The following guide is not a get rich quick scheme or even a get rich easily scheme. It is a comprehensive guide to farming materials and getting the most out of them. But most importantly doing it better than the competition.
1. Information
The biggest mistake you can make early on is not understanding every aspect of what you are setting out to do. In order to narrow your focus you will need to gather information based on your servers AH economy.
First write down every raw material you will be capable of acquiring. Ores, Crystallized Elements, Gems. Now plug them into wowhead and follow the links leading out of their pages. Make yourself a little flow chart of every possible avenue these raw materials can take. Transmutation, Smelting, Crafting into items, Disenchanting. Take your complete flow chart back to the AH and find your best profit.
For the purpose of this guide let’s assume your best course of action is farming titanium ore for prospecting.
You now have your target.
2. Efficient Farming
Plan your route. I use a combination of Gather Mate 2 and Routes to generate a game plan. Gather mate gives a good base of information on each zones Node spawning. While Routes gives a very good start to an efficient path you should take while mining.
Stick to the plan and don’t be distracted. If you came out to mine titanium then mine titanium. You will be tempted over and over again with some shiny thing to do just off your route. Stick to the plan.
Make sure you have the bag space to carry your goods and are mining only things directly related to your goal item. Anything else will only slow you down and waste bag space.
3. Forcing the Edge
Up until this point this guide has been mostly common sense and good practice. But these are things that anyone is capable of doing. What you’re looking for is an edge on the competition at the cost of morality.
*Take everything you can. Don’t bother with courtesy. If you can swoop in on your own grandmother and take a node from her while she fights a mob, do it.
*Don’t be a general Farmer. Stay focused on your target material, leaving other materials in your wake to slow down the completion. Exceptions to this rule are Rich Saronite and Titanium which share spawn locations. If you’re mining Titanium you want to clear Rich Saronite to give it a chance to spawn.
*Don’t get your hands Dirty. Make connections with pvp guilds on both sides of your server. I unload my blue quality gems pulled from nodes in exchange for screenshots of dead competition. Lots of BG honor grinders look for world pvp to augment their honor gains between queue pops. Work out a deal that thins the heard while you farm.
*CC, Hit it and Quit it. Never bother with trying to kill another player for a node. This is nothing but time wasted. If possible fly in, deliver a long CC (Sap, Hungering Cold, Sleep, Engineer MC Cap, and so on) take the goods and go.
*Be a Gay Black Jewish Woman. If you’re being aggressive enough you are bound to get angry whispers. String them along very passive aggressively. Never admit to doing anything wrong and never use inappropriate language. When the inevitable “**** you ****** that was my node” or “You don’t have to be such ****** about this” rears its head, simply screen shot it and come back to it before you log off for the night. Put in a short ticket along the format of
“At <time> server, the player <Player Name> sent me a whisper using very offensive language. As a <Minority group offended by whisper> I don’t stand for hate speak like ‘<******, ******, ****, so on>’. Thank you for helping keep this an enjoyable activity free from real world hatred.”
Keep is short and sweat but loaded with buzzwords you’ve likely heard in sensitivity training and HR meetings at work/ school. The ticket will likely be service while you’re logged off. And when you come back the person will be serving between a 24 hour and 1 week suspension. A few less fish in the pond.
*Use Addons and Laziness against em’. All auto post, auto undercut addons work the same way. There is some kind of If Then statement that decided if the market is right to post and what price to post to undercut the competition. You can use this to force your competitions profits into the ground and even steal their stock. Simply use your supply to post aggressively bellow them. Wait for them to repost at an undercut to you, and then repeat. Once their auctions are at the lowest their addon is set to allow they will stop chasing you down. Simply buy up their stock and repost at the normal price. Use single 12h auctions to minimize expenses.
*COD arrangements. Set them up with people willing to buy in bulk. Make the price reasonable. And play nice for a few weeks flooding their inbox with COD mails. After you have secured their trust they will start spam clicking through mails provided you send enough of them. At an arbitrary point in the middle of your COD mails add a zero to the amount. If the buyer blows through your CODs you score a bonus. If you’re caught blame it on a typo.
*Last but not least, use bank alts and farming alts. You’re going to make enemies and you wouldn’t believe the shit you’ll end up blacklisted from.
Lots of the things in this guide are downright despicable. But your options for being successful farming are to either put in more work than the competition or slit more throats than the competition. Make the decision about what kind of successful you want to be and go for it.
Happy hunting, you soon to be Heartless Bastards.