, brainless mob killing, here are some great places to rack up the gold while grinding:

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Defias Windmill (Level 12-20)

One of the best areas for low level gold grinding is Defias Windmill, which sports a rather nice spawn of Defias Trappers. With a little over 90% drop rate on Linen Cloth, they’re an Auction House goldmine in the making. The best thing about these mobs, however, is that they actually respawn a lot faster than other spawns. It makes overcrowding less of an issue, and there’s less of the whole “OMG YOU KSing n000BS!” talk going on there.

The going is so good here that some players continue leveling here even in their mid-20s, which is where competition can get a little annoying (seriously, it’s time to move on to a new spawn at that point), but it’s pretty much guaranteed easy gold.

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Scarlet Monastery (Level 40)

The Scarlet Monastery has a great little-known mob lurking around in its graveyard—the Unfettered Spirits. You have to be a little careful as they’re wandering around right next to two elites (the Anguished Undeads and Haunting Phantasms), but the Unfettered Spirits are pretty easy to take down and have some excellent loot.

This spot is not as well known (right now at least) as others, so you won’t have quite as much competition from regular players and professional gold farmers here. That means less ganking and less complaining—pretty much an all-around winner!

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Deadwind Pass (Level 60)

In the Auction House shuffle, Runecloth is always a very profitable item to have in stock. The Ogres at Deadwind Pass have a very high drop rate for Runecloth as well as a nice little bonus of around 7-8 silver per mob. 

Like Defias Windmill, the mobs also spawn very fast here and, if you catch it at a good time, you’ll have continuous profit pretty easily with little respawn time. Unfortuantly, this can be a pretty popular hangout place for the professional gold farmer crowd if you’re playing on a high population server.

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Arklon Ruins (Netherstorm – Level 70)

Most people still remember the Arklon Ruins pre-nerf when it was one of the better Mote farming spots. Fortuantly, this spot can still be pretty good for farming as the Felblade Doomguards and Artifact Seekers both have a great drop rate for Fel Armaments and Marks of Sargeras.

If you want to generate some good Aldor reputation, this is an excellent spot to grind for gold. It’s no longer teeth-gnashingly difficult to grind in since the mote nerf and the Auction House profits can be pretty lucrative.

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Northrend (Level 80)

Northrend is a gold grinder’s wet dream and is essentially the “place to be” for higher level gold grinders. If you have an AoE class, you’re going to be in love all over again with grinding, but solo classes won’t miss out on too much. There are a ton of humanoids roaming about the area, which means you can dispatch them pretty easily and pick up the spoils afterwards.

This is pretty much the place you want to have the most possible slots available (that means stop being cheap and buy a decent bag) because you’re gonna get a lot of great drops. It’s very possible to easily achieve 80-100g each hour if you grind efficiently.

So why exactly did I buy my first gold guide when there’s a ton of free guides floating around out there on the internet?

Well, to be perfectly honest here, I started out in the same leaky boat that a lot of people are still drifting in. Once upon a time, I believed that anything could be found on the internet for free. I figured that with all the blogs, websites, and forums out there dedicated to World of Warcraft, I basically had all the information I needed to make as much gold as I could ever want.

Just take a moment to imagine how vast and totally unkept the internet is. As a new player, I was searching for something that would help me make gold right then– I didn’t want to wait until I was level 80 and I didn’t need advice from two versions ago, either. There was a lot of guides out there that promised all sorts of quick riches, but everything that I found was boring, rehashed and otherwise vague information that barely scraped in a few gold pieces at a time–if I was lucky.

So, here are the 7 reasons that made me make the jump to purchase my first gold guide–something that changed my world of warcraft experience forever onwards.

1) Beginner Friendly

No one starts out being a pro, and simply playing the game (even if you’ve got a few level 80s under your belt) doesn’t make you an experienced gold farmer. The best gold guides start out with the basics so that players who just registered their account can start making gold from the moment they log in. I wasn’t that new at the time I bought my first guide, but now one of my richest characters is a level 10 on a server I barely even play on.

It was important for me to have a guide that offered me freedom– maybe sometimes I would want to level up a little quicker, and maybe sometimes I would want to take a break in leveling and make some extra gold for new equipment. Either way, I found there was a lot more flexibility offered in the bulk of paid guides–they were larger, more up-to-date, and infinitely more detailed than any of the material I had found on my own.

2) Money back Guarantee

No one likes buying something and then being surprised when they open the box. All of the guides that I review here (even the ones I don’t recommend) all come with a 60 day refund policy. Not every guide is made for every person, and sometimes what looks good on paper doesn’t turn out to work that great for you as a player. How complicated is the refund process? Well, I have a little bit of experience here as a guide reviewer–I’ve seen a few that weren’t even worth the ink it would take to print them out. Fortuantly, the refund process is pretty quick, and it probably took a total of around 2 minutes to complete it.

3) You Can’t Make Gold with Outdated Advice

Forums and blogs are a great place to learn about sewing or drawing. There’s no Sewing Version 2.0 or Charcoal Drawing 20.1–both topics are straightforward and it doesn’t matter if you’re searching for it now or twenty years from now–chances are, whatever you find is still gonna be pretty relevent. Unfortuantly, this isn’t the case with games like World of Warcraft where there are major changes happening every patch that can completely change the way the game is played.

If a guide isn’t regularly updated, it can become totally useless very quickly.