On twitter @ReliqEU decided on something to do whilst waiting for Warlords – make gold!

I’ve made one or two gold in my time in WoW, although I’m no @PowerWordGold or @PhatLewtsGold I’ve been slowly making gold over the years – mostly so I can spend it on the various gold sinks which are in the game! So I offered my services…

So, the first question I had was what tradeskills and characters did I have to work with. Rel has the following on his server, with the professions below being all maxed out.

• 8x lvl90s
• Cooking
• Jewelcrafting
• Blacksmithing
• Engineering
• Tailoring
• Alchemy
• Mining
• Skinning

Since I wrote this Rel has noted that his Tailor is offserver and he does have an alchemist… so I’ve adjusted things below. I’ve left the tailoring part in as that could still be useful.

General things

If its not nailed down, turn it into gold

I’m always surprised when people say they leave grey items on mobs – those items quickly add up and some like the weapons are worth 2-5g each, not to be sniffed at! So when in the world, loot those grey items and then sell them to a vendor!

And sometimes, unexpected items can be sold – if you’re not going to use the stolen reputation insignias the Zandalari Warbringers and Zandalari Warscouts drop then sell them! They sell for 17g 50s and when I realized I wasn’t going to use the ones I had stashed away, I sold the pile for ~2k gold.

The “If its not nailed down” links up nicely with the achievement Riches of Pandaria – scattered across Pandaria are items to be collected and most vendor for nice sums of gold. If you get every single item they’ll vendor for ~1600g and you get a nice achievement to boot!

Rel has 8 lvl 90s; assuming that none have picked up any of the treasures already that’s a total of 12,800g to be had.

• WoWHead guide which has zone maps & full list of the objects
• Finders and Riches Helper – an addon which will flag up the items for you. Requires TomTom and NPCScan

Related to “If its not nailed down” is the use of the auction house – as you go around the world you’ll have mobs drop green / blue / epic items, recipes, etc which other players may want. Which is where the auction house comes in. Whilst using an AH addon isn’t required, scanning the AH to build a pricing database and then being able to see which items are worth selling and which are worth just vendoring is very handy.

Personally I use Auctionator for this, but there are others. I also use the realm specific addon from The Undermine Journal which gives me very good details on all items ever seen on my realm.

Using The Undermine Journal is handy for rare drop items, generally used for transmog reasons, whose looks mean they sell for far beyond their stats or rarity. Its not a market I explicitly go after, generally such items drop for me in the process of doing other things like farming raid mounts and the like.

Dailies

Now, onto Rel having eight level 90s. You can make a lot of gold from dailies using that many characters, although you may want to poke your eyes out with a spork before too long!

There is, however, one daily which rewards 45g and only takes a couple of seconds to do – modulo travel time. Its A Timeless Question asked by Senior Historian Evelyna on the Timeless Isle. It really doesn’t take long to do and that 45g really adds up – if Rel has all of his characters do this then he’ll make 360g a day just from this quest. You could even leave characters you don’t really play logged out next to the quest giver so you could login, do the daily & then wait 20s to log out.

If you do want to do more dailies, there are lots around to play with – some more annoying than others mind!

Grinding

Grinding for gold can work – a well geared character helps here obviously! I know that my tailors are now self-sufficent for cloth by killing the Yangol on the Timeless Isle whilst they do the Path of the Mistwalker daily for the 50VP. It also rewards 24g as well.

There is also the grinding of mobs in the Vale for Skyshards – lots of gold, items, etc to be had from those. The rares in the Vale can also drop Treasures of the Vale which are a nice bonus for crafting professions.

If you do grind for this or other mobs – eg for Black Prince rep – then make sure you use a potion of luck so that mobs have a chance to drop Plundered treasure which will contain some gold and tradeskill items.

Special note: Timeless Isle

On the Timeless Isle, you occasionally get BoA items to create items suitable for your loot speciailization. These are nice, at 5g vendor price.

… but stop! If you get one of these and have a class suitable for using it, send it to them instead!

A good example of this are the Timeless Plate Leggings which vendor for 5g in their BoA state. However if you use them they could turn into an item which vendors for ~34g – eg Everbright Legplates.

If you have an enchanter it can be even better as you can create the item and them d/e to a sha crystal!

Professions

Professions can be a good source of gold and Rel does have some he can use

The farm

The farm can be a great source of materials for professions – currently I’m using 5 farms at the weekend to supply me with trillium ore for alchemy cooldowns. Whilst I could maximize the money from the farms I have by running all 8 all of the time, I’ve tried doing that and it takes some time to do all of the farms – roughly half an hour – and when it comes down to it, its not very fun! Using a subset of the farms over the weekend – so using a single seed bag – means I have sufficent materials for alchemy cooldowns, but don’t get horribly depressed and want to salt the farms. To stop me from being tempted into growing things on farms I’ve let go fallow I’ve planted trees.

If you do decide to make use of the farm, El’s Anglin’ has an awesome guide to the farm – if you’re chasing the farm then its hard to bet.

Cooking

Whilst most of the +300 food goes into making Deluxe Noodle Carts for raiding, the Ironpaw tokens slowly build up & I’ve been turning them into 100 Year Soy Sauce, Black Pepper and Rice Flour to sell on the auction house. Excess +300 food also ends up on the AH as you never have a even balance of foods from Nomi.

Alchemy

Outside of making potions of luck, I tend to make most of my money via transmutes – and so I tend to recommend that alchemists use transmutation mastery if you’re after gold.

The normal transmutes which are useful here are:

• Transmute 10x Ghost iron bars to to Trillium bars – no cooldown
• Transmute green quality gem and a golden lotus to make a blue quality gem – no cooldown
• Transmute 6x Trillium bars to make Living steel – 24hr cooldown

The first is a great transmute – take the ghost iron bars mining produces and make trillium bars. Those trillium bars can either be kept to turn into living steel, sold on the auction house or given to a blacksmith to turn into balanced ingots.

The second is good if you’ve got a good source of golden lotus – the best reliable one I’ve found is the farm – I tend to get between 4 and 12 golten lotus from each farming sessions. This does require a full farm mind! The end result can be nice to turn those annoying green quality gems you’ll have a lot of into blue ones which can be sold on the AH or cut by the JCer.

The last is lovely if you’ve got a blacksmith or engineer – which Rel has. It means that you can make your own living steel. Either to sell at ~230g a bar or add more value by turning into a belt buckle or an engineering pet / mount.

Jewelcrafting

Cut gems people want! Whilst this does mean having a good supply of gems & keeping an eye on the market via an AH addon you can make money here.

However a lot of other people will have the same idea – and at this point in the expansion there will not be hard to find cuts as all of the cuts can be found by doing the daily JC research.

One possible way here is to sell uncut gems, you may find they’ll sell to other JCers. And you can thus let them take the risk of making cuts other people don’t buy! Plus the delta between uncut gems and the cut gems aren’t that large.

Its a small market however since any JCer can also prospect.

You can also craft the mounts, but whilst they sell for ~22,000g to 25,000g for the blue ones and ~110,000g for the epic one, they require orbs of mystery to craft at 18,000g each. Along with living steel and stacks of gems.

Blacksmithing

You can make reasonable amounts of gold by selling belt buckles – they’re currently selling for around 300g each. However they require Living Steel to make and if you don’t have an alchemist to make these you’ll need to purchase them at around 230g each. So you’re looking to make ~70-100g per buckle. It is a fairly active market however – right now there are 36 on the auction house.

As with any upgrade item the price and demand will fluctuate over the week – so you may see spikes on Wednesdays and on the weekend.

Another option with blacksmithing is to make Balanced Trillium Ingots – the resulting items sell for between 1500g and 6500g. but it’ll take between 21 and 28 days to make a single item and requires trilium bars to do so.

Engineering

The start of expansion engineering mounts are high value, high risk items – whist they’ll sell for ~70,000g or so, that’s mostly thanks to needing three orbs of mystery to craft – that’s 54,000g after guild discount.

The Sky Golem is an option, but that’ll take 30 days to craft, along with 300x Ghost Iron bars to make the 30x Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source and 30 Living Steel bars. So whilst they sell for ~14,000g you’ll need to spend ~8,000g for materials.

You can make the pets as well – but they still take 15x Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source and 15x living steel bars. So you can make two pets or a SKy Golem!

Tailoring

Note: Rel doesn’t actually have a tailor on server – I’m leaving this here as others may find it useful

If you have a tailor you can make gold in several ways. There is the leg armor – they sell for between 400g and 500g, but will take an Imperial Silk to make.

If you have access to haunting spirits or blood spirits you can make a number of items – with the 522 items going for ~5,000g

The other option is to make the Royal Satchel, a 28 slot bag. The recipe needs exalted with the August Celestials and takes 12 Imperial Silk to craft. You can expect them to sell for ~3000g

Mining

Go on mining trips to make lots of ghost iron bars to sell on the AH or for an engineer to turn into Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source. You can also give them to a friendly Alchemist to turn into trillium bars which can be used by your blacksmith.

Skinning

Skin things, sell the leather! Without leatherworking to turn the leather into magnificent hides to then turn into leg armor it’ll be hard to do much else!