Casual Gold Making in The War Within - Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 348

Live Posted 10 days ago by SamadanPlaysWoW

SamadanCasual Gold Making
Hi all,

I am playing casually (2-3 hrs a day). Doing mostly M+ and heroic raid

I'm not looking to make millions of gold. Things like flipping / market speculation / spamming trade chat crafting are too complicated and too time consuming for me.

Is there any simple ways to just make some decent gold, while playing the game, so I can afford things like enchants / pots / flasks / repair?

Concentration crafting is probably the way to go for profit with minimal efforts. If you’re not willing to go into crazy shuffles to catch up, enchantment probably has the easiest catchup AND the biggest profit/conc (at least at a relatively low level of optimization, idk what actual goblins are doing with their conc).
The basic idea is to do barely reach a r2 craft with as cheap reagents as possible and then use your concentration to get a r3 instead. CraftSim helps a ton with it, as it can find your optimal reagent setup and even lookup what’s your best recipe to spend your concentration on for profit. It does require either TSM or Auctionator to know the market prices.
With a decent setup you can get like ~5k po out of 400 concentration. And I haven’t minmaxed at all (green non-enchanted profession gear, no extensive research on optimal talent builds or recipe to farm, etc).

Alternatively, mining or dual gathering. Imo mining has been overperforming herbalism by quite a lot those past weeks so I’d mostly mine but ymmv. It can be a bit grindy to catchup on all the knowledge points, but it shouldn’t take too long and then you’re on your way for a steady revenue.
I do 30 minutes sessions with a phial of vision (truesight) to see all stealthy nodes (pretty important) and resell non-r1 materials (because I keep the r1 for my other professions), and usually I get like 15k-20k out of it. Now the price might crash down over time but so far it’s still a pretty decent income imo.

If you’re doing any profession at all, I’d suggest getting the Myu weakaura for knowledge points.
Goldzen_tv
Get mining and herbing on your main. Then you fly around gathering istead of waiting for raid or M+ invite. Don’t idle in Dornogal, but «idle» flying around (even with normal flying to get it done in a way more chill way). You will probably have enough money to buy consumes for the season, but not enough for a token.

I have a guildmate earn his money like this. By the time i have spent jumping around in Dornogal or inside the raid (waiting dor the group/raid to form), he have made a couple of thousand gold each time.

By have herb/mining on your main, you will gather for more minutes total, than having a separate alt getherer. Just because it’s way more convinient to pick up those nodes on your way to do your normal stuff.

Try picking up fishing and soaring around Hallowfall for Blood in the Water nodes.

Slum Sharks sell for 800+ a pop on the AH last I checked (2 hrs ago) and you can get quite a bit of gold from casually fishing and getting mining/herbalism nodes between fishing nodes.

Plus, fishing is relaxing and doesn't require knowledge points or anything, just a rod and a node.

Tips on fishing, nodes are server side, so if you want to be courteous to other players, don't fish when another person is fishing already. Shore wreckage/debris looking nodes give transmogs and rare permanent boosts to fishing skill and perception. There's a boat toy you can get for fishing nodes out in the open water from Dragonflight called Tuskarr Dinghy, check it out on wowhead its p easy to get.

Tailoring/Enchanting. Going as casually as possible, you grab your unraveling and weaving, and a resourcefulness too. Unravel cloth to threads, sell. Rinse, repeat. You can do this in small or large batches, though risk goes up with size. It's an excellent thing to do between queues for M+ or PvP, or during raid while the raid leader yammers on.

Over time, invest in resourcefulness and multicraft, you can expand into bolts, and turn unraveling>Bolts>Bracers>DEing into an easy shuffle. If you go into the Dawn/Duskweave trees, you'll eventually be able to turn concentration into gold on Spellthreads very easily. Slowly expand through that, expand through embroidery, maybe toss a few bags up. You can eventaully expand through gear, grabbing the occasional public order, or doing PvP gear at the start of different seasons, with crafts/recrafts being abundant on some servers. Maybe craft the occasional bags. Bags are a great general market to be in, through a bit more restrictive than in DF.

Enchanting, I'd hop through DEing, go for Blue and Green gear DEing. Then slowly make your way through the shatter tree. Don't worry if it takes a while. The gold is eventually working your DEing into a shuffle, where you can DE the bracers you can cheaply make, and then make a value judgement depending on the market whether to sell shards, or shatter to dust and sell dust. Over time, you can buy cheap weapon recipes. for 100-200k (I know, quite an investment for you atm, but it's worth it long term.) Work on maxing those, but basically shatter every day or so and use concentration to make max ranked weapon enchants for a cool 10k+ each profit (which will naturally go down over time.) You'll eventually be able to make more and more of these.

That would be the formula I'd give more casual guildies, and I have already. One of my guildies was struggling with his plans, he took me up on it two weeks ago. In two weeks with a fresh character and fresh professions, he's up almost a million, just messing around very casually between running content.

Like all markets, you need to keep and eye out, because markets swing, but by and large, it's a very steady business that's very low effort. You can watch TV, or do it between other activities, and it's very profitable, especially considering the investment.

I have 12 characters with skinning and I went for the Supreme Beast Lure (I think that's what it's called) first on all of them. They're all parked where I can just log in, use that lure, then send the beast fang to my main. Prices on the fang have dropped to about 2k each from 10k+ the first week (Tichondrious US), but it's still only about 10-15 minutes a day for ~24k gold daily for me.

On my druid I then specced into the first tree, got all the +skill from there, then went leather, and am now almost done with chitin. On that druid I'll join bee/wolf farm groups occasionally.

Editing to note that for the lure, you only need level 70. You can spawn the 80 mob on the edge of the city there and then run to the guards for an easy kill.
20th Anniversary Gold Making20th Anniversary EventThraun GamingMaxing Thaumaturgyu/UmbralDarkling
After reaching the thaumaturgy pinnacle I can verify it is well worth the investment. My profit margins are fat and the effort is minimal.

The key is to attain 375 skill in Thaumaturgy where you can turn T1 mats into T2 mats. You may be thinking that this isn't all that useful since T1 and T2 mats are very similar in price but I'll explain why it matters.

The difference between T2 and T3 Herbs is often large enough where you can see more than a 5x difference. This is an opportunity to increase margins and ensure that you aren't flooding an already saturated market with T2s. This is of course going to require Herbalism to the point you can convert T2s and T3s.

Largely stick with Mercurial and Ominous Thaumaturgy due to Volatile being very bad for conversions. Mycobloom floor is too low and the other materials don't have enough profit to warrant converting. Your target herbs are Lure Drop, Arathors Spear, and even Orbonid has a decent spread. Things like Ironclaw, Storm Leather, Blessing Blossom, and Gloom chitin should all be milled down. I Recommend selling the Volatile mats (Bismuth, Mycobloom, Weaver Web, and Storm Dust) for the reasons mentioned above.

We are able to further increase margins by selling the gems we get from procs and also making the Blasphemite out of the Gleaming Transmutagen. You don't make your big money here but remember, everything you utilize will ensure you net profit stays healthy and fat.

The requirements to achieve this are to have Alchemical Mastery maxed and everything is Thaumaturgy except for Transmutations as this offers no increase to our Thaumaturgy skill. You must also have all blue Alchemical Profession gear as well as be a Goblin or Kultiran. Without the racial bonus you will be 2 points shy of the skill requirement to transmute T1s into T2s.

Remember to pivot to market demand, buy lowest price mats, and check the AH regularly for the best deals. Doing all this you can easily make 600k a day with minimal effort depending on the health of the market.

Let's defy the law of equivalent exchange!

There's no real secret, just some work. Here's all that's needed:

1 - Be goblin or KT race, very important. Without it you're not able to Thaumaturgy rank 1 to rank 2 mats.

2 - Be maxed in every single node giving Thaumaturgy skill. You can easily find all of them by simply reading the nodes.

3 - Have blue accessories with resourcefulness craft and enchants and max skill.

4 - Make a spreadsheet with the results for each material that you can prospect.
There's some recursion in the process, make sure you factor that in since this is where you're making your profit.

5 - Simply plug in the current prices into your spreadsheet and start making the ones with the highest margins.

Bonus: 6 - After you're confident enough in your model. You can make a tsm string with the formula you get and start automating the whole process.
Eyan Gold Deflation
Where does gold come from in the game?

These are the sources I can think of: quests, selling items to vendors, mobs, and bosses. I get the impression that these sources have decreased compared to before.

Providing services in the game, such as gathering herbs or mining, doesn't create new gold—it just moves gold between players.

At the same time, the cost of repairs is increasing. A repair for my gear now costs almost 1000g. It’s not that I have little gold, but I’m not generating much new gold in the market; the gold I gain comes at the expense of other players.

What do you think—are we heading towards deflation?

SL and previous xpacs had tables, and DF had race quests that a lot of people did for raw gold.

I don't know if we'll see deflation necessarily but I definitely expect less inflation compared to before because of the absence of two sources.

For example the price of a token has not increased much recently even though demand for crafted items has been steadily dropping.

Weekly caches are being upgraded in 11.0.5, but I don't know if that will affect gold and if it does, how much those even make up of total gold printing.

Not this expansion, they’ve been doing it for years. in BFA I was grinding for AH mount and distinctly remember them nerfing old raids and other raw gold farms which made my life harder, then they banned boosting communities as an easy way to make gold for many. Then they consolidated the AH so bots on dead servers tank the prices of farmable goods on live servers.

Then they nerfed more recent gold farms like mission tables, dragon races, etc. All the while increasing the cost of repairs and borrowed power like crafting gear each patch, and adding big ticket FOMO purchases.

The one and only sole purpose of all of this: selling more WoW tokens. Since Microsoft bought Acti-Blizzard theyve been cooking up ways to have microtransactions in WoW, and this was their solution: make it obnoxiously time inefficient to farm gold so most regular players just buy a token every few months as a soft microtransaction. So yes they’re intentionally deflating the economy while adding more gold sinks so you have to buy gold through them.

When the wow token first came out in WoD, they were set at 30k and quickly tanked to 25k or so as people were super happy to spend $20 and get that amount.

In 2024 that is such a small amount of gold, nobody would be willing to spend $20 for that much.

Heck, you can get 50k in an hour of farming herbs and ore right now.

I bring this up because the value of the token is a product of players determining what is worth their time.

We have had a lot of currency added to the game since WoD, including the expansions after the mission table was removed, and as a result of that increase in currency, prices of everything has increased.

Players were buying and selling wow tokens at 30k, and they have done so at 300k. If anything is true, if there was an expectation that gold would experience a deflationary period, that is, its value increases, people would be incentivized to buy and sell wow tokens LESS.

With inflation, meaning your gold is worth less, you need more gold to buy an item, an enchant, or a wow token.

If you had the expectation that inflation would make wow tokens more expensive in the future, you would be incentivized to spend your gold reserves now, when they are cheap, vs later when prices go up.

With deflation, you would be incentivized to wait to spend your gold reserves if prices were dropping.

Not everything is a “wow token conspiracy”Further Reading/r/woweconomyDiscord Server

Comment by PKitojoyFor casual players (2-3 hours a day), selling tokens for gold would be the way to go.
Gathering just increases that players' play time (which that player could have been enjoying m+ or raid instead).
And the concentration recharge just takes too long and does not cover the daily consumables.
Not forgetting the need to sell those mats too.Comment by RellyneEverytime you would start to think that Blizzard doesn't do things like that on purpose, remember that they're the ones creating the craft/mat economy.

They're the ones putting rare mats like null stones and tinderboxes on very stupid recipes like BS stones or green gear. They're the ones attempting to hold the tinderbox problem for as long as they could. From the early access "professions won't be available, but surprise, they are!", to prof shufling (which is very simple to fix) and moving most of artisan mettle/knowledge to the very expensive patron order system.

So yes, they're going hard with the gold sink, even though gold sinks never work. Its main target are people with infinite gold ("legal" or illegal) and they will never go out of gold, they'll just print more by any means, including buying tokens for $$. Gold sink only hurts the casual player, which aren't the main target of it (but are the majority of the player base) as it is useless to remove so little gold from the servers.Comment by xDxDEverytime you would start to think that Blizzard doesn't do things like that on purpose, remember that they're the ones creating the craft/mat economy.

They're the ones putting rare mats like null stones and tinderboxes on very stupid recipes like BS stones or green gear. They're the ones attempting to hold the tinderbox problem for as long as they could. From the early access "professions won't be available, but surprise, they are!", to prof shufling (which is very simple to fix) and moving most of artisan mettle/knowledge to the very expensive patron order system.

So yes, they're going hard with the gold sink, even though gold sinks never work. Its main target are people with infinite gold ("legal" or illegal) and they will never go out of gold, they'll just print more by any means, including buying tokens for $$. Gold sink only hurts the casual player, which aren't the main target of it (but are the majority of the player base) as it is useless to remove so little gold from the servers.Comment by xDxDDouble postComment by OlderSchool457Sounds like Blizzard approves of the Profession Shuffle Exploit.
So, is it i bug to be fixed or a future Feature everyone should read up on and plan for later?Comment by OlderSchool457Everytime you would start to think that Blizzard doesn't do things like that on purpose, remember that they're the ones creating the craft/mat economy.

They're the ones putting rare mats like null stones and tinderboxes on very stupid recipes like BS stones or green gear. They're the ones attempting to hold the tinderbox problem for as long as they could. From the early access "professions won't be available, but surprise, they are!", to prof shufling (which is very simple to fix) and moving most of artisan mettle/knowledge to the very expensive patron order system.

So yes, they're going hard with the gold sink, even though gold sinks never work. Its main target are people with infinite gold ("legal" or illegal) and they will never go out of gold, they'll just print more by any means, including buying tokens for $$. Gold sink only hurts the casual player, which aren't the main target of it (but are the majority of the player base) as it is useless to remove so little gold from the servers.Comment by Innerpain99Last week i did test how much gold can make for 1 week. I run old world dungeons for transmog and recipes and stock up items for 2 milion gold worth in ah.Then i lvl up my herbalism and mining from scrach.Start was very bad gold per hour but when i got more points things get better.Resoults are 716 422 gold for around 25 hours of play time and tbh it was more fun than running s1 m+ dungeons :)Comment by ElzbeitaOne place I push my guild towards all the time, it can sometimes take awhile to sell, but Pets. Its all About Pets.
You don't need to level them, you don't need to sit at rare spawns for hours. Most people that have been playing for awhile have 100's if not millions worth in pets. I check 10 spawn locations a week, total of 2hrs in downtime to see if rares are up but I do not wait. I make 3-4m a month. But I am also into pet battling. One of my guild members regularly brings in 800-900k from pets a month. If you are willing to setup addons like Rematch, Pet Scripts, and Rematch-TSM-Price-Data it can help you make so much more gold. There is also two pet dungeons that add a ton of gold to the total.Comment by hadware2Last week i did test how much gold can make for 1 week. I run old world dungeons for transmog and recipes and stock up items for 2 milion gold worth in ah.Then i lvl up my herbalism and mining from scrach.Start was very bad gold per hour but when i got more points things get better.Resoults are 716 422 gold for around 25 hours of play time and tbh it was more fun than running s1 m+ dungeons :)Comment by GoldzenDeflationary expansion 100% imho, so many more gold sinks and less raw gold income will bring the inflation down alot the token
will just adjust lower just similar to how cata token works. Its great for the in game economy but alas my 100 million gold in TWW goal
might be alot harder than I thought but i'm not giving up.Comment by facetiousgerbilCareful about suggesting that maybe you don't start fishing in the same pool as others. I have had mountains of hatred sent to me for suggesting that it's incredibly rude, and people proudly admitting that they'll do it anyway because f you. 'Sorry not sorry.' There's a lot of players out there that just want to be jerks to other people for literally no reason.Comment by YaduaI think definition of casual player differ from player to player, most suggestions are simply not for a casual player, but someone more invested. Hell using addons already transcend definition of casual player (at least for me).Comment by Mednawhat a wildly editorialized and unhinged post about gold lmaoComment by arnotaFor casual players (2-3 hours a day), selling tokens for gold would be the way to go.
Gathering just increases that players' play time (which that player could have been enjoying m+ or raid instead).
And the concentration recharge just takes too long and does not cover the daily consumables.
Not forgetting the need to sell those mats too.Comment by glassleoConcentration crafting is just bad advice at this point. The profit margins are low and you have to babysit the AH when you sell.Comment by ScaryfoxI'm seriously not sure how that was a proper response to the player complaining about gold sinks. As much as SL was boring, I was able to make thousands of gold just simple Emissary quests. I probably can't make the same amount now since it went down from 2,000-3,000 gold to just 200-300.Comment by SoleniaIf you are a casual you buy a token. The time spend farming gold is not worth it if your main focus is m+ / raiding.

Casuals make maybe 30k an hour = 10h for a token (eu)... That's ridiculous, even begging on the streets will probably be a better time/money investment.Comment by ViktorGonzalesand people wonder why players rolling need on everything they can in raids and try to sell the itemComment by SilverdevilboySome people who clearly don't play much of the actual game talking about gold deflation.

Bosses drop more gold than ever before, grey items are more plentiful and worth more, the weekly quest gives more than twice as much gold as it used to, emissary quests are back in a new form giving 1.2k per character, and patron orders are giving all crafters a raw gold income that's brand new....the average player is getting much more raw gold than they used to.Comment by SilverdevilboyI'm seriously not sure how that was a proper response to the player complaining about gold sinks. As much as SL was boring, I was able to make thousands of gold just simple Emissary quests. I probably can't make the same amount now since it went down from 2,000-3,000 gold to just 200-300.