I'm nearing 200k gold on my main toon. I guess it's mostly due to gold inflation during cata, but my net (wow) worth really jumped up since the expansion launched. I remember when I first hit 100k and thinking, wow I'm so rich, I should buy something. But then the tendency to hoard my wealth kicked in, and now I'm almost at double that amount.
I really SHOULD spend it on something, it's just hard to remember that it's just pixels. When you're frugal in RL, that kind of just carries over to your wow spending I suppose.
Anyways, I make my gold the way anyone else makes gold: grind professions & sell things on the AH. While some people claim that you can make a lot of gold just doing dailies, this takes a lot of time. In a fraction of the time it takes you to do 10 dailies (which would fetch about 160g total), I could buy and re-sell a few things on the AH for ten times the profit. You just have to know what are the hot sellers and when you can get a good deal on something.
For anyone who's looking to seriously get into the AH, you must have an addon of some sort. I use auctionator, and I honestly don't know how I ever got along without it. It keeps track of all your auctions, makes buying in bulk so much easier, and even keeps an ongoing database of prices so you can monitor when is a good time to buy an sell.
The other trick is to have a profession that can craft the popular selling items, and have alts with gathering professions that can support the crafting profession. For instance on my main I have alchemy but not herbalism. I use alts to gather herbs, or better yet, buy them in bulk whenever the prices are low. To be honest though, I can't remember the last time I went near an herb. Potions and flasks are not my moneymaker of choice - I go for the transmutes.
Anywho, without further ado, here is my top 5 gold-making schemes that's worked wonders for me:
5. Cloth
This is not something I do actively, but it's something that can generate a lot of profit, especially at low levels, for relatively low effort.
Cloth is everywhere - that shit drops from any humanoid creature and sometimes you find yourself literally swimming in cloth. I know I sure did when I was grinding rep for the Insane title. I had to run Dire Maul over 100 times, and let me tell you, I racked up stacks upon stacks of runecloth.
Rather than just vendor them or try to sell them on the AH, I enlisted the help of my hubby who was a tailor. Stacks of cloth BOLTs almost always sell for more net profit than the cloth counterpart. Don't ask me why, it's certainly not difficult to turn cloth into bolts, but there you have it. I guess people don't want to sit there on their mains making bolts for 10 min straight. The opportunity cost seems relatively small to me, but whatever.
I made a tidy little profit selling all those bolts of runecloth. Even now when I run low level dungeons or raids, I always save up the cloth and sell them as bolts. I've found that frostweave bolts always sell out very quickly at a good price.
Mind you, I don't go "farming" for cloth by any means. The beauty of it is that cloth just seems to appear in your bags mysteriously. After running BC-level raids, for instance, I'll often find several stacks of netherweave in my bags. It's almost like free money!
4. BoE badge gear
I used to do this a lot more during Tier 11 raids and Firelands, not so much anymore. Some badge gear, whether it be justice or valor, is BoE and you can purchase it with your mains and send it to your alts or sell it. Well, often times my main would accumulate a lot of valor points with nothing to spend it on (all my gear came from raids). So I'd buy the BoE bracers or boots and sell them on the AH. When content is first released they sell at upwards of ~7-8k gold so it's a good way to make a lot of cash in a short period of time.
I also did this on my alts during firelands - in the process of grinding valor points I'd also rack up a lot of justice points, which I would use to buy the lower tier BoE gear. They don't sell for as much, but sometimes you're just looking to unload all the JP sitting in your bag. Overall a pretty simple way to make some money if you've got a lot of points and nothing to buy.
3. Low level instances
You'd be really surprised at the cash you can make just by clearing low level dungeons. I noticed that my gold stash was really growing a lot when I used to run tons of BC dungeons for tmog gear.
First of all, there's just the plain old gold drop from mobs. This doesn't make up a significant portion. But then there's stuff like cloth, motes/primals and other crafting mats that drop. Running the zangarmarsh instances, I'd pick up so many primals that would each sell for ~50g.
Then there are random green drops that can be DE'd - the BC level enchanting mats sell pretty well. And sometimes you'll get a random BoE blue or epic, which sell very well nowadays due to people wanting unique gear for tmog. BoEs are generally hard to come by so people are willing to pay upwards of 1000g just for some garish looking sword!
Another big bonus is certain instances drop quest/rep items. Grinding heroic Steamvaults for tmog gear I picked up a lot of coilfang armaments - enough to get me exalted with the Cenarion Circle and plenty more to sell. At one point they were going for ~120g a pop and I would pick up 10 or more each run. The creatures in underbog would drop sanguine hibiscus, which also sold well.
2. Enchanting
Just the ability to DE useless gear is a big bonus. A piece of BoP epic gear will vendor for maybe 20g if you're lucky, but when you DE it into a maelstrom crystal you can sell it for 10 times that price. As you upgrade your own gear instead of just vendoring the old epics, you can DE it and sell the shards. When you pick up BoP epics and blues from dungeon runs, you can DE it and sell the mats! When you pick up a lot of useless greens out in the world, you can DE it and sell that mats again!
I've found that enchanting as a service or trying to sell enchanting scrolls alone is not quite as effective, simply because supply outweighs demand for a lot of the enchanting scrolls. Chanters make them to level their skills and flood the AH with tons of scrolls, so that's never been a good moneymaker for me.
But one thing that has sold consistently well are scrolls for rare, useful low-level enchants. For instance, I picked up a enchanting recipe for Fiery Weapon, a popular twink enchant, and I've been buying mats for cheap on the AH and selling the scrolls for 100g a pop for about a year now. People who are twinking or leveling alts buy it up quick whenever I put some up. Of course you need to first farm the recipe to do this, and I was just lucky that it happened to drop for my alt when I was leveling her. I'd say it's worth the extra effort to farm, it's always been a consistent seller!
1. Truegold
Seriously, I've been selling truegold on the auction house since the day cataclysm came out. Ok, maybe not THE day, but let's say within 1 week of cataclysm launch, I was selling truegold and they've been selling like hotcakes since week 1.
With the cata launch came the new epic crafting recipes, which all required a hefty number of truegold. Back then truegold sold for ~1200 a pop when everyone was hungry for new epics and you could turn a really tidy profit! All it takes is some pyrite (expensive on the AH but can be mined with some persistence) and a few volatiles.
Now the price has dropped down to ~300g but it's still a steady seller. If you consider the cost of the reagents it's not much profit, but the beauty of it is that you can easily mine your own mats. I keep a couple of alts handy to mine the pyrite (or smelt the ore if I can buy it for cheap), farm volatile fires at my secret fishing spot in Hyjal, or grind some elementals for volatile air. I also keep another alt with maxed out alchemy who transmutes volatile life into other volatiles as I start to run low. It's a pretty smooth process and when you account for the occasional procs, I'd say I sell anywhere between 5-10 truegolds a week.
Cataclysm has been out for what, a year and a half now? If you assume that I've sold one truegold a day at 300g, that comes out to over 150,000g! Not bad at all. If you're just willing to do a little farming now and then, this is a real moneymaker.
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