d, and there will always be the odd stray Gnome to pummel, but it is the metallic clink of gold that oils the game’s sinews and keeps everything flowing nicely.Quite simply, you need gold for almost everything in the game, from repairing your battle-dented armour to collecting pint-sized companions.
Fortunately, gold comes easy. Well, I should say: just enough gold to survive on comes easy. Quest rewards, drops from slain creatures and the proceeds of any gathering professions you might have can all supply enough gold for you to keep your gear in good order, purchase your new skills or spells and perhaps have a little left over to put towards a mount, or a shiny, new sword from the auction house.
If you are satisfied with this rate of income, then you don’t have to read any more of this article, go into the kitchen, make yourself a cup of coffee and login to WoW, you don’t need this guide and you’re wasting valuable playing time! If however, you drool enviously at the folks chugging along on clattering motorbikes, or wish you had one of those three-seater, pimped-out Traveller’s Tundra Mammoths then fear not: this guide will endeavour to help you to maximise your rate of income and, because there are an almost infinite number of ways to make money, hopefully it will help to identify the paths that excite and interest you.
Due to the length of this guide, I’ve decided to hew it into manageable chunks, and so this first instalment will be a general overview. In future, I will add other guides dealing with the auction house, each of the primary professions, a run-down of seasonal cash-ins and a look at specific money-makers. Probably.
Open A Bank Account.
Everybody should have an alt that is set up to act as a ‘bank’. Bank characters save you so much time and money that, other than the initial run from the starting area to the nearest city, there really is no negative aspect to them. My bank character (a level 1 Orc Warrior) even has his own personal guild to take advantage of the extra storage that a guild bank offers. As you make more and more gold you can buy extra bank tabs and eventually have more than enough space to hoard items for future use (or sales). With a bank alt stationed patiently in a city your main characters can frolic murderously through Azeroth, Outland or Northrend, only pausing briefly at a mailbox to send any items marked for storage or sale to your bank. This frees up a great deal of time.
With hindsight, I wish that I had chosen a Hunter as my bank character and levelled him to 20 to take advantage of Aspect of the Cheetah. That run from the auction house to the bank can rapidly become tedious. I would strongly advise against using a high level character as a bank alt purely to help limit loss in the case of your account being hacked. I have had the misfortune to be hacked during the early days of The Burning Crusade and, despite having 5,000 gold on my account, I only lost the 300 that I had on my highest level characters. Similarly, don’t draw attention to your bank alt by kitting them out with expensive ‘Twink’ or novelty items that can be identified from the login screen.
It’s useful to note here that naming your bank character can affect your future income. As this character will be the conduit from your main characters to the auction house it could be maintaining an almost constant presence on the auction house and in city trade channels. Thus, if you call yourself a name with negative connotations such as ‘RipoffMerchant’ or ‘Ninjabank’ there is a chance that buyers will be less likely to want to give you their money. This is especially true when selling on a face-to-face basis through the trade window, where people are more wary of scams. So choose something inoffensive and remember that, as with all character names, you could be stuck with that name for a very long time.
Start Small.
Not all gold making guides recognise that it can be difficult to earn a good gold reserve when starting with a low level character. You may think that WoW has been around for long enough that players should all have at least one level 80 character by now, but this is simply not the case. New players are constantly signing up and many participants who have subscribed for years still have yet to reach the acme due to a very casual playtime schedule and real-life commitments or perhaps they have just scattered their playing time over many alts. Even veteran gamers who have multiple high level characters still begin new (non-Deathknight) characters on new servers where they are severed from their industrious level 80 sugar daddies.
Unless you are aiming for having enough gold to buy your mounts as soon as they are available to your character I would not advise being to ardent about cash generation while you are still low level. The rewards and drops you get from questing and killing should suffice every player other than the ‘Twink’ (who should be exclusively funded by a high level character anyway), and don’t forget that while that fetching robe on the auction house might give you 300 extra points of mana as well as bringing out the colour of your eyes, it’s very likely that it will be replaced in a few levels time, meaning that you wasted your money.
Level First, Farm Second.
This is true for many reasons, the primary being that levelling in itself is the greatest possible boon to increasing your income rate. Your level 20 shaman may be able to farm a thousand Gnolls an hour, but the gold generation will be pitiful in comparison to what you could do with a level 80 shaman in that time (especially if you lack decent-sized bags and mounts). That is not to deflect you from any kind of money-making enterprise. On the contrary, it is always nice to have a degree of buffer money in case you need it, just don't go out of your way unless you really, really need the cash.
Crafting Professions Are Money Pits.
They may sound like fun and offer useful or enjoyable items to augment your avatar, but in general advancing crafting professions (Leatherworking, Engineering, Blacksmithing, Tailoring and Enchanting) are the best ways to become impoverished. Aside from enchanting (more on this later) none of them offer anything that can be considered a must-have for the money-savvy levelling character. Even if you take the crafting profession’s corresponding gathering profession you will still need to spend a large proportion of your gold supply (and time) on items from the auction house, new recipes and trainer skills. Often without being able to sell the items you have crafted for anything more than the vendor price. Crafting professions only cease to become profitable when they are at the maximum level and it takes a massive amount of gold to get to that stage. For the lowbie on a budget this means alternatives should be sought.
Gathering Professions Are Money Makers.
Despite crafting professions requiring a great deal of money and time to progress, people still take them up all the time and are willing to pay for anything that will help them advance the profession quickly. This is where you can really start to make some ‘entry-level’ money from the auction house. Mining, Herbalism and Skinning all give you something for free that other players are willing to pay for, and while the lower level ores, flowers and skins are generally not worth that much (because they are easy to obtain) the higher you get the more worth the middle and later ones have. This is especially true for the natural resources commonly found in the level 40-60 zones where there are the fewest players passing through. Items like Iron ore and Mithril ore are worth more now than in ‘Vanilla’ WoW days because today’s high level players who need them to craft articles for alts, or to level up a new profession are less willing to spend time traipsing around the old places like The Badlands, and those that do revisit the original zones probably consume the things themselves.
So, if you have time, learn Herbalism and Mining (usually the most profitable two choices of the three) and develop them while you’re levelling your character, keep everything that drops from the nodes for selling off later or storing for your own personal use and watch the rise and fall of the auction prices, selling when they are high.
Always vendor grey items.
I make a point of keeping as much bag space free as possible, whether I’m levelling an alt, farming for something in particular or hitting an instance. You never know what is going to drop and I hate destroying things to make space in my backpack. Many people destroy, or even neglect to pick up grey weapons and armour, but this is a huge error: grey items are always worth decent money (relative to your level), and once you start to reach level 55+, they start to break the 1g vendor value. If you do have to discard anything, make certain to retain the grey weapons, as these are by and large worth the most, chiefly the two-handed variants.
Think Big.
So far, we have looked at small investments and low level activity, and while these are excellent ways to learn the capriciousness of the auction house and bring relatively rewarding ends, in the grand scheme of things they garner only small payoffs. To make hundreds and thousands of gold you really need to think big, and for this you will need investment capital and higher level characters.
Most of the money-making techniques that lend themselves to the maximum levels are ones that surround the auction house and high level crafting professions. This is where professions come into their own and can begin to turn a serious profit if enough research and time is dedicated to finding and exploiting their niche products. I will hopefully write separate guides to turning a profit from each of the professions so I won’t say much here, preferring to concentrate on the idiosyncrasies of the auction house in the next installment.
Suffice to say that each major profession offers creations that will make you money. How much money you make is rather dependant on your server’s prices & demand, sales techniques and research. The key word here is research and it is that which separates the sellers at the top-of-the-food-chain from those bottom-feeders that do not maximise their profit potential. Almost everything in the game is worth something to somebody and will sell for a certain price that is based on various factors. The trick is to use research to identify the items that people want to purchase but the supply is limited (or non-existent) or to find out how you can make the product cheaper than the other sellers. To that end I cannot recommend websites like Wowhead.com enough. Wowhead’s database lists every in-game item, where it drops or how it is created, what it can be used for and even displays invaluable players’ comments.
Check out the next guide where I’ll be taking a look at the ups and downs of the auction house.
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