Yet another WoW moneymaking guide

[x_jonnyb.good_x]

Heres a post i found, its kinda long and im not claiming it, i just havent seen it and i think its useful, and im bored

Again, this is how I made my money. I've been playing this game since the first week it came out and I've never made an altthis guide is truly the path I took from lvl 1-60 (with a few modifications here and there as lessons learned from my mistakes!) There's hundreds of ways to make money in this game. You be a gatherer the entire time, selling mats and make money. You could do nothing but manipulate the Auction House and make money. You could grind areas that are known to drop rares and epics and make money. There's tons of ways, this is just my way. Enjoy!

Phase One Levels 1-40 Hunting and Gathering

So you're just starting World of Warcraft, you've picked your race and class (gnome rogues ftw!), and you're at the point where you get to pick two professions. You might say to yourself oooh I'm a rogue so Ill get leatherworking so I can make my own armor! or I'm a warrior so Ill get blacksmithing so I can make my own weapons! OK just stop right there n00b! Lemme tell you a little secret about all those cool crafting professions

***With the exception of a handful of items per crafted profession, you wont make money! And hey guess what, those few items that are profitable are pretty much unattainable at lower levels!***

I hate to rain on your parade so early on, but its better I tell you up front than watch you waste what little gold you earn trying to level up your crafting profession. The problem with crafting professions is that you fall into the trap that I like to call Skill Leveling Fever, where you will do whatever it takes to raise the skill of your profession. Some of you will say Ya Gen, but that's why you take a complimentary gathering profession so you can farm your own mats. This is true, but you will VERY quickly reach a point where the materials you require will be unattainable at your characters level. And what are you gonna do, wait until you can farm them yourself? Hell no, I know you better than that! You're gonna go run to the AH and start buying materials for the sole purpose of leveling your crafting profession. Welcome to the poorhouse!

So instead, pick two gathering professions. The cool thing about gathering professions is that you start making money right away walk up to a mineral vein or a plant or a dead animal and grab those mats! Its 100% profit! And since you are going to be spending a LOT of time running around doing quests and killing animals it only makes sense to take advantage of gathering professions. Mining and Herbalism are the biggest moneymakers, but since they share the minimap, I usually will pick mining or herbalism and then pick up Skinning.

The one negative thing about gathering professions is you'll find your bags fill up VERY quickly. Don't worry, the first thing you're gonna buy are 14 slot bags. These things cost like 2g50s on my server, which you'll have after selling like 4 stacks of whatever you got. Buy 4 of these 14slot bags, you'll need the space! At this point some people make alts that sit near the Auction House and they mail all their mats to the alt. This is a good idea for some to me it would drive me nuts having to mail stuff all the time

Also, items with grey text are vendor trash, meaning you sell them to a vendor. ALWAYS pick up the vendor trash at your level every little bit counts. If its WHITE text, that means its used in a profession somehow. Hold onto it and see what its worth on the Auction House. If you can sell it to the vendor for 25s but sell it on the AH for 50syouve just doubled your profit! Don't laugh at 50s profit either do that 1000 times (which you will do this 1000s of times in this game) that's 500g!

You should be making more than enough money to pay for new skills, updated armor and weapons, gryphon flights, stupid noncombat pets (hey I love em too!) etc. But keep in mind you are working towards two things when you hit lvl 40:

1. Buying your mount, which is going to cost you 90g
2. Preparing for your first crafting profession, which will take money to level and buy schematics/patterns/recipes/etc.

You cannot enter Phase Two until you have purchased your mount and have like 100g in savings. Trust me on this one

Phase Two Levels 40-59 Its fine learn 2 craft

You've hit lvl 40, you have your mount (sure beats walking huh?), you've learned all your new skills, and you've decked yourself out in some fancy new duds. Now what?

Well, you *could* stick with your two gathering professions. They will still make you a lot of money, actually more money than in the first phase because you'll know have access to higher level materials. If you don't feel like busting ass trying to make money with crafting professions, stick with gathering by all means. You could stop reading this guide right now and have enough money to make you happy.

Still reading? Okay good lets talk about your first crafting profession

Pick a crafting profession that sounds fun to you. Don't worry, its going to make you money (except maybe Alchemy, I'm sorry I *still* haven't seen proof that you can make lots of money off of Alchemy). What your going to do is drop the gathering profession that doesn't complement your new crafting profession. For example, if you want to take engineering, drop skinning and keep your mining. The one profession I do not recommend you take at level 40 (besides Alchemy) is Enchanting. Enchanting is a great profession but its not for the faint of heart, and its a #@%$! to level up. If you are dying to be an enchanter now, welcome to the poor house otherwise try to hold off until you're level 60 (well be discussing that in the next phase).

Now that you're level 40, it should be very easy to power level your new profession to a certain point. Do everything possible to farm your own mats while leveling, it will save you a ton of money. This is important because you need your money for

SCHEMATICS, PLANS, FORMULAS, RECIPES, ETC!!! These are what separate you from all of the other people taking up crafting professions. I see twenty new threads every day asking how do you make money in leatherworking or whatever, and people usually reply you don't take herbalism its a goldmine. I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

It takes hard work and a LOT of time and gold to make money in crafting!

You will NOT be rich from a crafting profession just by learning what the trainers provide! You have to spend gold on schematics/formulas/plans/etc to make the stuff that people really want to buy. I'm not saying that every plan on the AH is going to be a moneymaker, but the ones that ARE moneymakers you're going to have to pony up the cash. Don't bother farming for them its a waste of effort just pay a reasonable amount for it on the AH.

Guess what? You've just put yourself above probably 75% of the other crafters out there! Why? Because 75% of WoW players either don't have the gold to buy plans, or they refuse to spend money on them because people price gouge on the AH. Now instead of competing with 1000 engineers, you are competing with 250 of them and out of that 250 there will be quite a few that aren't as aggressive in making money like you, you sly dog!

Its important to remember that crafting professions are a long term investment. Unlike gathering, you actually have to spend money for crafting professions to make money. On my server sniper scope schematics go for 100g. 100g is a ton of money, but as soon as you pay it off (you can make 2-3g profit off of each scope), you've got another weapon in your arsenal of moneymaking!

The questions I get asked all the damn time (people even create alts on Malygos to bug me during my Molten Core run lol) is what items sell for a profit, how much do you sell them for, etc. And the answer is find out for yourself. Make a spreadsheet or list of everything you know how to make. Then for each item list out how much RAW material it takes to make that item. What do I mean by raw material? Its the total amount of uncrafted items you need to eventually make the item. For instance:

Hi Impact Bombs x 8 = Mithril Bar x16 + Solid Stone x16 + Mageweave x4

Notice that Hi Impact Bombs really take Mithril Casings, Solid Blasting Powder, and Unstable Triggersbut the RAW material list is as stated aboveget it?

Ok now that you have that for every item you can make, figure out the UNIT PRICE for each raw material. UNIT PRICE is how much it costs if you buy one Mithril Bar on the AH. Don't look at the prices for just one Mithril Bar though look at how much a stack costs and divide by 20.

Got that? Great! Next step is to find out how much you can sell each item for. Do a search on the AH to see what the going prices are, it might take you a few days to get an accurate number due to the Retard Factor of people putting up items for ridiculously low or high prices. If the items just don't show up on the AH, determine if anyone would actually *buy* the item first, and if you think they would just take a guess of how much you could sell it for.

You know what the final step is right? I sure hope so. You know how much it costs to make the item, you know how much you can sell the item fordo some simple subtraction to see if you can make a PROFIT off of your items! You will be surprised how many items will make a profit. The obvious choices are items needed for quests, items that need to be purchased several times (such as armor kits, sharpening stones, scopes, potions, etc), and blue items.

The two top comments I get from this section are:

Gen, you really expect me to make a spreadsheet of all my crafted items, with materials, and costs of mats etc etc? that seems like a lot of work cant you just tell me which ones sell best?

Get out of my forum! If you cant do the legwork and put the effort into it go pick flowers and collect rocks.

Gen, why do I have to make a spreadsheet based on cost of mats in the AH? I can easily go farm my mats and make 100% profit!

Ah HA! This is the statement that is the death of crafters everywhere. I'm going to make the next statement in all caps not because I'm angry, but because I want it to stick out so much you cant help but read it and remember it:

***IF YOU CANNOT BUY THE MATS ON THE AUCTION HOUSE, CRAFT YOUR ITEM, AND SELL THAT ITEM FOR A PROFIT DO NOT MAKE IT!***

Seems so simple yet time after time again people will say things like yeah of course you aren't going to make money if you buy your mats on the AH you have to farm the materials. Well, if the materials are worth more than the finished product, why would you bother making it? Just sell the materials for a larger profit! The purpose of the spreadsheet is to help you identify what items you can make a profit on.

The next logical step is to realize that if you can buy the mats on the AH and still make a profit, why would you spend all that time farming materials? In the time it takes you to farm the mats to make one item, you could buy the mats to make 10 items.

You should be making more than enough money to pay for new skills, updated armor and weapons, repair costs, stupid trinkets (I love my Orb of Deception!) etc. But keep in mind you are working towards two things when you hit lvl 60:

1. Buying your epic mount, which is going to cost you 900g
2. Having nearly all of the schematics/plans/etc for your crafting profession, and being able to make a steady income off of it.
3. Having at least 100g (preferably more) saved to help you level up your 2nd crafting profession

Do not bother with Phase Three until you have the above three items complete. Patience is the key if you rush into this stuff you will have more expenses than you do income.

Phase Three Level 60 Farming is for suckers

Ok so you're sitting pretty at level 60, congratulations! You've got your epic mount, you've completely owned your crafting profession, and you got your nest egg of gold. And your entire time spent in WoW now consists of you either in a high-end instance or sitting in Ironforge trying to get a raid group together. And that means you're not running around gathering! Plus by now you've probably said to yourself Man, I don't even need to farm mats anymore. I can buy them off of the AH and still make a sweet profit! Welcome to Phase Three

Now Phase Three is 100% optional. Some of the gathering professions are useful in high-end instances. With mining you can get Dark Iron Ore and Blood of the Mountain, which both sell well AND help you raise your reputation with the Thorium Brotherhood. With Skinning (plus an enchant and a finkles skinner) you can skin Core hounds in Molten Core and The Beast in UBRS. Both have their uses for sure. But this guide is about how I made money and since I HATE FARMING (farming is for suckers!) I dropped my gathering profession and picked up a 2nd crafting profession (in my case enchanting).

You level the 2nd crafting profession the same way you did the first, with the exception that you don't have a gathering profession to assist you in the leveling process. So that means you'll be buying your materials from the AH (yeah you could make alts or whatever, I just don't like making alts). The key is to level as cheaply as possible until you can get to the point where you can make a profit (or even break even) on the things you create as you level up. Again, same thing as the first crafting profession buy up all the patterns/plans/etc that look like you could make a profit with, make a spreadsheet, etc etc. This will be a slower process than the first crafting profession, but you already have your epic mount, and you're hopefully getting good weapons and armor from instance runsso there's really no rush anyway.

There's one more thing you can do to make some extreme money, but keep in mind that everything requires an investment of time and money and this will require a lot of both. There are lots of faction based patterns/plans/etc recently implemented in WoW. Some of them are as simple as killing tons (and I mean thousands) of Furbolgs until you are honored/revered with the Timbermaw Furbolgs, some as daunting as turning in thousands of Dark Iron Ores to the Thorium Brotherhood. Were talking a couple thousand gold worth of investment right there if you don't mine it yourself. 99.9% of the players in this game wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole, simply because they either don't want to waste their energy to achieve this level (which is totally understandable you have to be crazy to do this), or they don't understand the benefit of knowing how to make these epic items. Its basic logic though lets say you invest 2000g to become revered with the Thorium Brotherhood. You learn how to make the revered epic items. Congratulations you're probably one of the .01% of the people on your server than can make them. And you know what? 99.9% of the people on the server want those items because they're some of the best gear/weapons in the game! There's one guy on my server that makes weapons for 4000-5000g each. It doesn't take a math genius to see that the return on investment can be very lucrative! Some of you will say Oooh but Gen how in the hell am I supposed to get 2000g to invest in this? Well, you could either plan ahead and mine the dark iron ore yourself (for Thorium Brotherhood, for the others anyone can do it), or do what I did and sell what you can sell like a madman and save save save! Others will say Yeah but Gen all of those high end materials come from Molten Core and they cost thousands of gold to buy the mats! This is true, but as I said before this is the upper echelon of making money, and it takes big money to make big money. You don't go to Las Vegas with 20 bucks and expect to win thousands of dollars do you?

Phase Four Any Level Oh you crafty bastard!

So this isn't really a fourth phase, its more of a bonus chapter of things I did/do to make money. There's no real rhyme or reason to it, its just the extra things I've done along the way that aren't really profession related. I never mentioned them in my first guide because A) I wanted to keep it legit, these things aren't anything you can do to depend on an income but if they happen look out! And B) I'm still making money on several of these so I didn't want to spill the beans just yet lol! I wont go into super detail here because I want you to use your brain not to figure out exactly what I do, but to figure out things I haven't even thought of!

Oh I'm a poor guy! On rare occasion you will see someone selling an item in the trade channel. If its something you know is a hot seller, msg them and ask the price. Sometimes they will flat out be stupid and give you a low price. Buy it, wait one day, and put it on the AH for what its really worth. If they reply with a price that's pretty much what its worth, say oh gee, I can only afford <insert low number here>I doubt you'd sell it for that. Oh well thank you I appreciated it. You will be surprised how many times they will sell it for that amount or close to it. I've done that at least 20 times with sniper scope schematics alone! Am I proud of myself for doing it? No, I am not. Am I happy to have the extra gold? Hell yes!

Wholesale Materials If you find yourself crafting the same items over and over, you'll start to pick up a trend of certain materials that you use in large quantities. The best thing to do is to buy them in bulk for a cheaper unit price. Sure, you're eating more money up front, but your profit margin will be way larger (what, you weren't going to pass those savings onto your customers were you?!?!) There's several ways to do it, but my two favorites are the AH and gold farmers. On the AH you might see 100 stacks of heavy leather, all with 2g buyout, with a 1g min bid. Bid them all at min bid. Chances are you'll win a percentage of them at half of what you would normally pay! For gold farmers, if they can understand you (LOL), strike up a deal with them to COD the materials to you for a reduced cost. I have many farmers constantly working for me!

WTF is that??? troll the AH for items people auction, and browse thottbot and allakhazamtheres tons of items that you can buy, do something with, and resell for a huge profit. I personally know of a few items that I can make 50g+ profit on every time, and a buddy of mine has found another completely unrelated item that does about the same. What are they? Not telling!!! But do the research and you'll find several little nuggets of moneymaking!

Hey hey! I got blahblah on the AH! Im not condoning spamming like a fool, but a well crafted funny msg every 10min or so about something SPECIAL you've put on the AH will really help sell your product! Do not do this for everyday junk like light leather and copper bars this is something you use for rare/epic items or things that are in HIGH demand. Be witty and funny and people wont be as annoyed by you. Hell, ask people in Malygos, I spam stuff and say pst the gnome in the wedding dress! cuz yeah I wear oneand a Goblin Rocket Helmetand two Cookies Tenderizersand I'm a male gnome you got a problem with that?!

I think that's about all I've got for version 2.0well let this thing run 31 pages and break, just in time for version 3.0. Hopefully by that time I've learned new ways to make money for you guys!

Good luck and stay wealthy!

There it is, dont flame if its already been posted, just say it nicely, and thats akk

[Pvt. Snowflake]

Another one hehe

[Nezdragon]

Ah, GeneriKB's guide... was looking for this one.

My tauren warrior was poor as hell with mining/smithing, so somewhere in the mid 20's I switched to mining/skinning. Suddenly I had more money than I knew what to do with. I was literally upgrading my gear at the AH every few levels (blues too!) and I still had enough money to buy my mount easy. I hit 60 with all blues except for my chestpiece, which I recently upgraded to Might. All my gear except my gun (4 and my boots (Sapphiron's, 53) are upgraded to level 60 5man gear. About a month or two ago I bought a Warlords deck for 275g, bringing me down to 10g. At the moment I have around 395g, all farmed back.

Not crafting anything was a little boring at first... Until I saw how much gold I was getting!

As a side note, my warrior is still mining/skinning, with level 245 fishing and 300 cooking/FA. My 38 rogue has 75-80g, all self farmed, with herbalism/skinning.

[x_jonnyb.good_x]

Yeah man, not crafting saves so much money on mats, and the skills to buy the things you craft. Pluz, it doesnt really matter what gear you have at lwo levels.

[Dreadme]

lol this was sticky'd in the WoW forums a while back dunno if it still is

[HunterHero]

u need to lvl 60 to do that u are talking about jonny.b.good. one to gather mats and one to make the stuff.. right?

[koraff]

One of the recent patchs made the epic mounts cheeeeeeeeap I think you get exaulted with AV then the mount is 6g and the training is like 18g or something..cheaper then the 60% speed mount just thought i'd mention that.

[Minimized]

Well... The training cost is now divided into Epic And Non-epic... Epic riding skill costs... 900g? If you're not honored/sergeant, that is... An epic mount is 100 g (Still not honored/sergeant), except for the AV one, which costs 9 g.
Non-epic mount is 10 g, and non-epic riding skill is 90 g.

[Mazgra]

Here is another moneymaker, go to deadwind pass and camp the3 birds for like 2 hours and pick up everything they drop, i make 5 gold in 20 mins

[Ark]

cool, thanks, +rep

[kanezfan]

Here is another moneymaker, go to deadwind pass and camp the3 birds for like 2 hours and pick up everything they drop, i make 5 gold in 20 mins

From just junk or ah stuff as well?

[Bloodskull]

Hey I'm new to this site but I really have to say, Nice Guide!!!
I'm level 18 and took up skinning from the beginning and I waited to get a second profession because I knew someday someone would tell me something like this. Although I like just got one, but now I'm going to ditch it thanks to you!!

Again, Your Guide Rocks!