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Gathering your Way to More Gold.
Earning gold in the World of Warcraft isn’t that big a deal.
It’s pretty easy really. You can start with zip, at level 1,
and by the time you hit level 60 be able to spend the gold to buy nice
mounts and stuff. By 85 you should be doing just fine.
Gathering is nice. You don't have to do much with
the auction house, you don't have to do much research, all you do is
go to some area and just gather stuff for awhile. Then you pack it
up, ship it off to your bank alt, and go back to PvP or whatever.
Heck, if the queues are long you can mix your gathering with the battlegrounds
PvP or dungeoning. Or even waiting for your guild to get its act together
and get started with that raid.
Many of the crafting skills use the raw materials that you will be
gathering.
- Skins are mainly for leatherworking, but other crafts sometimes
have use for them.
- Ores are for engineers, blacksmiths, and jewelcrafters.
- Herbs are
for alchemists and scribes (Inscription.)
The easiest way to get stuff to sell is with those gathering skills:
mining, skinning, and herbalism. Pick any two, but I suggest mining
and skinning. You’ll be fighting many many beasts, so you might
as well skin them, and ore generally sells better than herbs. Actually,
with Cataclysm, herbs are selling for decent prices, so herbalism
works.
Of your secondary professional skills, Fishing and Cooking can also add to your cash flow. Skip the other professional skills for now. They have a lot of value, but can be very expensive to level up. We want to earn gold here, not spend it (yet.)
Mining – This is the most reliable gathering skill in terms of the prices that you can get and the demand for the ore. Start in your low level areas and mine copper till you skill hits 65. All ores that you dig up will sell quite nicely on the auction house. Keep them until you have a stack of 20, then sell the stack. Higher level ores will require a higher level skill. The next ore is tin and it requires a skill of 65.
By the time you’re mining tin you will have collected and sold
several stacks of copper and you should have a nice little gold stash.
You'll simply repeat the procedure until you're mining the top level
ores. Keep an eye on which ores are selling for a price that's worth
your time. Then gather more of that ore.
Herbalism – aka Flower Picking is much the
same as mining in that you’re going to gather stacks of 20 herbs
and then sell them. Get your skill up as high as you can before moving
on to the higher level stuff. On some servers herbs sell well at high
process, others not so much. Herb prices have risen since Cataclysm.
Skinning – All the skins sell well, even the
scraps, but they might not sell for very much at times. Sometimes there
are just too many people skinning, so the supply pushes the prices
down. Still, most skins sell very reliably. Keep an eye on the prices,
they'll vary wildly.
Fishing – Any fish you catch will sell, especially if there’s a cooking recipe for it, though the prices might be pretty low. Some though, such as Oily Blackmouth, are required for other professions, such as Alchemy, and so sell for several gold per stack.
Cooking – Foods restore health and some restore mana and some will actually buff certain stats, such as Stamina. Any of the foods that provide buffs will sell, some very well, and the ingredients can all be gathered, some of them with the fishing skill.
The advantage, of course, to gathering for gold, is that you’re
not spending money to buy (and then resell) items. You’re also
not spending tons of gold to buy up a crafting skill. It's nice, easy,
reliable, and will keep in you gold if you keep working at it.
There are other ways to make gold, some faster than the above, but
the gathering skills will generate enough gold to keep you in decent
items all the way to the level cap. Work your gathering skills with
a little extra loot grinding and you’ll have your Epic Flying
Mount soon enough.
Obviously higher level have an edge here, but even low levels can
gather enough stuff to keep themselves well equipped.
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