Stop wasting time, start making gold (A lvl70 commonsense guide).

[dbresq]

I've been a lurker for quite some time now and evidently now is the time for the lurkers to become contributors. So here's the first of (hopefully) many contributions to come.

Throughout my time here I've seen a lot of guides and schemes to 'get rich quick'. Quite frankly I've found 'get rich quick' schemes have been a great source of wasted time not just in wow, but mmo's in general. What I have found is that you spend so much time looking for schemes that you've lost a lot of time you could have spent actually making money. That's one of the habits we need to break - wasting time. It doesn't matter if you're saving for your epic flyer or just need more cash to cover raiding costs or craftable gear, this guide should help you out.

A bit more about me - I play a lvl 70 holy priest as my main and haven't really bothered to level any of my alts up to 70 as yet. Granted that I don't have access to a (primarily) dps class I guarantee that these pointers will work regardless of class. Anyhow, on with the show!
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Epic Flying Mount
Regardless of what your short term goal is, you should definitely make getting your epic flying mount one of your primary goals. This is because put simply getting gold is a joke once you have your epic mount. It's funny how you need tons of gold to get your epic flyer but you can only easily get that much gold once you have it. Getting it in the first place will just take some hard work and perseverance on your behalf.

If you have access to somebody who can loan you some money towards your epic flyer ask them if you can borrow the gold; you'll be able to repay them a lot faster having your epic mount then you'll be able to save up for it yourself without an epic mount.

Stop Losing Money
Ok so this is where a lot of people fall behind in the gold grind. Never hang around doing nothing but chatting. Ever. For example you may have just finished a long raid and you're just chatting with some mates while you unwind, all the while running in circles around Shattrath. Or you could be waiting for a BG queue to pop and just standing around. DON'T DO THIS! DON'T EVER STAND AROUND DOING NOTHING. You could be out grinding a few mobs, picking some herbs/mining ore, or even doing your dailies. All of these activities require very little concentration so you can continue chatting with your friends while you do them.

Any time you are just standing around or running around Shattrath/Org bank roof in circles you are losing money. Break the habit! Once you get into the swing of keeping on the move at all times you'll notice your attitude changing. For example, long BG queues become a GOOD thing; that's more time you can spend making money.

Ok so I know not to stand around doing nothing, but how do I shot gold?
Alrighty, as I discussed earlier, my main is a Holy Priest. Not exactly an inhuman grinding machine of dps death. While I did do a little grinding now and then just to mix/speed things up a bit, that wasn't the main source of my income. I used the following techniques to get together the cash (all of which you may or may not have access to):
- Gathering Trade Skills (Herbalism)
- Fishing
- Daily quests
- Occasional Grinding

Gathering Tradeskills
This is a very important one. You need to have at least one gathering skill otherwise your cash inflow will be hurt severely. If you don't have at least one gathering skill it is highly recommended that you drop one of your tradeskills and relearn a gathering profession. I had to drop enchanting to pick up herbalism and believe me; my cash flow sky rocketed after I did that. Fewer outflows and more inflows.

You've got a choice between Herbalism, Mining or even Skinning. I am going to straight out recommend Herbalism as your gathering profession if you can only take one, if you can take two get Mining as well. This is because herbs are consumed constantly and as such their will always be a market for them. For example if I use herbs to have pots made, once I drink that pot it's gone and I need another one and as such there is a market for it. If I need a gem for some new gear, I use one that has been mined/prospected. However, once I have that gem, I don't need another one for that gem slot. That's why I think Herbalism is the way to go; people will always, always need more herbs.

The benefit will be two fold if you are a raider; you will likely need consumables to raid, and being a Herbalist means you don't need to buy herbs from somebody else. Not only will you be able to improve your cash inflows by selling herbs; you'll now be able to decrease your cash outflows because you don't need to buy herbs yourself.

Making money with Herbalism
This is pretty straightforward - jump on the AH and check which herbs are selling for the most money. Once you have identified your target herb, go farm it up. If you don't already have it, grab the mod Gatherer and the GathererDB plugin here: http://www.gathereraddon.com/dl/ This will let you know where all the herb nodes are so you don't have to find them yourself.

The other thing is to never pass up a herb node in Outlands, regardless of whether it is your target herb or not. Any herb from Felweed up has a chance of having a Fel Lotus in it. These are used to make flasks and sell extremely well (usually 20g but as high as 30g per Lotus on my server). Even if you don't get a Fel Lotus you still made some potential money with the herbs that you did get. Sell them on the AH too.

Fishing
This is one that is extremely under rated. Fishing is the ultimate 'I have 10 minutes to spare' money making profession. Why? Fishing Pure Water pools. These bad boys can return between 2 and 6 motes of water. If you have a really good run you can get nearly 30 motes in less than 10 minutes. You'll probably average 10 motes depending on how lucky you are with the spawns - sometimes you'll only get one, sometimes you'll get six.

So you may be wondering where you can find these pools. The best area is the up in the Elemental Plateau at the lake where the Water Elementals are (not the lake down near the throne of elements, the one up on the Plateau). The pools are on a one hour respawn timer and only a couple can be up at any given time. What this means is that after a pool has been fished dry it won't be available for respawn for a whole hour. When you check the spawns, fish up any you see then double check the other spawns to see if any have respawned after you just fished one dry.

If you're really lucky, you might be able to get all six spawns in one session. If you can manage to do this it's probably worth keeping track of the time and coming back 45-50 minutes later as the pools should probably be ready to respawn and you can farm the crap out of them.

My favorite quick farm route would be without a doubt:
- fly up to Barrier Hills (just north of Aldor Rise in Shattrath) to check herbs. Good spawns, lots of Mana Thistle and Dreaming Glory.
- from there fly over to Elemental Plateau (short trip) to check pure water pools, fish em dry.

Daily Quests
This is another area you will be able to improve your cash flow on. Again, I'm a Holy Priest so killing things is extremely time inefficient. When I was starting out on my Dailies I basically got a feel for how long they took and compared how long they took and how much money I got in return to other methods of making money to get a feel for their time efficiency. Sucking at killing things ruled out the banishing quest at Ogri'la. I also didn't bother with the Skettis escort quest unless I happened upon the quest giver ready for me to start the event; I didn't want to waste time searching for his respawn or waiting for other people to finish.

So what you want to do here in the very least is unlock the daily quests for Skettis (Sha'tari Skyguard) and Ogri'la (there are a lot of group quests involved, but don't let that deter you. Get them done). Then you want to do:
- Fires over Skettis (Skettis, bombing run)
- The Relic's Emanation (Ogri'la, do this one first for movement speed buff)
- Bomb Them Again! (Ogri'la, bombing run)
- Wrangle More Aether Rays! (Ogri'la, do this one last so you don't have rays trailing you for the other quests)

Just doing these to start with will net you around 45g, and you'll be able to do more and more as you get your epic mount and unlock the Netherwing daily quests. If it's a pain flying between the two areas on a 60% flying mount there's good news; there's a flight path between the two points which will be made available to you once you reach honored with the Sha'tari Skyguard.

Haxing the Dailies
This is a good one if you don't have access to a lot of daily quests or you don't want to do some time inefficient quests. This method is unreliable however, and it requires you to be up late.

Basically what you want to do is go about your day as per normal. Knock over any daily quests you'd normally do. If you can still do more daily quests then depending on your luck you may be able to weech out a bit more daily gold. At a given time in the early hours of the morning (which I have not yet been able to identify, has been anywhere from 1-3am server time for me). The quest givers will reset but your daily limit will not reset. What this means is that you can do daily quests already completed that day again while still under that day's limit. For example I do the above dailies on Wednesday evening. Once it gets to 2am (or whenever) and the quest givers reset I do the quests again and they are allocated to Wednesday's limit. In another couple of hours the daily limit will tick over and I will have a fresh limit to work with for Thursday (the quest givers would reset again when the limit resets).

Again, this method is unreliable at best, but if you're awake anyway and you haven't reached your daily limit it could be worth checking out.

Grinding
Not something I'm a particularly big fan of, but it's worth doing now and then if you have the time. What I did was respec shadow and go grind up some primals (fires at Hand of Guldan in SMV were my favorite). The important thing was that I had to make sure I had a lot of time available to grind in order to make it time efficient. I needed to be able to grind up enough to make 100g to cover a holy -> shadow and then a shadow -> holy respec as well as making a decent profit. This basically meant that I needed around 5 hours worth of grind time to cover my costs and make a respectable profit, so I'd respec shadow over a weekend (my guild doesn't raid Friday or Saturday nights) and spend a couple of grind sessions over the weekend farming it up.

Don't spend any time grinding if you can't put in a few hours doing it per session, it's not really worth it.

Conclusion
So we've gone over a few easy farming methods that any class can do to gradually grind up some decent gold. Using a mixture of the above methods I was able to reliably (without too much play time) make about 700 gold a week after all the expenses associated with raiding four times a week. Once I managed to get my epic flyer that shot up to well over 2k a week. You too can make as much gold as you want, you just need to stop being lazy and put in the time and effort to do it. Basically:

- Stop looking for shortcuts. This is typically one of the biggest wastes of time in any MMO, just do the hard work instead and you'll get where you need to go faster.
- Don't sit around doing nothing. You're losing money if you do this.
- Learn a trade skill. Herbalism is a good one, and it's easily the best one if you raid.
- Do your dailies every day you log on to play. They don't take long. For half an hour you'll get 45g in the very least which should be enough to cover day to day costs if you raid.
- Grinding is a good option, but don't do it if you can't put in at least an hour or two. Allow more time if you have to respec just to grind.
- Don't pass up any loot. Loot every single mob you kill and sell the junk, even if they are just incidental mobs that got in your way. Nickel and diming is a great source of income in the long term.

[Farylon]

Read it all, I like it. It's a nice "motivational" guide, if you will.

Also

Haxing the Dailies
This is a good one if you don't have access to a lot of daily quests or you don't want to do some time inefficient quests. This method is unreliable however, and it requires you to be up late.

Basically what you want to do is go about your day as per normal. Knock over any daily quests you'd normally do. If you can still do more daily quests then depending on your luck you may be able to weech out a bit more daily gold. At a given time in the early hours of the morning (which I have not yet been able to identify, has been anywhere from 1-3am server time for me). The quest givers will reset but your daily limit will not reset. What this means is that you can do daily quests already completed that day again while still under that day's limit. For example I do the above dailies on Wednesday evening. Once it gets to 2am (or whenever) and the quest givers reset I do the quests again and they are allocated to Wednesday's limit. In another couple of hours the daily limit will tick over and I will have a fresh limit to work with for Thursday (the quest givers would reset again when the limit resets).

Again, this method is unreliable at best, but if you're awake anyway and you haven't reached your daily limit it could be worth checking out.

This would definitely explain what happened to me, then. I had done my thrallmar mark daily when I was able to do the quest again late at night. Didn't think much of it then. Turns out it can be a 'repeatable' mess-up :P

Nice guide.

[Dalamar]

The hacking the dailies part earned +rep from me, didn't know about that, nice find.

[GanjalfTheGreen]

you make some very good points, +rep

[Xerian]

Nice guide. +rep

[shadowbladex]

Nice guide. But if you have glider u'll get money in no time..

[Unholyshaman]

Good Job! +rep

[dbresq]

Funnily enough shadowbladex I have actually tried out glider on different accounts before. The problem I found with it (and I know from reading their boards other users have the same problem) was that I would get so engrossed in watching the bot go about it's thing that I'd be sitting there for an hour plus watching it before I realised what I was doing. Eventually I realised that I might as well just play the game myself; I was sitting in front of the damn thing anyway and I knew I could do a much better job.

Edit - Also, thanks to all the champs for repping me; glad you enjoyed the... tutorial?

[WeThree]

thanks for the info, common knowledge for the most part but people tend to forget the basics and make life harder then it needs to be.. +rep

[cripling]

or just rent your account to wowpl.com and get REAL money instead of friggin gold :P +rep though for awesome guide, the daily quest part got to me

[oakwalker]

Funny that if you do all the netherdrake quests you will pull out normaly 2k after you reach your drake, Also you said its required to have a gathering skill, well im Ench/Eng the biggest money drains, and my tip is. Grind like crazy

[champion538]

Great guide. Just like the guide I'm working on. Keep it up.

[xennon]

Nice guide!