Intro

OK, I seem to be one of those guys on World of Warcraft that always has money and everyone is always asking me for some of it. If they are not asking me for money other players are asking me how I get all that gold. This is a rambling response to all those people with all my secrets (if you can call them that) revealed. Take from it what you can, and do with it what you will.

The first secret to making a lot of WoW gold is simple: patience. There is no real easy way to make money without putting in time. Sure you will see some people talk about playing the Auction House relentlessly, but there are so many people doing that it is hard to find the quick turn over’s that would make it worth while, even using an addon like Auctioneer. That really leaves doing dungeons (and questing), manufacturing and farming.

Dungeon Running for Cash

Have you ever tried running chain heroics for badges? You know what I mean, you got a group together and did every dungeon in Northrend for the badges to get the armor you needed. Remember how boring that was, remember how much gold you spent on repairs? Did you make any gold at it at all? If you did make some gold you made very little and it took an awfully long time. Even with the new random dungeon tool with the badge rewards and the gold rewards, if you get killed even once then you can kiss all profit goodbye. If you are looking to earn badges, great and probably well worth it; but if your aim is to make some cash, this is not the way. And I have not even talked about the cost of buff food or battle and guardian elixirs.

However there is one option that does make sense to some extent… Level 80 daily quests. You can do 25 daily quests and each gets you about 13g or more. In addition there is the cash you make looting and some include badges or seals. If you are good you can do it all in about 2 hours. Total it up… about 325g and up 10 Crusader Champions Seals. (After you buy everything you need with the seals, you can keep buying pets and resell them for good cash on the AH. Also you can buy heirlooms that benefit your other character and this is important.) This is not bad gold per hour when all is said and done and most players if they are not greedy can easily live on this gold to play comfortably.

Manufacturing for Money

Personally I find manufacturing dull and in some cases really risky. If you are buying the materials you need to create product you have to balance the price of all materials and time against what you can actually sell the products for. That sounds easy, but when it comes right down to it unless there is a very brisk market for what you are selling you could find yourself sitting on a whole lot of product without any buyers. Oops. Here is an example: Let’s say you are an Alchemist with a specialty of Elixirs, your skill is at 450, and you have decided to make Flasks of the Frost Wyrm for resell. If you are buying the mats you are paying about 60g for a Frost Lotus, 4g for 5 Lichbloom, 8g for 5 Ice Thorn and 1g for the vial. This produces on average 2.5 elixirs (remember the Elixir Mastery proc).  So lets add it all up: Total Cost for 2.5 doses is 72g with a net cost of 28g / 80s (your mileage may vary).

As a net cost before marketing that is not bad under optimum conditions. The average sell price is about 35g. The auction house takes a cut of that of course (5%) so the price new net is 33g / 25s. Total gold made on one dose … … 4g / 45s. So if we make 100 of them we can make 445g, IF we can sell them all, IF we don’t have to repost them (loosing the initial deposit to the AH). It is not hard to see where a bad couple of days could wipe out the 445g profit just to AH costs and here is the kicker… you WILL have competition and you WILL be undercut sometimes. Can you afford to be undercut too often? Kicker number two; consider the Herbalist/Alchemist profession character that can undercut you all day (more on this later). Obviously making money directly off the AH is tricky and full of risk.

The other option in manufacturing is the JIT (Just In Time) method where you make items to suit demand and in very small quantities. This approach has the advantage of minimizing loss while retaining raw mats for other products. What does not work in this case is the “LFW Tailor” where you will get people asking and trying to undercut prices on the AH. This is an awful way to make cash unless you really are desperate, although if the tips are good you could do ok, but it is a real grind and you really have to have a complete repertoire of patterns and the most up to date one as well. In any case DO NOT TAKE ORDERS UNLESS THEY ARE PREPAID.

There are many ways of making money with manufacturing but they can become more time consuming than you think. Work your strategy out for you; this is not my idea of making money in the amounts I like.