Welcome to Ten Ton Hammer’s Ultimate Gold Making Guide for World of Warcraft. Here you’ll find everything you need to know to farm gold in World of Warcraft without the need to buy it, use any kind of cheat, or otherwise break the Terms of Service. Our Gold Making Guide is all about earning gold through questing, production professions, the auction house, and other locations in the game so that you can earn as much gold as possible in the least amount of time.

This guide is a work in progress, everything that's striked out is on its way currently! Check back for frequent updates.

  1. Chapter 1a: Getting Started
  2. Chapter 1b: AddOns You Need
  3. Chapter 2: Choose Your Professions
  4. Chapter 3: The Top 25 Daily Quests
  5. Chapter 4: Gold through Gathering
  6. Chapter 5: Gold through Production & Speculation

The Complete Guide to Making Gold

Part I: Getting Started

Making gold in World of Warcraft is very similar to making money in the real world. There are a few basic paths that you can take, each is very different and relies on your experience and the resources available to you.

I. Gold through Questing: The most basic of all gold making techniques. Players complete up to 25 daily quests for rewards ranging from 13 to 30 gold plus some additional goodies. This gold making technique is the backbone of the WoW economy and is where all those huge amounts of gold out there 'come from.' You can make about 400 gold per day doing this, but it requires a substantial amount of time.

II. Gold through Gathering: Gathering raw materials (typically herbs or metal ore) requires a few things to be effective. You need a profession like herbalism or mining that is sufficiently high level to gather profitable raw materials, and you really need epic flying and an appropriate mount to make it efficient. This method of gold making can be tedious as it basically involves flying a pattern around a zone for hours on end collecting resources, but it can be very profitable. An herbalist in Scholazar Basin on a server like Laughing Skull can rake in upwards of 500g per hour.

III. Gold through Production: Producers are the real kingpins of the WoW economy. These are players with very high skill levels in professions like Jewelcrafting, Inscription, and Enchanting. These players typically rely on other players to gather their raw materials for them which they purchase and use to create items that they sell for a significant mark up. The sky is the limit for this kind of gold making, and as such this is probably the most lucrative method.

IV. Gold through Speculation: Speculators are the people that everyone loves to hate. These are the players scanning the auction house many times a day for items that they believe are underpriced. Speculators rely on their knowledge of item prices to determine which items can be bought and re-listed for a profit. Speculators also take advantage of knowledge of future demand such as buying up items used in a world event quest line right before that event happens or, to give an example, buying up all the cheap Frozen Orbs as soon as patch 3.3.3 was announced (which caused them to nearly quadruple in value). Speculators need to have a significant pool of cash to work with and not be afraid of sitting on an expensive item for a while until the right buyer comes along.

No matter which path you choose you're going to need a few things to help you on your way. You are going to have to Mod Up!

Critical Addons:

Auctionator: This mod allows you advanced functionality on the Auction House that will let you act quickly, decisively, and efficiently. Auctionator allows you to buy huge amounts of materials quickly as well as easily determine the best priced items. It also assists you in selling by having convenient pre-set settings for auction duration, undercutting, and number of items simultaneously listed.

Auctionator is must-have mod for anyone pursuing gold through Gathering, Producing, or Speculation and it has the additional benefit (unlike Auctioneer) of being light weight, using only a couple megabytes of memory, so it won't slow down your gameplay.

 

MoneyFu: One of many gold monitoring mods, MoneyFu is my personal favorite. It is an optional part of the FuBar addon and monitors your total gold across all your characters including your incoming and outgoing gold. MoneyFu will tell you how much gold you are making or losing per hour on a daily and weekly basis. Often when players are doing a high volume of trades or crafting they lose track of whether they are even making or losing money because they are moving so many items. This mod will help you to keep everything in perspective and show you exactly what's up with your finances.

 

Gatherer: If you are making gold through gathering then gatherer is a must have. Gatherer remembers the location of every resource node you have ever gathered or even seen. This is an invaluable tool because resources spawn in static locations so you'll always know where to go and which paths to take if you are trying to farm a zone. Why fly randomly in circles when you can follow paths that will get you straight to exactly what you want to gather?

Once you're modded up you need to ask yourself a few questions. First off, how much gold do you have? If you're a fresh level 80 or not 80 yet then it's likely that you are pretty much broke between buying gear and new skills. If you're in this situation then consider getting into daily quests immediately. Sometimes you have to spend gold to make gold, and you will absolutely need to rush to epic Northrend flying immediately if you're considering Questing or Gathering because your gold per hour will nearly double with that addition.

At this point it's also important to consider your professions. Many players level with professions that interest them or fit the flavor of their playstyle. Unfortunately, that ends the second that you start looking at making serious gold. Regardless of how you begin your gold making journey, you'll eventually need to develop some professions, so best to get started early. Next we'll need to take a basic look at the professions and what they can do for you.

Chapter 2: Choose Your Professions.


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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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