People say this as a sort of knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of threads, but what is never mentioned is the significant travel time that can literally add up to hours if you have a healthy-sized roster of alts
Sure, you can make 3000-4000 gold per alt depending on how many dragon race WQs are up… but mutiply all that travel-time by X amount of toons and you’re looking at 4-5 hours - and for only like 30-40k gold?
It’s just not time-efficient the same way say… mission tables allowed you to cycle thru a bunch of alts + collect their payouts in like 20-25 minutes tops, with 0 travel time (assuming the alt was parked/logged out near the mission table)
I just returned to the game recently and from what I have seen you should do world quests for easy gold.
Depending on the set of quests it’s an easy way to make a good bit of gold and you can do it on more than a single character. They take what 1-3 min each for most of them and give like 500-700g.
With TWW release there are a few really good ways to make gold. I really recommend spending some time earning as much as you can early in the expansion and then just relaxing for the rest of it while you make gold more casually.
Gathering you can easily earn hundreds of thousands, or millions of gold quickly by selling herbs and ore to the crafters who are rushing to get their skills up.
In DF I made my first mil on my DK who was my gathering toon, then leveled up this guy and started crafting.
Crafting is big money if you can be active. I’m not even talking about big special crafts like what I was known for before I quit playing on my server.
The garbage BoE items sell like crazy! I went with JC and Inscription on this guy as I thought it would be fun to craft and I wanted to try and make a mil or two extra in DF so I could stop being poor and just wow…
I would mass produce BoE rings, necklaces, Staves, offhand books, and crafting equipment and I made bank. Early on things sell quick, but then it gets to the point where you will need to actively repost your items as people will be doing the same so their items sell first as most people buy the item on top of the list even when they are the same price.
Early on crafting BoE items made just as much gold as the Lariat if you are active enough with it. Idk why people buy those junk items when You could just make a crafting order, do a dungeon/wq or w/e for better items but they love them.
Lastly, with crafting look out for the special big crafts you can do, idk if it’s the same now but people would be very generous with their tips in the past.
Whatever you end up doing try and do it early in an expansion as the further in we get the more people doing the same and the less people buying stuff so the profit drops quickly.
Doing gold WQs, gathering professions, weeklies. I do the SL anima weekly and get at least two paragon awards a month (~3400 gold each.) Grinding Korthia and doing invasions accelerated the paragon awards, but I’m busy doing DF and Safari achievements.
Right now it’s chests. And that I’m seeing mutliboxers also doing chests now makes me think that it’s probably the most efficient while the mats are in their end of expansion crash.
The 600g quests and races are also good for a quick few K.
I just started retail on a new account after skipping SL and DF, so I bought a token. All I need are the 32 slot bags that are selling for 8 gold and my bank slots. And a Grand Expedition Yak. I really won’t be buying much else besides some enchants and questing will pay for those easily enough.
I miss collecting gold for low effort off Shadowlands Mission Tables too.
When I was farming for the Brutosaur mount in BFA, I ran lots of old dungeons and raids and found that I could grind slightly over 100 gold/minute in Hellfire Citadel, Blackrock Foundry, Highmaul, and Blackwing Descent. Those all got nerfed hard by the time Shadowlands came around (like less than 30 gold/min when I last checked; not worth the time).
That leaves me with dragonracing and world quests that have a straight up 500+ gold reward, which as you say, is not time-efficient. There’s always WoW Tokens, but not everyone’s cup of tea (or even a feasible consideration if you have a tight budget).
Solo raids. A single run of Antoras the Burning Throne on normal warrants me about 3k gold just from selling all the loot. This doesn’t include doing a bunch of other raids.
If I’m soulless and have no life I could probably earn a weekly income of about 18,000 gold just from doing multiple solo raids of recenter expansions. More or less.
Otherwise I’m kind of a one-shot deal. Might chance upon a valuable transmog being that I’m on a roleplay realm, or perhaps a pet drop that’s worth a lot. Then I sell those.
On the rare occasion I might also find a naked guy sitting in a random bush hidden in Stormwind again who will tell me “Congratulations, you found my hiding place” and randomly give me 50,000 gold as a reward. (That’s the story of how I finally got enough gold to get my Grand Expedition Yak)
If you’re looking to farm old content and sell stuff on the AH to make gold, pets and super rare transmog is the way to go. Some pets still sell for thousands.
If you have a tailor, bags still sell well. Not for much, but it’s at least steady gold. Old mats, like ore and leather sell well too. Put on a movie and mine your way around Northrend.
When the expansion goes live, more people will be resubbing and buying up mats and greens. That will probably earn you more gold than anything else now a days.
I made tons with vantis vantus however you spell it, runes. As a tank or healer qeueing for randoms, you can get a ton as rewards for qeueing up. They arent big sellers anymore but during the DF peak, i was making tens of thousands of gold a week selling them.
I’m the new XPAC I’ll do some gathering for easy early gold but I hate professions now. My main stream is always mog. Gonna be interesting to see how the market adjusts to the changes. I’m guessing it’ll grow fast, spike, and then be completely dependent on accessibility to new content.
Well of course. By funneling goldmaking to people who sell carries they are concentrating earning power among players who will have little use for the gold and must sell it for tokens, while making it hard enough to earn gold that average players will need to buy those tokens. It’s a business decision intended to sell more tokens, free money for Blizz.
