So I gave some AH / stockpiling tips in my previous post, but there's far more you can do to get your roster of toons prepped for maximum gold making once Cata ships. In my opinion, this is far more valuable than simply stockpiling items; stockpiling items will give you a one time profit. While this profit can be substantial, you'll make far more in the long run with an account loaded with toons that (maybe even passively) churn out gold continuously for the rest of the expansion.
Dual Gatherers
Now, this next piece of advice is probably a bit obvious, but it will make an absolute
killing in the first two months of Cata:
Level an 80 Druid dual-gatherer with epic flight.
That's it. Do this, and take a couple short brakes from racing your main to 85, and you'll make bank. In the first two months of the expansion, Cata mats will be by far the best way to make gold, but the window of opportunity is very narrow. Every single serious raider is going to be madly rushing to complete their crafting profs for the first tier of raiding content, and many many casual players will want to level their crafting profs as well. There's a huge opportunity here for 200g/stack herb/ore sales, and with flying mounts right out of the gate, having a dual gatherer ready to go will make an absolute killing.
You'll want to be a Druid, of course, for five reasons:
1. Instant speed flying mount.
2. No need to dismount to gather herbs.
3. Combat speed (Travel form) to run away from mobs that aggro from your gathering ore.
4/5. Indoor speed (feral talent, 30% cat form speed) + Stealth to get at all those mineral nodes underground.
I would be shocked to find dual gatherers getting less than 1k/hour when all the raiders are busy powerleveling to 85 and/or gearing for the first tier raid content. There will be astronomical-never-will-you-see-it-again demand, and limited supply (since lots of players will focus on non-gold aspects of the game and/or don't have a dual gatherer like you to take advantage of the market opportunity!)
Depending on how heavily invested you are in your main's profs, you may actually want to drop your profs pre-Cata and change your main to a dual gatherer. This way you'll be able to make a killing
while you're madly powerleveling to 85. This depends very much on which profs you have right now though: don't drop tailoring / alch (see below) for herb / mining, but most other profs should be safe--but only if you're willing to start from scratch once the herbing/mining boom is over! You'll need to decide for youself if this is worth it to you. (I'm not doing this, personally).
Alchemy / Tailoring CDs
The second fantastic account prep strategy is to level as many 75+ toons as you can to set up a factory of xmute / cooldown toons. I have two accounts, and plan on having 11 max lvl alchemists and ~5 tailors to churn out Volatile xmutes, epic gems, and cloth.
Assuming that the value of xmutes and tailoring cooldowns keeps pace in Cata, you're looking at about 150g/day per toon (in today's terms), or 300g/day in 4.0 inflation-adjusted terms. Lets say you get 5 of these alts for Cata, then you'll be able to afford epic flight for a new toon every ~3 days! That's a lot of passive income!!
"But Bravada!" I hear you say,
"Didn't you just say before that leveling profs post Cata will be easier than today!? How can you turn around and suggest that we level profs now, before we can take advantage of this?"
Wow, that's an excellent question. You've been paying attention! Well, I guess the answer depends on how much gold you want to make before the xpac hits! >_>
At level 65, you can learn WotLK level profs, including (for alchemy) epic gem xmutes and (for tailoring) frostweave bags and specialty cloth (Spellweave, Ebonweave, and Moonshroud). I'll talk about alch first, then tailoring after.
Now, lets assume that (like last time) Blizzard targets a release in November. This means that there's a solid 4 months of epic gem xmutes to cash in on before the Cataclysm. The average profit per xmute right now is about 65g (without a JC). With 120 days before the next expansion, that's... 7800g. Profit. Without taking into account XMute specialization! Per alt! With XMute added in, profit jumps to 80g per xmute, for a total profit of 9.6k. Multiply that by however many alts you're willing to level and you'll see why I'm not too concerned with saving even 2k gold in leveling costs! As an added bonus, alchemy is one of the cheapest profs to level, with average powerleveling costs in the ~3k range, including the Primal Mights needed to specialize.
And, you only need to be lvl 65 to take advantage of this, so you can race all your alts to 65 now (or 68 for xmute spec) and then take your sweet time finishing off the grind to 75.
Now, tailoring is much less sweet of a deal, unfortunately. Since they got rid of tailoring CDs in 3.3, there isn't any passive earning power left. That being said, every serious gold maker should already have at least one tailor leveled to make bags. Assuming you're on board with churning out a gbank tab (9
of bags, at 50g profit per bag, there's no way your first tailor won't pay for itself. You can also still make good gold on a lot of servers (server dependent! know your economy before relying on this!) by making specialty cloth, so I'd suggest trying that market out as well.
Unfortunately, since there's no passive bonus for additional tailors, there isn't much value in pre-leveling tailoring on your remaining posse of alts, but I would highly suggest stockpiling mats now sitting in these alts bags waiting to go once 4.0 ships. There should be an opportunity in there a few weeks before the expansion hits where new prof changes are in the game, but Cata content is still unavailable. This way you'll be able to take full advantage of easier prof leveling while still being ready to start churning out Cata specialty cloth (on a one week CD) out of the gate.
Note: I suggest powerleveling a tailor pre 4.0 since you'll want to get started on bags ASAP, and unprocessed frostweave cloth takes up a lot of bag space. If you're willing to mail bounce a lot of cloth, then you may do better waiting for 4.0.
Here's hoping this is helpful for some of you. As I said at the top, check back here later and I'll try to update with more speculative strategies for Cata investment (assuming I can find reliable Beta info).