Hey all,
So I noticed on the AH that stuff like Mithril Bar, Copper Bar, Fel Iron Bar etc actually sell for pretty decent gold. Can you actually make decent gold from these old mats? I’d assume most areas would be very uncontested as well, especially in War Mode.
Does anyone actually try and make any kind of gold on old mats? If so, how is it going?
They are easy to get, just involves going to old zones. But, if everyone started doing it then the prices will drop massively making it not worth it.
So maybe check it out but keep quiet on the results 
Definitely noted…
Thanks!
You make more farming current stuff generally. Then you can buy old mats.
I would only farm old mats if looking for some really chill farming
Nope. If I happen across them and do not need for older prof mogs I’ll sell, but I definitely do not go out of my way to farm them.
I make very modest amounts of gold, but often spend a lot of time in older xpac zones. Old professions are fun for me and herbs are a nice little AH treat on the side. No way to make big money, but enough to save for another Warband bank slot or something.
It’s all relative. And like almost everything in modern WoW, it’s all based loosely around the Token.
No one farms anything anymore. Need some copper? Token. Need Arcane Crystals? Token. Whatever you need … doesn’t matter… just sell a Token, and buy whatever you need.
And AH degenerates know it. All those “rather high prices for old mats” are falsely-inflated rates based on nothing more than “that’s what suckers will pay.”
18g for Thorium??? Are you insane? lol Have at it, fools.
But I mean… if people wanna pay 50-75k for old mats that take 10mins to farm, not like anything I’m going to say will change their minds. Just glad that’s not me.
I’ve tried making money off old mats and have two banks full of them, but they fall in and out of favor quickly. Certain mats or old recipes, gear, etc. sells quickly, others i can never get to move if i list them 50 times.
Things like copper bars, silver ore, will probably always have a market, but to me not worth it to farm exclusively.
What a decent gold ? Like 20g per 20 ?
Well…someone’s gotta be farming these items, right? Unless there’s a way to make them spawn out of thin air…kinda like gold. The AH just moves stuff around between players, but both the items and gold still have to be obtained somewhere else in the game first.
the old mats do sell well due to needing more to make one bar or how rare the nods are sometimes
I never farm for them. Every now and then if I’m on an alt or travelling past then I will gather it.
But gold wise - you will make more just doing quests on an alt in current content than farming old mats.
To a point.
I could type out 5-6 paragraphs explaining this in finer detail, but … who cares? lol Bottom line is that no matter how much real people farm stuff, all AH degenerates have to do is buy it all up and relist it.
Because they know: with each passing day, fewer and fewer people actually play this game. Fewer will go out and actually farm up the mats they need. Just buy a Token and be done.
Go farm up 5 Arcane Crystals and you’ll understand where all the Thorium comes from… 
supply and demand. the demand is way too low to make actual gold.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but Outland mats used to be the most valuable by far due to the fact that nobody likes farming them and Outland resource nodes are actually quite hard to find and have long respawn timers.
Maybe, as a commenter said, people buy tokens for mats, but I sure don’t. I never have bought a token except when I bought a virtual ticket to Blizzcon, which was a mistake on my part.
There are a whole bunch of players who’ve played for a long time, we know that. And they’ve stockpiled mats as they’ve moved through the expansions, so many players have bank alts with their own guild, I know that I do and now rarely visited.
As to why people buy the old mats, I can only guess. There are (now) some achievements for crafting, say, 500 cloth wrists with BC professions – so maybe some player might go for that by buying cheap cloth on the AH.
For me, every character that I decide that I want to be an engineer, I’m headed back to Shalozar Basin to farm stuff for Jeeves and then later for Reaves. Thankfully the mailbox is a toy now. But you do need some points in old expansions for the wormhole generators if you want to go that deep into the profession. So – old mats!
It’s less farm old mats
And more farm specific old mats, cuz some are used in specific transmog items
I had not thought of that. I know a player who specializes in selling shirts. That’s her niche market and she says that she does well.
I look at how much is available. If there are hundreds of thousands of some old mat available, even though the selling price sounds attractive, I’m just going to figure it’s not much in demand and probably won’t sell. Try selling a few for 50% off the current price. If it comes back, that means there is absolutely no demand.
Old professions have been totally gutted. The gear has intentionally been made unusable as gear. The only people who make most of these are the few completionists who collect recipes that are usable for transmog.
Are you sure they sell? They get posted, but do they actually sell though?
Case in point, and this was before a unified reagents market - I had a hefty back stock of khorium during WOD, which you needed at the time to make some more obscure transmog items, and while I was maybe able to sell one or two ores, I never really moved whole stacks. My experience with reposting old mats, especially BS and engi stuff, is that you can end up reposting for very long periods of time.