Every single person that I’ve spoken with has told me that farming and gathering are the main ways to make gold in classic wow.
I’m someone that greatly prefers crafting and selling via the AH. My reasoning is that farming is limited by the amount of time you put into it, while crafting is only limited by the materials you’re willing to buy off the AH. Just last night I made over 100g profit selling crafted items on the AH that maybe took me 20 minutes to buy the mats for, craft and post. Crafting scales a lot better in terms of time invested vs profit. Yet, I still hear people always say that gathering is the way to go and to go farm to make gold
Well without all those gatherers your profit margins will shrink, so you should be happy there’s as many people willing to gather mats for you. But crafting is definitely viable, it’s just what you described requires a little more game knowledge and it’s easier to get burned. There’s no real possibility to lose money farming and gathering
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For me it’s because farming involves gameplay, killing mobs, and crafting is just button clicks. Only found a few games that manage to invest crafting with actual gameplay.
*To clarify I’m not saying clicking isn’t gameplay, I play Eve for goodness sake, but it’s not why I startup WoW.
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I can understand that, but my counterpoint would be that crafting frees you up to do whatever you want to in game without worrying about killing specific mobs for hours for gold
Fair enough. What if what I want to do in-game is kill mobs for hours?
Then you’re free to do that while knowing that you additionally have items for sale on the AH that are completely unrelated to the outcome of your farming session
Early on in the game, there aren’t a lot of mats to buy to craft with, and you can sell farmed mats and drops to generate gold.
By now, the AH is flooded with low priced mats, so crafting makes sense now. Everybody said farm pre-launch because it was guaranteed cash flow, but now it makes sense to craft if you can buy mats low enough to generate a decent profit margin.
because different people like different things?
The answer is likely similar to the question “Why do people prefer farming/crafting over buying low/selling high auction house?”
- Playing the AH against itself is volatile and dynamic. It can be profitable, it can be difficult.
- Enter crafting. Less volatile, but still dynamic in terms of how many other people are crafting and the profitability of those crafts.
- Lastly, farming. Unless your intent is to “farm BOE blues/purples”, farming is a consistent known static accumulation of straight coin and vendorables.
Some want safe and known earnings. But of course, some don’t want to sit at the AH all day and others don’t want to farm up crafting materials to hope the market remains profitable for <x> item.
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I like killing all the things. 
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Gold-making methods are never guaranteed to stay consistently profitable.
–The more people who are out gathering mats, the less gold you’ll make gathering mats.
–The more people crafting the same items you are, the less gold you’ll make crafting those items.
That’s why its important to take advantage of everything now, in the early weeks of WoW Classic, before everyone else levels up their professions and catches up to you.
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A less flippant counter would be;
A) I’m already free to pursue my preferred gameplay without bothering with crafting at all.
B) I actually DO throw stuff up on the AH, when it happens to fall into my inventory from my default gameplay activities. It’s a fun momentary diversion like inventory management or new spells.
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I disagree with the idea that crafting is volatile. In general, crafted items should always sell for some profit over their materials assuming the item has enough demand. Sure, sometimes the price may crash to below the material cost, but it will correct itself eventually by either the mats becoming cheaper or the crafted item going back up in price.
Also, I don’t spend all day at the AH. I spend maybe 30 minutes when I first log in buying up the reagents that I need, crafting my stuff and posting it before going out into the world and doing stuff.
When I hear these it’s usually in regards to leveling and also specific to “mount at 40.” Everything is expensive when leveling your first character, so people try to save every copper. Spending on training Engineering (for instance) is expensive.
I’m going the route of two gathering professions and selling everything until 40. As soon as I have my mount (and a little extra money) I’m going to drop skinning and pick up Engineering.
Only certain professions and certain recipes truly make money. Most professions are better off selling the mats because people buy them to level the crafting profession. There’s often much less risk in selling mats than crafting them and hoping the crafted items sell.
The main difference is in consumables, those are constantly needed and can sell decently. However, even with those often the margins are pretty thin and you can do almost as well just selling the mats.
Where you really make money is in rare patterns or recipes that people need for progression in raids and such. You can often demand a premium for them and the raiders will buy them up.
So, yes, for the most part gathering is the way to make gold. It’s less time, risk, and effort invested. You might make a bit more by crafting but it’s usually not worth the extra effort that you could instead use to gather some more.
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Weird thread.
Who cares if people want to gather?
Do you really want more competition to undercut your crafted items?
Not everyone likes playing the AH, they prefer being out of the capital city killing things. Everyone is different
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Nice job taking quotes out of context
I looked at the context, there wasn’t much of it but the quotes seem to stand fine as he put them. It’s a huge risk to make things when they may sell below the material cost - or not sell at all. Crafting is often highly volatile, selling the materials is usually less so.