WoW gold farming guide - greed is good edition

In this guide we will be looking thoroughly on various methods of gold farming in World of Warcraft. After reading this, you should possess a deep understanding and knowledge in gold making necessary to make an informed decision regarding your Warcraft future. This guide is suited for all sorts of players, so don’t worry if you are new to this online video game - we will introduce you to the World of Warcraft farming step by step. No matter if you play since the Vanilla WoW, or you started with patch 8.1.5 - you'll kill the Auction House from these tips. Leave quests to complete behind, get to the farming right away.

Wow gold farming Fundamentals

Farming in WoW is a player activity focused on efficient accumulation of wealth, be it raw gold or valuable gear, reputation on any other sort of value bearing object). "Efficient" means maximum possible amount in minimum possible time, usually measured as amount per hour. In more unorthodox types of farming (in our case, that would be profiting off WoW Auction House) various measures of time are used, mostly weeks. In the modern, retail World of Warcraft currently in a BfA expansion farming is far easier than it was in WoW Classic. With phase content progression, it could take weeks if not months to farm for the epic mount at lvl 40. 

That said, in WoW we encounter myriad different ways of farming, from mundane kill grinding, through sophisticated game mechanics abuse to goblining (which stands for playing on Auction House). In due time, we are going to learn about every single one of them, the tradeoff, pros, efficiency and most importantly - fun potential.  

wow gold Farming glossary

Bank alt - a player characters used for banking activities exclusively.

Barking - continuous advertisement of one’s WoW Auction House postings via trade chat or other means

Carry - running other players through an instance or other kind of content, usually as a service for gold

Dumping - trying to sell huge amounts of goods either via dumping it in huge quantities or via trade chat, usually correlated with an expected negative change of market

Flipping - your usual, straightforward, buying low and selling high, making a profit in the process

Gold cap - that’s a maximum gold one WoW character can carry. It’s exactly 9999999g 99s 99c

GPH - gold per hour

Server Hopping - changing WoW realm utilizing shard infrastructure

MV - Market Value, current item value

Shuffling - more or less complex process of acquiring raw materials in order to refine them for profit. It can be done in several ways either by farming mats, turning them into items like bracers and then disenchanting them for resources worth more than a combined value of those used to its creation or in some cases just straight up buying equipment off WoW Auction House and disenchanting it for profit .

TSM - TradeSkillMaster; a great addon for achieving money profit. It's one of these addons tracking your auctions, sniping deals, and generally making your life on Auction House far easier

TUJ - The Undermine Journal, WoW Auction House tracking website, sporting many useful tools like charts, heat maps, and deal listings. It should be on your addons list as well.

Now you possess a much-needed glossary to understand a little what you need to know about gold making and farming quest. 

Basic wow gold farming methods

Like we’ve mentioned earlier, there are several different approaches to efficient gold making. All of them viable, all of them worthwhile and profitable, all of them having pros and cons. Committing to one way or the other doesn’t bear any consequences. Although it would be wise to consider what kind of player are you. Would you rather chill out with guildies on discord while going for a kill, or maybe you are lone ranger with penchant for meditation? As long as you are going to obtain your gold fairly and with accordance to game rules you will find something for yourself here. Your faction doesn't matter. These ways apply to both Alliance and Horde.

Okay, so for those looking to cool off after hard day of work, we’ve got plenty of things to do - ore and herb collecting, skinning, fishing, raw gold farming, legacy instances running, transmutations, and potion brewing.

If you are looking for less single player experience there are witty and best gold farming spots 2x4 waiting for you. What’s 2x4, you ask? Imagine two groups, say group A and group B, both consisting of four players (hence 2x4 handle), scoring kills in zone with particularly high respawns rates, sometimes even with mobs spawning immediately after clearing the whole pack. When it comes to collecting the loot off dead mobs we know that exactly five players can loot one carcass. Thus, a player from group A loots body splitting loot among his 4-man group, using first four slots. Then group B player picks up the stuff splitting it to the rest of the team effectively bypassing 5-man hard limit. 

2x4 setup allows players to quickly mow through mobs, share loot, farming rare and sought after gear like various equipment slots, mounts, battle pets (like Twilight pet), transmog items, recipes, and raw or DE materials to craft with or sell on Auction House. It takes very little effort to do it efficiently. Farmers usually tend to sell it unless there is market surge for something at the moment.

Now let's talk about the best ways to make gold in WoW.

Solo gold farming in WoW

Lone gold farmers may share a feeling of being overwhelmed at first by a multitude of possibilities but bear in mind that legacy transmog runs excluded you are limited by your ability to blast through surrounding enemies which may be challenging at first but worth the price. Remember thou that repair costs stack up and will impact your GPH coefficient, and it may seem insignificant as first you really want to max out your earnings before you feel blood and sweat dripping off your brain. 

That said - let’s start with the easiest solo farming route, the Living Steel Transmutation Farm.

Harmonious Farmer

What you will need is a 90lvl+ character. The higher the better since we are going to visit Pandaria so you will want to plow through mobs. We’d recommend a class with AoE taunt (Monk would be the best for this), Pandaria flying unlocked with alchemy (transmutation spec is obligatory!) and mining on board. 

So what you are going to farm here are two things - Ghost Iron Ores and Motes of Harmony. The former one is easiest to obtain - just follow the red line with your mining radar on and you should amass few stacks of ore even on a busy day (for some reason people don’t farm Living Steel mats despite the high demand). If you get bored, switch to killing Stout Shaghorns - the faster the better since they respawn instantly and create a chance to drop Motes of Harmony which are essential part for the next step. 

Once you’ve had enough, it’s time to convert our materials into something more sellable - combine Motes into Spirits, transmute smelted Ghost Iron and create Trillium bars and use this to perform two transmutations - Riddle of Steel and Transmute: Living Steel. Those, of course, are limited to one per day, but they proc with Transmutation Master occasionally yielding free Living Steel. It’s a single source of stable daily income - farm mats every few days, transmute it and sell highly sought after Living Steel on Auction House. It’s an excellent gold making method to create profit since it’s low effort and reliable. 

Once your farming empire starts to grow, you could stop supplying markets and craft gear that Living Steel is used for on your own - mainly Sky Golems and Jeweled Panther Mounts. Don’t get too excited by their high turnover rates - both markets are less dynamic than LS one so it’s a good investition, especially for an experienced farmer with diversified Auction House portfolio.  

WoW BfA patch 8.2 Ore and Herbs farming spots

Patch 8.2 in Battle for Azeroth, tweaked entire economy and how professions work what has greatly impacted farmers. This is not the place to cover all changes but what interests us in this section are new raw materials introduced in the patch - Zin’anthid herb and Osmenite Ore. Both can be farmed with a degree of safety and both are worth a ton since patch launched not so long ago (as of the time of  this article median price is around 70g/ea for both on US and EU servers (e. g. Darkmoon), it may seem low but first of all - it’s costless raw materials and prices are falling because of market saturation, they will stabilize once raids are open so either sell now and invest gold somewhere else, ie. herbs for potions or wait the thin weeks out). Just don’t get scared by naysayers - even though price has dropped steeply it’s always an opportunity to amass some initial capital for your other ventures. 

Zin’anthid farming guide

First of all, it’ll be wise to get a high level gear part - craft or buy Monel-Hardened Stirrups which will allow you to gather while being mounted, you could also make use of Monel-Hardened Hoofplates (mount speed increased by 20%) and Coarse Leather Barding if you can’t switch to tank spec to avoid being dazed by monsters. 

As for the class, one with main tank spec would be your best bet. For the gathering professions pick mining/herbalism combo - although blacksmithing may tempt with buff to utility gear, you are going enough GPH to safely balance Stirrups cost. With median price around 600g this gives us 300g loss/h against around 20k GPH, depending on server population and overfarming.

Do what you think is right, but we strongly advise to hold the herbs and wait for raids upcoming. Prices should go up or at least normalize. You could also make potions and hope for profits but be cautious, markets are incredibly volatile right now (this guide was written few days into patch 8.2, future readers should probably sell the herbs outright or wait for raid nights for potion prices to go up) mainly due to many wealthy players resetting the costs (on the other hand that could be profitable). Can’t stress this enough - whatever you do please refrain from dumping - this is viewed as bad practice morally and economically since wealthy goblins have enough gold to buy you out and sell your stock two to three times higher.

What’s great about this route is that it can be easily combined with Osmenite farm presented below.

Osmenite Ore farming guide

It’s mostly the same setup as former - pick up your tank, buy or craft Monel-Hardened Stirrups and make a lot of gold. This time you can go wild and equip whole utility set - Coarse Leather Barding and Monel-Hardened Hoofplates - since it’s virtually impossible to be in the red while running after ore and herbs at the same time. Here comes the route:

With blacksmithing still being limited to crafting entry-level gear we advise to prospect all the ore collected and either sell the gems or cut them. Prices are high right now and will probably dip a bit but you can wait for raids to open and people buying gems for their new gear. In general, crafting professions are currently less profitable because of the fact that crafting materials sold on their own give almost the same silver and gold with less effort, and without the need to skill anything. It's game-breaking since, for example, in Vanilla WoW crafting professions were a big thing. It can show you how much the game changed over the years.

But wait, there’s more gold to earn! 

Nazjatar solo gold farming

After few hours of gathering mats you might get tired of those pesky yellow dots on your radar so here comes the third way to earn easy gold in patch 8.2 - Encrusted Coins. This BoP gear as fluff states can be sold to right vendor for a hefty sum and that’s what we are going to do exactly. However the catch is that you can only hold one of them so this involves some hopping to Gloomseeker Yarga hidden at 39.02, 57.99 in an underwater cave. Also, bear in mind that Coins are cursed and will reduce your health as long as they are in your possession.

We will be looking there for Crazed Quel’dorei and Maddened Souls but you can fire up at anything there, those two happen to be easy to defeat. You should drop about six to ten coins/h which turned in reward you with Jiggling Sack containing random amount of gold (usually 300-600), so your total GPH depends on RNG. As for the estimates people report earnings around 3k to 5k GPH. Not much but it’s straightforward and fair job which rewards you with gold that can be spent on harder to obtain materials like Anchor Weed and such.

Making gold with a stick

We’ve mentioned fishing before and as it may seem there is nothing to explain here, it’s deeper than it seems. Way of the angler is tough and comes with an array of achievements and items but for me it’s the best way to make gold while I just want to chillout. Just get your own fishing rod, head towards nearest beach or dock, tune in to WoW ambient (or swap it for podcast or music) and watch calmly and patiently how your bags are being slowly filled to the brim with fish that can be easily sold on Auction House for a lot of gold.  

That concludes solo gold farming in WoW BfA patch 8.2 section of this guide.   

WoW gold farming in 2x4 setup

As explained earlier 2x4 is a clever way to trick spawning and looting mechanics by quickly killing mobs in high respawn rate area and loot their bodies only once per team. So for the pros we are in the clear but sadly there’s one huge con - 2x4 spots are dynamically changing right now as patch 8.2 is only few days in so Blizzard nerfs them as time goes on and people most likely will find new game breaking locations to farm. That said there is one fairly reliable Gilded Seaweave farm in Nazjatar, although supply for cloth is skyrocketing and prices are plummeting really fast, coming weeks we are probably going to experience crash but that may be an opportunity for us to shuffle tailoring gear for enchanting mats, and enchant some weapons or simply sell it. Nevertheless pick up your friends or PUG from group finder and head to specific location on the map. Keep in mind that 2x4 is a team game, and general guild members needs are in the first place. Although everything depends on the scale.

You are looking for a mob called Shirakess Subjugator that drops insane amounts of Gilded Seaweave. Players report numbers around 1k/h, which at current median price oscillating around 50g earns you 5k GPH, green items and lockboxes not included. Speaking of lockboxes, it would be a good idea to have a Rogue alt available (you could do this via class trial) as they are pure gold in green gear when opened.

As we’ve mentioned before currently, we are experiencing birth pains of a new patch so that’s the only fireproof hyperspawn (as they sometimes call 2x4 farming) spot that we can recommend so far. 

WoW gold making via transmogs farming

Some say transmog markets are dead since posts patch 8.1.5, some advise sticking to sniping great deals or just casually flipping and so do we - there are servers where making gold off transmog is viable although you’ll have to check it yourself and consider other possibilities BUT if you are really eager to dive deep into legacy raids, here’s what’s good. 

All in all the biggest issues are low drop rates (hence the profitability of the whole endeavor) and instance locks that will limit your farming schedule to one day per week per character, so we advise you to muster up few toons and combine this method with some mentioned before. 

In actuality farming transmogs is no brainer - just run through all Mists of Pandaria Raids and Dungeons on highest possible difficulty (remember to visit world bosses if you have spare time and haven’t yet acquired mounts, also skip last boss in Throne of Thunder) which for raids is sadly LFR but to trade-off that entering the instance doesn’t require any time, then proceed to Warlords of Draenor doing the same. You might want to adjust your routes (as we are deliberately not suggesting anything since possibilities are endless and it’s generally up to you how you are going to approach every instance) as some encounters are more tedious than others (particularly Black Furnace in Blackrock Citadel is hard to chew solo because of its unique mechanics). As for the Legion, Archimonde fight is your best bet since it’s quick, rest of the instances are quite not worth the time if you are looking for cosmetics.

However, professional transmog runners don’t limit themselves to just farming rare skins, the bread and butter of this profession are huge amounts of gold you can make by simply vendoring all the greens and trash, so even on dry runs, you will earn gold. What with the older instances, you might ask? That’s a good point. There are people there out in the world running exclusively one zone. Usually, it’s Ulduar despite its length and the sheer amount of time you have to put into it. However, you can make a good coin out of drops there so check it out. 

Actually, that was one school of transmog farming, more safe and time consuming one, but since BfA hit the shelves, most average farmers turned to Island Expeditions for transmog farming as transmogs faster on each isle and you also advance yourself in newest expansion. We strongly recommend taking this path as since patch 8.1.5 it is less limited than Legacy Instances and offers you a great deal of rewards and weapons. 

That would be it as gold making via transmog farming goes, not a viable farming method on its own but great supplement for those who want to bring some freshness into their farming routines. We're not going to hide with our view - being reach, even just in a video game, is an awesome feeling. When you can afford top tier gear, transmogs, battle pets, and vanity stuff, you're the boss.

Also this concludes our World of Warcraft gold making guide. Have fun, and get rich quickly! If something changes, we'll keep you updated about this event.

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