Paying for WoW Tokens Without Relying on Other Players

[Smitten]

WoW Tokens are a great way to play without having to spend real money, but if you're not actively playing the AH or making gold through other methods, it can be a challenge to get enough gold each month to pay for them.

I've compiled a list of quick, soloable, and easy to complete activities that any Level 100 character will be able to do. I'm only listing activities that do not require any player interaction, so they can theoretically be completed on a totally empty realm without relying on selling on the Auction House or grouping with others.

Of course, repeating this on more than one character will significantly increase the amount of gold you get.

Before Starting

Before you get started, I'd recommend having empty bags (as best you can), and having your Hearthstone set to Shrine of the Seven Stars/Two Moons. Not only are all the portals valuable when hopping between continents, but also provide quick and easy access to Mists of Pandaria dailies. Your Garrison Hearthstone will still allow you to easily access Draenor.

This guide also assumes you'll be participating in other content during the week such as doing dungeons or raids, PvP, WoD dailies and other content that will generate natural income. While most of this guide can be used to purely pay for tokens without touching WoD (and could even be done on MoP level accounts with good gear), it is merely to offer quick, easy activities you can do to supplement your natural gold income.

You can find the latest price of tokens and their current trends here.

Cataclysm Heroic 25-Man Raids
Total Monthly Gold: ~30,000g (~7,500g per week)

This is one of the easiest and most consistent methods, and will likely make a bulk of your monthly gold for the least amount of time. Doing this every week on 1-2 characters will likely pay for your token in full, depending on your region.

There are five raids worth doing:

• Blackwing Descent (Burning Steppes)
• Bastion of Twilight (Twilight Highlands)
• Throne of the Four Winds (Uldum)
• Firelands (Hyjal)
• Dragon Soul (Caverns of Time/Tanaris)

The Method:

• Clear each of the raids, killing as much trash as you want. The more trash you kill, the more gold you'll make. While the actual gold that drops off of trash isn't that great, the greens that do drop can provide an additional 100-500g per run, depending on your luck.
• Each boss will drop around 120-130g in gold, and all the drops should be vendored. The more weapons you get, the better.

Tips:

• Turn the tier tokens in for their respective armour pieces before vendoring, as they sell for more gold than the tokens themselves.
• You can do Baradin Hold for even more gold, but some items do not sell to vendors, and it may not always be under your factions control.

Optional Additional Gold via Players:

• BoE Epics that drop can be sold on the Auction House, as those interested in having them for transmog may purchase them. They won't sell for lots of gold, but often 2-3x more than vendor value.
• Embersilk Cloth can be sold as-in on the Auction House for significantly more than vendor value, but may not sell quickly on your realm.
  
  • If you are a tailor, you can turn the cloth into bags to sell on the AH.

Mists of Pandaria Daily Quests
Total Monthly Gold: ~27,000g (~900g per day) efficiently, ~45,000g (~1,500g per day) all quests.

There's a reason Mists of Pandaria daily quests were hated on release -- there were just so damn many of them! But now that we're Level 100, it is easy gold. Unless you are crazy, I'd recommend only doing this a couple of times a week to supplement your stockpile for your token.

The Method:
Not all daily zones were created equal. Some are significantly more time efficient than others. I'd recommend the following daily hubs in this order for maximum efficiency:

• Golden Lotus Dailies
• Shado-Pan Dailies
• Kirin-Tor Offensive/Sunreaver Onslaught PvP Dailies
• Klaxxi Dailies
• Tillers Dailies
• Lion's Landing/Domination Point Dailies

Simply do all quests and vendor anything that drops in the process.

Tips:

• Kirin-Tor and Sunreaver Onslaught PvE dailies take longer, but offer more gold.
• Other daily factions that provide respectable amounts of gold include the Order of the Cloud Serpent, and the August Celestials.

Optional Additional Gold via Players:

• Turning Motes of Harmony that you'll obtain while questing into Spirits of Harmony to purchase Mists of Pandaria crafting mats can be a decent gold maker. These old mats are often used by players to make some Transmog gear.
  
  • If you are a Leatherworker or Miner, turning Ghost Iron Ore and Exotic Leather/Prismatic Scale into their respective crafting mats will often sell better than raw ore and leather.
  
  
• Windwool Cloth can be sold as-in on the Auction House for significantly more than vendor value, but may not sell quickly on your realm.
  
  • If you are a tailor, you can turn the cloth into bags to sell on the AH.

Garrison Gold Missions
Total Monthly Gold: Varies

You'll often find missions providing gold as a reward. By stacking followers with the Treasure Hunting, you can increase the base reward by 100% for each follower with the trait on the mission.

The Method:

• If you haven't sorted your followers yet and don't care about much else in the Garrison, pick followers with the Treasure Hunter perk each week.
• If you have excess Garrison resources, you can buy Follower Trait Retraining Guide for 1,000 Garrison Resources each and reroll until you get Treasure Hunter.
• Send as many followers as you can onto Gold missions to increase gold acquired.

Tips:

• Try to have a good spread of counters.
• Complete other non-gold missions to generate fresh ones which may offer gold.
• Don't spend too much time on them, you only have to check a couple of times per day at most.

Additional Gold from easy In-Game Activities (with player interaction)

Honour Points to Gold:
A full honour cap can be traded for 38 x Brutal Gladiator's Mutilator's. This will net you around 630 gold after the refund timer expires and you can sell them to a vendor. Great if you're a regular BG/Skirmish player.

'Raiding with Leashes Pets':
Old Vanilla and BC raids drop pets that are used for the achievements Raiding with Leashes (Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, AQ40, Naxxramas10/25), Raiding with Leashes II: Attunement Edition (Karazhan, Serpentshrine Cavern, Tempest Keep), and Raiding with Leashes III: Drinkin' From the Sunwell (Black Temple, Mount Hyjal, Sunwell). Selling these pets as a bundle can net easy gold for pet collectors and achievement hunters who hate collecting pets. You'll also get cloth, gold and items to vendor from the raids too!

[Mythreber]

Great guide!

[Miksu]

Awesome guide mr. Smitten =)

[markons]

I was just wondering one thing. Some raids drop gold/gear depending on how many people are in raid killing boss. What will happen if you get 9 people ( for the sake of argument lets say your alts ) + you and start killing boss. Ever of your alts do some small amount of dmg, then you kick all of them, kill boss and loot him ( before the time for them to be ported is up ) Would you get amount of gold/gear for how many people started the encounter or how many people were present when the boss died?

[Smitten]

I was just wondering one thing. Some raids drop gold/gear depending on how many people are in raid killing boss. What will happen if you get 9 people ( for the sake of argument lets say your alts ) + you and start killing boss. Ever of your alts do some small amount of dmg, then you kick all of them, kill boss and loot him ( before the time for them to be ported is up ) Would you get amount of gold/gear for how many people started the encounter or how many people were present when the boss died?

All players get 120-130g up to a certain point, but I'm not sure the point at which diminishing returns kicks in. The amount of gear remains the same. It's more effective to run on each alt just for extra gear drops, since that's a majority of the money.

[Kenneth]

love this guide dude. Thank u so much! The struggle might officially be over!

[Astrobazooka]

I tried this, and get at least 8k gold each week by doing cata heroics on my main by only vendoring the drops, I also sell the boe's on auction which in total I can say I make around 9k each week with this method (sometimes I sell boe's for 1k each). Thanks alot for this method!

[Notfincher]

I was just wondering one thing. Some raids drop gold/gear depending on how many people are in raid killing boss. What will happen if you get 9 people ( for the sake of argument lets say your alts ) + you and start killing boss. Ever of your alts do some small amount of dmg, then you kick all of them, kill boss and loot him ( before the time for them to be ported is up ) Would you get amount of gold/gear for how many people started the encounter or how many people were present when the boss died?

All Raid Gold is personal loot now, similar to Diablo 3 or RaidFinder. Everone gets the same amount of gold regardless of player size.

[ddrfan]

really nice guide, thanks for sharing