How to farm Warcraft gold

From AJS.COM

Farming gold in World of Warcraft is the stuff of dozens of documents that you can buy over the Web, and it's starting to get to me. So this is my running guide (I'll update it often) on how to farm gold. No more buying gold online and risking account bans (I'm surprised anyone ever did this). No more reading through guides that aren't worth the money they charge. Just one document (that you can add to if you want to log in) and it's free to read.

Contents 1 Auctioneer 2 Low levels: 1-9 2.1 Tracking 2.2 Enchanting 3 Mid levels: 10-49 4 50s 5 58 through the 60s 6 70

Auctioneer

A lot of these tips involve the use of the auction house to buy or sell your goods. Auctioneer is an addon that will help quite a lot with shopping the auction house. It tells you how much things should cost, both for buying and selling, and only requires that you do some infrequent scans of the auction house. I do this before I leave the game for the night.

Low levels: 1-9

Frankly, at low levels you don't need gold. What you need is to learn to conserve what you have.

• Don't buy gear from vendors (it's way too expensive).
• Once you are level 5 or 6, head out of your starting area for the nearest big city.
• The Auction House
  • Shop at the Auction House (ask a guard where it is).
  • Wait for good deals on what you want. Don't be afraid to try again tomorrow.
  • Buy 8-slot bags as early as you can afford them. This will help improve how much loot you can carry in a single run.
  • Pick up two gathering professions (mining, herbalism or skinning... even enchanting, though that can be tricky), and sell the trade goods you get in the Auction House.
  • At very low levels, sell any bags you find (once you have enough) on the auction house, not to vendors.
• Start leveling your cooking, fishing and first aid early and often. They don't generate much cash, but you will need them later on.
  • The fastest way to level cooking is to cook the fish you get.
  • Fish recipes are usually on cooking supplies, general goods, tradesman or inkeeper vendors in the appropriately leveled zones.
  • Don't buy cooking recipes on the Auction House no matter how badly you want to!
  • Always be on the lookout for fish pools (swirling circles on the surface) and floating junk. Fishing there will get you special fish and loot which often sells well.

Get to level 10 as fast as possible. Don't worry about money at this stage.

Tracking

Mining and herbalism each have a tracking skill that goes with them. You click on its icon to activate it, but since you will have two skills and you can only have one tracking skill active at once, this can be a pain. Doubly so for hunters who get tracking skills for animals and humanoids that also conflict!

For hunters, the best solution is to go with skinning and enchanting. That way, there's nothing to track. You skin the animals you kill and you disenchant the green items you get (see below).

For everyone else, I suggest taking skinning plus one of mining or herbalism. That way you track the mining or herb nodes, and just skin the animals.

Sadly, this is what everyone does, so skinning won't get you a lot of cash. Don't be afraid to sell the skins fairly cheap, as long as it's more than you would get by selling them to a vendor. Auctioneer does a good job of itendifying good prices, but if you get things expiring, lower your prices.

Enchanting

As you start to level you will sometimes get a green item (the text in the tooltip will be green). These items are higher quality, and can be disenchanted by those that have the enchanting skill. Here's what you do when you get a green (or blue or purple, for that matter) item:

1. Check to see if it's something you can use!
2. Check to see if it's soulbound. If it is, just sell it to a vendor if you don't need it.
3. Look at the disenchant price (latest Auctioneer puts this right on the tooltip). If this is higher than both the vendor price and the Auction House price, enchanters should disenchant it and use the disenchanted supplies to practice their enchanting skill or sell them on the Auction House.
4. Look at Auctioneer's suggested sell price and the amount that a vendor would pay. If the vendor would pay more or very close, just sell it to a vendor.
5. Finally, if it's got a good AH price, sell it there.

At very high levels, enchanting is phenomenally lucrative, but it's a pain to level and it doesn't generate as much gold while you level.

Mid levels: 10-49

Once you're on the path to leveling, you want to focus on both gathering money and conserving it.

• If you get an item whose required level is 19, 29 or 39, and plan to sell it on the Auction House, make sure you don't under-price it. These items are highly sought after by people doing low-level PvP battlegrounds.
  • Never buy new gear from the Auction house when you are a level ending in 8 or 9, for the above reason.
• Don't sell anything green or blue to vendors (the name color, when you mouse over it in your bags).
• Don't buy new gear from the Auction House until your existing gear is too low level for you by at least 5 levels. Why? Because quest rewards may upgrade it for free!
• Continue to gather trade goods and sell them. This alone should generate a few gold a day, even at low levels.
• Don't be afraid to do low level quests that are green. They still give cash.
• A horse is a great thing to have, but skip it until you're at least 50.

Mages: Look for people offering to give gold for portals once you are 40.

Rogues: Look for people asking for someone to open locked boxes (make sure they're offering a "tip").

If you do all of that, you should be fine for cash until the 50s or so.

50s

Ah, now come the expenses. Spells and abilities are starting to cost quite a bit, and you will have several incrementally large expenses as you level through the 50s. Good news: when you hit 58 you can be dead broke, and that's OK. Gold falls from the skies like rain in Outland ;-)

• Continue to work your gathering skills all the time.
• Continue to sell things on the Auction House (you should be good at it by now)
• Buy a mount as soon as you can. The 50s take a while, so do it early.
  • You will need to buy the training first and then the mount itself.
• Start running through instances if you can get a group (that can be hard in the post-Burning Crusade WoW, so if you can't you can't).
• Don't be afraid to do lower level green quests. There are many more of them than there are 50s quests.

58 through the 60s

Once you hit 58, you are off to Outland. Don't pause, stop, delay or dither! Go!

• Quests in Outland give much more gold!
• The gathered goods that you can get will generate much more gold because you'll be getting the things that 70s need (for now... until Lich King comes out).
• Try to hold of on Netherstorm and Shadowmoon valley quests. You might have to do some in your high 60s, but you want to run out of all other quests in Outland first!

That's it. That's all you need to know to get to 70... and then...

70

Now that you've hit 70, your world changes. You should have been able to save up enough for a flying mount. This is critical because you can't do Daily quests in Outland without a flying mount! If you have not saved up enough through your 60s from quests, then start gathering like crazy and build up your cash. I suggest farming in the lowest level Outland zones for now.

Your flying mount comes from Shadowmoon Valley and as of the 2.3 patch, you'll get a quest from the Shattrath flight master to go to the vendor when you get to 70.

Once you have your flying mount, you'll need your epic flying mount. This bad boy flies faster than you've ever gone, but it costs 5,000 gold! Yep, that's right, over 6 times more than you spent on your flying mount, and you thought that was a lot! Here's how you get the cash:

• Do all of the daily quests every day that you can. This is your primary cash source once you have a flying mount at 70 (68 for druids).
  • See WoWWiki's list of daily quests
• If you held off on the Netherstorm and Shadowmoon quests, you're going to have a big cash influx, because (until you install Lich King), all of those quests now give cash instead of XP, and they give a lot of cash.
• Farm for ingredients required for high-end trade skills.
  • Chief among these are "motes" which can be found on any type of elemental in Outland, but are more common on the high level ones that are in flight-only areas.
  • Leatherworkers need many things that you can skin in Outland. If you're a skinner, then aim for high level basilisks, ravagers and snakes.
  • Mining can yield motes of earth while herbalism can yield motes of life.
• Run some instances with people. In 2.3 there are daily dungeon quests that should provide a good income, and if you're an enchanter you can disenchant the drops that no one wants (let people roll on the resulting components, but you still make out well even if you only get one out of every 5 shards).

If you do all of that, you should have you epic mount in no time. After that, and only after that, if you feel that you need a trade skill to make things, go ahead and start leveling it. You will have to go farm low-level stuff, but that's fine, as it will be trivial now. You probably even have enough cash to just buy your way up to 300 in any trade skill by buying components on the AH. There are lots of good, free guides out there on leveling trade skills.