Making extra gold in WoW isn’t hard. Follow a few basic tips and you should have enough to buy your epic flyer (and training) plus keep yourself in decent gear through the leveling grind. If you want to get to the point where Vial of the Sands is petty cash then it’s going to take a bit more work.
In the following pages we’ll be covering concepts and techniques rather than the “go here, farm that” type of stuff, which is boring anyway. Also, new expansions sometimes render much of that advice obsolete. The basics won’t change enough to care about.
With the “Instant Boost to Level XX” available (for a measly $60,) you’ll be able to get a head start on some of these ideas (such as looting and pillaging and dailies.) Since you’ll only have a smallish amount of gold on that character, to start, there will be some incentive to get to work. You will, for example, want to buy your fastest epic flying and mount, which will cost you around 10k total.
By the way… you can buy the WoW Tokens off the Auction House and buy that character boost with gold. Also anything from the in-game store. Also game time.
The Contents
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The Gold Pages |
Earning More Gold in WoW
Here’s the whole thing, boiled down to the minimum. You make gold by…
- Handing in quests: At high level, do ten dailies and that’s almost 200 gold.
- Looting gold, obviously, and selling stuff to the vendors. For example, you clean out a dungeon and sell it all off.
- Gathering a pile of “in demand” stuff, such as the new cloths, skins, herbs, etc. in any new expansion.
- Selling stuff to other players, either directly or through the Auction House (AH.) Cloth, crafting materials, “Bind on Equip” items that you find, pets, mounts, and so on.
- Buy items that are priced too low, from the AH, and resell them on the AH.
And that’s pretty much most of it.
If you’ve seen the gold stashes that some people have then you may have been quite impressed. A number of players have a lot of gold. Ok, a few bought some, or all, of their gold, but many of them got it through knowing the WoW market and taking advantage of it and just working at it for a long time. As an example, If you make 1k gold a day, from day 1, then it will take you a bit over 3 months to have 100k gold.
There used to be a cap of about 212k gold, but Blizzard fixed that in WoW 4.0. It’s now basically unlimited. 1000 days at 1k profit a day, buying nothing else.
According to a forum post from June ’20…
The current cap is 1,000,000,000 gold per account without storing anything in your mail. You can have 10 million gold on each character, as well as 10 million gold in those 50 characters’ guild banks (Thanks, Kalli!). On one account, you can have 50 characters, so 50 small x 20 million = 1 billion gold.
Buy Gold? Let’s Not, We’ll Earn It.
We don’t buy gold, at all. There’s no need.
If you want to then go for it. Once there was the risk of getting your account banned, but you do not have to any more. Well, you can, but you can also pay Blizzard $20 and buy a token. Pay some real money and get the in-game stuff, quick and easy. Earning it does take some time and effort.
Our feeling is that you can take the money you’d use to buy gold and buy a guide instead (or read this one.) You’ll get a lot more bang for your buck and make a lot more gold in the long run. Plus, we don’t like to have our accounts deleted. Kinda gutless, I know, but there you go. (see this post for more on the subject of buying gold.)
Botting is in the same area. Nice to autoplay the game and make a ton of gold. Until you get banned.
Also, you don’t need to have high level characters to make a lot of gold. While you won’t be grinding Legion stuff with your level 3 Warlock, you’ll be able to play the Auction House game as well as any. That’s why so many of the characters floating around the various AHs are level 1 or so. Some of them have way more gold than you do. Nothing wrong with the high level characters, but level 1 opens this up to newer players and means you don’t have to use your main characters for auction housing, unless you want to.
It’s your Auction House Alt, make a level 1 and run it over to the AH. Then all your other characters on that server can mail their stuff to the alt. You log into it later and sell the stuff.
How Much Can You Make?
So how much can be made with level 1 characters, starting from scratch, on a new server? No Max Levels, no farming, no dailies, no dungeons, no generous guilds, etc? Would 1,000 gold in 30 days, from scratch, be interesting? How about 5,000? Check out our 1,000 Gold in 30 Days post (it’s on archive.org.) The end total after that 30 days was well over 5,000 gold. From zero, new server, etc. No, there was no gold buying, either. Currently the character has the gold total shown in that pic above.
So on Jan 26, 2021, we have…
Note that that was not from grinding away hours per day. That was much less than one hour per day over many months. This frees up plenty of time to do stuff on your main characters. Also, gold in hand is much less, about 3.6 million. I like to buy stuff…
By the way, all these tips will work just fine in whatever the current expansion. As for the good ol’ farming techniques? All the farmers will be heading out to the new zones, which is why old world items (ores, skins, etc.) will continue to demand a good price. People will still want/need them and the only one gathering/collecting them is you. Sound like an opportunity?
So Let’s Get Started:
- The Auction House Alt – An Auction House alt, or Banker, is a character that stores your stuff for selling on the AH. This is always the first character that I set up on a new server. All of your characters on that server can send stuff to the alt for later posting to the AH. Here’s how it works…
- Getting the gold at Low level – You’re brand new to the game or to the server and don’t have a copper to your name, or you just don’t want to use your high levels for these tasks. Here’s how to get started.
- Basic Gold Gathering Tips – basic, but solid, tips that will make your gold accumulation in WoW easier. This is a good place to start for the person who just needs/wants enough “to get by.”
- Gathering for Gold – Some tips for gathering (herbs, ores, skins.) A nice, easy, reliable way to go
- Grinding – Grinding? Farming? Blech. Well, if that’s your thing then here are some tips.
- Networking – Ready to get more serious? Here’s how to set up a network of your own characters to make gold creation happen in a more efficient manner.
- Limited items – These are vendor sold items that are in limited supply or hard to find. Grab them and resell them for a profit. Here’s the scoop…
- Professions – How do you make a small fortune using the crafting professions? Start with a large one. Generally, the crafting professions are a great way to spend tons of gold, rather than earn it, but there are a few things you can do to defray costs and even earn some solid gold. (Most of that gold I have came from crafting.)
- Auctioneer – Auctioneer is a addon that will help you to play the Auction House Game far more effectively than otherwise.
- Addons – Some other addons that we’ve found to be useful for gold making.
- More Gold Tips – On the blog, our Gold category.
- Tycoon Addon – Our review of a pretty cool little widget. It scans the AH, looking for deals, marks your map for gathering/farming routes, and more.
Making it Even Easier
Ok, so you aren’t happy with enough gold to buy your mounts and green gear. You want to be able to buy those very nice purple items on the AH, dropping nearly 10k per item and not have to think about it (like I just did.) Sure, you can get those items raiding, if you can get into a decent raid guild. Or get your arena ranking high enough.
Or maybe you just want to make sure your alts and your favorite guildies/buddies don’t have to worry about gold and can just pay attention to other stuff. In which case you will easily be able to fund all your alts, your guildies, your repairs and consumables, your gems and enchants, and buy any nice purple gear that pops up on the AH, and carry it around on your mechano-hog…
There’s just one final question…
Do you want to be able to get your gold with low level characters, entirely within the Auction House (which means no farming, ever?) Or would you like to know which items are worth farming now? And would you like all of the research to be done automatically? For the answer to either question, go here now…
Now go and make some gold!