Basic Gold Making Guide.

Gold, Glorious Gold!

OK, so thanks for looking at my guide! I’m fed up of looking on this site and seeing, ‘make 300G per hour! Be a rogue and stealth to bosses! For loot which *may not drop*. You only need to be level 80 and have 50,000hp!‘. I admit it, I exaggerated, but you know what I mean.

Alright, so let’s get the show on the road!

Level 1.

Stop! Don’t log in. Instead, create another character. This will be a Bank Alt., or a ‘mule’. This guy will store your gold to stop you spending it, and sell everything on the AH for you. Everything.

OK, so first – add-ons. You *need*, pretty much, Auctioneer. It’s a great add on – the first time you use it, you click ‘scan’ which will come up at the bottom of the AH pane. (On your mule, remember. The first thing you do.)

You then, when you auction something, click the ‘post’ tab, not the usual ‘auction’ tab. Drag and drop and *boom*, that’s pretty much sold for you.

Here’s a list of the most common things to sell, for good money;

Ores/Bars
Skins from skinning
Herbs
Cloth
Good armor – please don’t auction that Plate armor with spirit. Don’t waste the time, in my opinion it isn’t worth it. Here’s what classifies as ‘good armor’;

** Plate – Strength, Stamina and later defense/hit are good.

** Mail – Pre 40, same as above. After 40, Agility, Intellect and Stamina for Hunters/DPS shamans, and Intellect, some spirit maybe (and later things like Spell power, and spell crit.)

**Leather – most things will sell. Be careful of bad mixes though – Agility and spirit, for example.

**Cloth – Whatever. Really, there is little that won’t sell, and what doesn’t may well depend on your server.

Reagents for professions is the final thing I can think of. So remember all those Small Eggs you vendored for 10 silver? Yeah they might be going for a gold a stack of 20. And remember all those chunks of boar meat? Well, on my server, that’s 3G for 10 right there.

So that should be the AH covered right there. At level one (or RIGHT NOW if you haven’t done so already – like a fool!) take a mule into a city, and scan the AH. First part, finished!

Level 5

Well done, you made level 5 and you’ll soon be in your main town. Don’t stop there, go to the city first. Pick up Mining and buy a Pick, and pick up Skinning and buy a knife. You’ll find a vendor along with your trainer for these, or any Trade Goods Merchant will do.

This bit is really simple, but really important. I’m going to make it nice and big, because if you don’t do this, you don’t make as much gold. By a long way. (Pardon the patronising undertone, but some people may well ignore this.)

SKIN EVERYTHING, AND MINE EVERYTHING. SEND IT TO YOUR MULE, POST AND PROFIT.

You really have no idea how much money this will make, or at least I assume you don’t. On most servers, Copper Ore sells for about 1G for 20, with things like Thorium often hitting as much as 20G. You’ll be mining a *lot* of this, and it all stacks up. The same goes for skinning, and the later-leathers in the game. Even the earliest leathers aren’t to be snuffed, mind.

While Questing

While questing, these rules apply;

1) Take the quest reward with the highest sell-to-vendor price.

You’d be suprised how much difference this will make in the long run. If you aren’t using anything, your Auctioneer addon will tell you the difference in vendor prices.

2) Kill everything in sight.

Pretty obvious. Killing = money, loot and sometimes skins which also = PROFIT.

3) Always mine.

Don’t be afraid to take a large detour for one ‘measly vein’. There will often be enemies to kill to get to it, which give loot and money or skin, and you will profit also from the ores from the node.

4) Sell anything white!

Don’t get rid of that Egg. No, that meat sells! Yes, people actually need Spider’s Legs these days. Send anything white to your mule. Even one silver extra is… well, one silver extra.

Finished Questing?

No, you haven’t. Well done, you’ve hit level 80. You’re rich, beyond your wildest dreams! But wait. Don’t you want to be… richer? Yeah, I thought so. You want a Mammoth, don’t you? It’s OK, they only cost 16,000 gold.

Alright, so let’s go over the best ways of making gold. I’ll cover, in turn, the Auction House, and Dailies .

The Auction House

OK, so by level 80 you’re familiar with the place. Hell, maybe you’re sick of the sight of it, and sick of waiting for that damn AH scan to complete! But this is where the real money is made – with risk. Playing the Auction House. (Obviously you can do this from the get go, but I’d advise leveling first – you become familiar with prices on the AH, what sells and what doesn’t etc)

In essence, playing the Auction house is just like playing the stock market. You can monopolize, you can buy low sell high, and you can go broke very, very quickly.

So here’s how it works.

1)Knowing what sells

Simple, no? But I’ve wasted a *lot* of gold in my time because I pay 25G to post a rare weapon… and get “Auction Expired:…” You don’t want this. Really. At all. So, have a look around. If there are one hundred weapons of your type – don’t sell them. Maybe try and find an enchanter to DE for them and sell the results. Only one? Risky, but might sell.(After all – if there’s only one, maybe it’s not in popular demand?) What you want is about 3-4 of your chosen item on the AH, every day. This means they sell – what idiot puts a weapon on the AH, or some armor, that hasn’t sold in one week? Exactly.

EXCEPTION TO THE RULE

– Stackable trade items. Ore, cloths, herbs, everything like that – nearly always sell. But you’ve been doing this since level 1, right?

2) Using auctioneer right!

This is cool, you probably have only ever used Auctioneer to scan and sell. However, it has another function: to search. Yeah, it searches the AH for deals that are going lower than the listing price, and shows them to you! Awesome, huh? Well, be careful. There aare things that can alter the prices and leave you a few bob short.
*Only one item on the AH. People are used to seeing it at low prices, and still it hasn’t sold? So why’s it going to sell when you repost it even higher?
*Millions of items! So of course, you’re going to get some super low prices. However, here-s what’ll happen – You’ll buy it, and repost it. Then some economy-ruiner will come along, and post his same item, lower than yours. So yours doesn’t sell. Don’t be bitter, you’ve been doing it for 80 levels.
*Sometimes, an item will be so rare, that Auctioneer has only seen one. And that was stupidly priced. So 1000g for your rubbish sword doesn’t seem quite so bad to the programme!

3)Monopoly time!

OK, so it starts off you pass go, and collect 200 points. You then have to… what? Oh, not that kind of monopoly? Yessir, right away.

OK, so monopolies. These can be tricky to pull off, and require a hefty amount of gold – but if you do pull them off, you’re rich. Richer than your wildest dreams! Or, broke. When it doesn’t work.

So, the basic idea. Buy everything. Relist it, at your price. You own that market now.

Ahh, you’re seeing the holes aren’t you? ‘I don’t have enough gold!’ ‘People will undercut me!’

Relax, I said it would be risky! Yeah people will undercut you, but if you monopolize something like Copper ore, for example, or Thorium, of Frostweave cloth – it will always sell. I can personally almost guarantee it!

OK, so that’s my limited knowledge of the auction house covered. I won’t lie, I don’t spend a lot of time in there, but I know a lot about it because I spend a lot of my time in game actually alt-tabbing and reading about WoW. or Facebook… (I play a Paladin, c’mon….).

What do we all love, when we get to 80, hmm?? Yeah, that’s right…

Dailies!

I’ve thought quite a lot about what I could do here. I mean, I could do a guide, with 25 Dailies which takes a little under 2 hours, but that would be quite long. I could give you a link to a dalies guide but hell, they charge. And I’m against that. So what could I do? And then I decided, what the hell. I’ll just tell you about the best dailies and a vague idea of which order to do them in, and why! Hope you’re happy. If not, you owe me £30.

Just kidding.

It’s 40.

1) Which areas are best for dailies?

Icecrown. Great money, easy dailies.
Dragonblight/Borean Tundra. Everyone want Wyrmrest Accord Rep! Whether you’re a Tank or a DPS, or whatever!

OK, so here we are. Start off in Storm Peaks, and do your Overstock daily. Gets you 13G, after all.

Now, fly to Borean Tundra. You want to do Drake Hunt, and hand in – then head up to above the nexus and do Aces High (Yes! Maiden rules 😉 )

OK, brilliant. Now fly to Wyrmrest Temple, and nail out your Daily there. Do it fast, and who knows what you’ll get 😀

Now go and do your Argent Tournemant dailies – these are important, if you do nothing else all year round, do these! Just for the rewards you can get, and with the new patch it’s even better!

((HINTHINT >> Download Lightheaded. It links comments from WoWhead into your questlog – you’ll never get lost on a quest again. << HINTHINT))

Now, this might sound daft. But I did say I was vague! Do your Icecrown dailies! (This is my problem – I haven’t quite finished the zone yet so I’m unsure as to where all the dailies are!)

With Lightheaded you’ll do them quickly, and over the weeks will plan your own ‘speed route‘. safe to say, I’d do the Argent Vanguard first, and then do the ones aboard the Skybreaker. Perhaps they stack with others in the zone, I don’t know.

Fin.

OK, so I think that’s it. I’m sure however there is a lot left to cover, and I’ll get some comments telling me thus, so expect to see this guide expanded over the coming days until it really is, the only guide you’ll ever need!