I’m feeling irritable because of all the ads I still see for selling WoW gold. I personally think it stinks. Maybe I’m selfish, but I think it devalues the game. I know it can cause inflation…in other words a weapon that would normally sell for 300g might now sell for 1000g because there are people that can easily get 1000g by ordering it. And it’s a little unfair that people who don’t have extra spending cash in Real Life aren’t on a level playing field with people who do…I mean, it’s a game. Your personal economics should be left at the login screen.

But here’s a practical thought.

If you really do have enough Real Life spending cash, why buy gold? It’s risking getting your account banned.

Besides, the professional guides that are for sale can be bought for LESS than the cost of 2000g…and between the tips on this site and those guides, you can learn how to make 2000g over and over again!

So, to my mind, it doesn’t make sense from a practical standpoint to buy gold.

The cheapest WoW gold you can get is the gold you make yourself!

If you must spend money to get gold, please consider one of the following before you actually pay for gold itself:

World Of Warcraft Gold Secrets

One of the most thorough gold-guides out there. He provides lots of useful bonus products, a private forum, etc. He offers a very good guarantee, so it’s worth trying.

World Of Warcraft WoW Valkors Gold Making Guide

A large guide, updated regularly. Lots of lists, and a lot of emphasis on the Burning Crusade.

Warcraft Riches

A new WoW Gold Guide! This guy has compiled a lot of the strategies from many of the other guides…also with a strong guarantee.

Ultimate World of Warcraft Guide

One of the things that I don’t care for with this guide is that he has some exploits. Most of the ‘hacks/cheats/exploits’ that people advertise are old ones that won’t work, or can get you banned. In addition to the gold guide (which is really well done, with tons of interactive links), he offers a list of CURRENT exploits that work. Not my thing, but if you’re interested, check it out.

WoW Wealth

This is a relatively new one. There are two great things about this guide: 1) it’s the most current one on the market and 2) it comes with some really cool Video Tutorials.

I must say… loving the fact that that epic gem market is still flourishing on my server.

I don’t do any dailies/farming/AH re listing at all anymore…. I just take my badges from weekly raiding and trade them in for epic gems and sell those.

Its still 300g for a Crimson Spinel… so with a kara run + regular MH/BT I can get 2 or 3 epic gems a week…. or 600-900g a week by doing absolutely nothing.

Thats enough for me to pay for raid consumables AND save up for my epic flyer (yes, no epic flyer yet).

So far I’ve gone from ~200g to 2400g since the epic gem vendor has been released.

So if you haven’t tried it yet, and you’re raiding regularly where the badges are, you can convert your badges to gems and sell the gems at the Auction House.

Is it just me, or have Netherweave cloth prices taken a dip lately?

The funny thing is that lately the price of Netherweave Cloth on the AH has been lower than the sale price of Heavy Netherweave Bandages.  A 20-stack of bandages sells to a vendor for 6g.  It takes 2 20-stacks of Netherweave Cloth to make the bandages.  Ergo, if you see Netherweave Cloth for sale under 3g per stack, snatch it up, and push ‘Make All’, and walk away.

If you can pick up the cloth for 2g 50s per 20-stack, you’re making 1g per full stack of bandages.  This isn’t huge amounts of gold, but hey…I don’t step over a dollar laying on the sidewalk if I see one!

Oh, sure, there’s changes to some recipes. And WOOT! for shortened cooldowns…from 24 to 20 hours. El Oh El. So helpful. Not.

2.4 was the major change, but 2.4.1 and 2.4.2 are minor tweaks with no real impact to the gold making effort.

You can check out the current patch notes here.

I did check out some of the bigger guides out there and the Gold Secrets one has been updated for 2.4 already. (Luke has been busy on the test realm!) So you can check that out if you’re looking for a big package like that.

If you want to know which Daily Quests to do, Curse.com has a good summary of all the dailies and lets you know which ones to do for gold and which ones take more time. I’m not 100% sure I agree with the guide yet though…it estimates 20-30 minutes for a whole pile of dailies. I’m not sure that all of them are available on all servers yet, and I would think that it depends on the class on how fast you can kill things. In addition, personally I haven’t gotten the knack of the new bombing run yet, and I’m not able to get it done in just one run (maybe because so many people are doing them at once…I can’t manage to tag 3 Sorcerers on one run). If you have to do the bombing run more than once it becomes less efficient from a gold-per-hour standpoint.

Good luck with the patch, your addons, etc., and I’ll be in touch!

UPDATE:  The dailies are nice, but the gold-per-hour rate still doesn’t come close to other methods listed here and in the guides.  You might make 250g in 1.5 hours doing dailies, but methods like using Cartographer for a mining route is still better.  The dailies are more interesting than ‘grinding’, and they don’t depend on the AH market.  So I leave it to you to decide how fast you want to make it, and how interesting you want your farming experience.

As hard as the old dungeons used to be, many of them can now be done with 2-3 players depending on class. So you head into the dungeon with one or two of your friends and split the profits later.

For example, you can go into Zul’Gurub and summon Gahz’ranka. (Look him up in Thottbot if you don’t know who he is or how to summon him). He drops the Tome: Polymorph Turtle. Not all mages have this ability, and per WoWEcon.com it averages 1300g these days. Some servers are getting as much as 2000 g!

So if you’re looking for something DIFFERENT to do for gold…you might try killing Gahz’ranka and selling the Turtle Tome and splitting the profit with your buddies.

(Keep in mind, the drop rate isn’t 100%, and ZG has a 3-day reset timeframe, but it’s still fun!)

First, there are changes to Enchanting that will allow Void Crystals to be converted to 2 Large Prismatic Shards. I’m not sure yet how that will impact the market, but I’m willing to bet that the LPS price will drop dramatically, depending on your server. I know, for example, on raiding servers that the number of Void Crystals sitting in the guild banks is pretty high, with nothing to do with them. So LPSs won’t be quite as rare.

Other changes include raising the cap of Daily Quests from 10 to 25 per day. And there will be new daily quests. There will be a new Daily Fishing Quest, as well as some new dailies on Sunwell Isle. As I learn of which are the most efficient, fastest, easiest, etc., you can be sure I’ll post the info here.

Edit (Mar 10) — Latest patch notes denote that Jewelcrafters will be able to combine green gems into a random blue gem. The exact wording is:

Jewelcrafting

• • A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.

So…hang onto your green gems for now. They sell for next to nothing these days, and I’m betting the price will go up slightly since they will finally become worth something.

Edit: You may want to start collecting ‘Wind Scales’.  Check out Wowhead to see who drops them.  Used in many of the recipes post-2.4.

Edit: Remember to use Thottbot.com’s ‘Test’  site…instead of ‘Live’…to identify new and upcoming items, and items that might be in demand right after the patch.

The general concept is to provide one-stop for your server where you can post ads for your wares, search for buyers, search for sellers, etc. For example, if you’re an Alchemist, you might advertise that you’re looking for certain herbs on a consistent basis, and are willing to pay C.O.D. for them. That keeps you supplied, keeps your cost fixed, and avoids the Auction House and its fees.

It’s an interesting concept that I’ve heard discussed from several sources as being needed. Something beyond the Trade channel in-game.

It’s basically setup like a forum…you register, then you make posts in your Server (Realm) forum. And you can search easily, just like a normal forum.

It is in the early stages of release, so there’s not a lot of users yet. Hopefully readers here will go register there and increasing the user base…the more that use it, the more useful it becomes, but somebody has to be the first signups. Gold-making experts like you make the most sense!

Couple of other thoughts: It’s free. It’s got a built in feedback tool (called Karma), which acts like eBay feedback, which can help avoid scams and build reputation. But one of the things that I like is that by doing this you can advertise across factions…let someone on the Alliance side know what epic drop your Horde toon has, and double your potential customer base!

Go to http://www.WarcraftTrade.com to check it out and learn more about it.

If you are sitting at a Neutral Auction House with Bottom Scanner running, you will see the item as soon as it’s listed and buy it at the discount right away.

Here are some thoughts about this tactic:

1. You have to be paying attention to your toon. Any time you are online doing the same action for long periods of time, a GM might contact you to see if you respond. Cheaters that use ‘bots’ (programs that make their toon act), get caught like this and have their accounts banned. So just make sure that even though you’re watching a movie listening for BottomScanner to go ‘ding’, you keep an eye on your chat log from time to time.

2. You may want to have an alt toon do this for you, considering that you will become HATED by whomever was trying to move that item. True, they took the risk by putting it up on the Auction House so cheaply, but with some of the immature players out there, logic will not prevail. If you sniped something with your main toon, you may be subject to some griefing by the player who lost their item.

3. It’s not illegal or unethical. You’re not violating any rules of the game. True, it’s not very NICE to take advantage of someone like this, but they took the risk by putting it up on the Neutral AH.

Anyway, it’s not something I would do all the time, but if you find yourself in a situation where you can’t really play your toon but you can pay attention to it enough to listen for the ‘ding’ and avoid being suspected of botting, you could find some really good deals.

However, in combination with Cartographer, Herb/Mining becomes more viable.

Aside from the super-nice routing feature (see the other post on that!), it also displays spawn points on your mini-map. You can filter which spawn points you want to see, and you can scale how big they appear on the mini-map. The way it works is that when they are outside of the range that you could detect it, the mini-map displays an icon that represents the specific herb/ore. Once it’s in range, it turns into an empty circle, IF you are detecting that type of spawn…in other words if you have Find Herbs on, ore spawn points will always display the ore pictures, but herb pictures will turn into empty circles when you’re in range to detect the yellow dot. If you see empty circles, and they stay empty for a split second, then you know that nothing is there and you can move on.

So here’s what I do now (now that I dropped Tailoring and re-leveled Herbalism to go with my mining)…

I have a macro:

/castsequence Find Herbs, Find Minerals

I have that bound to a key. Clicking that key will toggle tracking herbs and ore every time I click it. (There is a global cooldown of 1 second, but that’s ok.)

Next, I setup my route to track the most-valuable herb and the most-valuable ore in a given zone. For example, in Shadowmoon Valley, I make a route for Nightmare Vine and Adamantite Ore. This path will cover most of the map. If I miss a few spawnpoints of Felweed or Fel Iron Ore, I’ll live. The route will go near enough to many of them anyway for me to track them.

As I’m flying around following the route, I look on my minimap to see what kind of spawn points are around. Then I hit my macro key to switch the tracking back and forth between ore and herbs. But because of Cartographer I know WHICH one I should be tracking. For example, if there’s a stretch of route that has herbs and no ore, I can tell because of what is being displayed in the minimap, and I don’t need to switch. If I’m coming to a cluster of spawn points that has both, I’ll keep one on (Herbs, for example), and when I enter that cluster, the herbs turn to circles…THEN I’ll click the macro and switch to Ore, and check those empty circles.

It’s tough to describe, but if you have either Herbalism or Mining and use Cartographer you’ll see what I mean.

If you need help getting your Herbalism or Mining profession up to speed quickly, probably the best guide I’ve seen for speed leveling is Penn’s.

I’m not going to go into ALL the specifics because I don’t want you to get your account banned. The general idea is that you give all of your gold to a friend to hang on to, then immediately report that your account has been hacked. After getting your account ‘restored’, including the gold you had, you have your friend give the gold back.

This cheat is NOT a good idea for several reasons. First, it’s unethical. You’re lying to Blizzard about your account. If you need to lie in order to get more make-believe gold for your make-believe character…well, let’s just say that reflects poorly on your parents.

Many folks might not care about lying, so let’s mention this: Blizzard ain’t stupid. They can track who you gave the gold to, when you did it, etc. They are well aware of this ‘dupe cheat’, and have the logs of your activity to know what you did. After all…they can manage to get your stuff back to the state before the alleged hack. Blizzard may decide to ban you AND your friend’s account.

It’s just not worth it.

So I recommend avoiding any gold-guides that advertise having the ‘gold-dupe’ cheat.

3x[Aquamarine] (1.5g each, 4.5g total on my server)
4x[Flask of Mojo] (25s each, 1g total on my server)

Yields an [Aquamarine Signet] which DEs into [Small Radiant Shard]. Total mat cost runs around 5.5g, give or take. Small Radiants seem to be running around 9-10g on my server. If you buy in bulk, and sell when the AH is empty, 5g profit isn’t hard. Also, since Small Radiants are used in Fiery enchants, the volume isn’t huge, but people are using them every day.

If that doesn’t work for your server, just keep an eye out for crappy Signets that are cheap so you can snatch them up and get them DE’d.

Step One: Find out what time the raids are. Go to www.wowjutsu.com and find the ranking for the top raiding guilds for your server. Either ask a member or visit their guild websites to find out what their raid schedule is. Calculate the overlap of the top 10 raiding guilds’ schedules. Let’s assume that it’s 8PM for your time zone.

Step Two: List typical raid consumables 30-45 minutes prior to that raid time. Double-check to see if I’m not wrong, but in that window (and immediately after that raid time) there is a shortage of the important raid consumables. So either gather them up at other times, or even clear them out right then and there and relist them at a premium! You’d be amazed what people will pay for the last flask or the last bit of oil, etc.

Note: only list them for the shortest window possible to save on your listing fees. The idea is that these products will move quickly. Also, don’t flood the market…only list a few of each item.

Test it out and see if these items not only sell, but sell well above the price they normally go for!

Low levels should never expect to make gold by killing mobs. But that’s not the best way to make gold. Low level mobs drop low amounts of cash and lower value items. Why? Because of the GPH rate! High-level players could go to low-level areas and blitz. So Blizzard has to keep the high-speed drop rate down in line with the GPH rate of other high-level areas.

Also, until level 300-375 in a crafting profession, that profession will not be very profitable. The reason for this is that high-level players with lots of gold sometimes ‘power-level’ a new profession. In other words, they may drop skinning and take up alchemy. They buy all the mats needed to level the profession to 300 from the AH, make tons of potions to level it up, and dump them on the AH. They don’t care about making money on the potions…they just want to get back a little money. So they sell the potions for less than a low-level player could even make the potion in the first place. It drives me crazy that people sell crafted items for a loss, but they do. This makes it hard for lower-level players to profit with professions.

Having said all that, low-level players CAN make gold, and they can use the best method for making gold. They can still play the auction house. Here’s why: Blizzard is NOT in charge of what people are willing to pay. Someone will always be in a hurry to make a little money and sell an item cheap, but fast. Someone else might be willing to pay above the normal price because they want the item RIGHT NOW!

I recently talked to a player who was a very low level. They had only been playing WoW for a couple of weeks. After reading the guide, they sold the herbs that were sitting in their bank, and made 2g over night. Even a level 5 with 2g can start turning that into more, without killing mobs or traveling around. Recently I bought an enchanting recipe (Frost Protection on Shield)…I paid 3g for it and sold it for 53g! Can you imagine a level 10 with 53g! It CAN happen…just not in the way that people usually think.

FACT #5 - Low levels CAN make gold by playing the AH much faster than by any other method.

There is something that can slow down the dailies: competition. You’re trying to bomb eggs in Skettis, banish demons in Ogri’La, or kill Ravagers in Nethwering, and so is everyone else.

So group up! Don’t be shy! Any Daily that involves a ‘kill count’ (including ‘killing’ eggs or cannonballs by bombing them) can be done in a party, with credit going to everyone in the party! Even wrangling rays is something that everyone gets credit for.

If you compete, you’ll get frustrated, and you’ll be taking enough time to do the quest that it reduces the gold-making efficiency. Especially if you’re a low-dps class, or don’t have your epic mount.

Create the following macro and bind it to a place where you can get to it easily:

/invite target
/script SendChatMessage(”Would you like to group up so we aren’t competing? We can share the count.”,”WHISPER”,”common”,UnitName(”target”));

If you are doing one of you quests and you see someone of the same faction, target them and hit this macro.