Tips for making gold (season oriented)

[Fuzzyboy]

Just a few more or less known gold-tips I thought I'd share. If you know of others, please append to the thread :-)

1) Prior to content patches, prices of enchanting mats and raw gems are low, right after, they skyrocket, because new gear that needs enchanting and gemming gets introduced. Tip: Buy and stock up on gems and enchanting mats a few weeks before patch hits.

2) Tip 1 goes for pvp season change as well

3) Sell potions. enchants, gems and enchanting mats during the week instead of during the weekend. Items tend to sell for a lot more during the week.

4) In game events: Find out what items are sought after and farm them - if possible in advance.

5) After an expansion hits: Until a month or two into a new expansion, BoE drops, dusts and shards sell for a lot of money. Sell it as soon as possible and do dungeon runs instead of dailes until the goldwell is dry :-)

[Nitro]

I decided to go the inscription route for making gold. I farmed up alot of gold with my multiboxing crew to get me some nice starting capitol and then i did this:


Max out inscription
Do your minor and northrend inscription craft every day until you have every single glyph
Make 3 alts to sell your glyphs and give them the best inscription bags in each bag slot (gives you a crazy amount of bag space)
Craft 20 of EVERY glyph and spread these across your 3 alts
Use Quick Auctions 2 to auto post all those glyphs for you and undercut the competion automatically, use a fallback price of 60 gold or so if not are on the AH. Hit the Cancel button to auto cancel all the autions you have been undercut on so you can report those.
Doing this I pull in anywhere from 500g to 3000g a day. This will depend on your servers competition and how often you feel like Cancel/Posting each day.

Take it a step further and use skillet to autocraft all the glyphs you are short on.

Once you get rolling with a good system it is VERY minimal time per day to make alot of gold. When you are posting every glyph in existance you will be amazed at how many you actually do sell at 60 gold each (awsome considering the cost per glyph to make is next to nothing).

[Ogloo]

the glyphs sell that much?

[Nitro]

Yup, the gold just rolls in every day.

[Ualaa]

I tried glyph sales, and they were not a consistent money maker on my server.
At some points, on a weekend you'll find only one copy of a glyph on the AH, and a price of 40g for it.
I'm not sure if this is a glyph seller or just a buy-low, sell-high person who noticed no competition for the glyph.

But 95% of the time, glyphs are undercut and re-undercut and will generally sell for under 1g each.
Even the new ones from the inscription books rarely have much more then 5g as the lowest price.
Selling the herbs for those glyphs is a lot more gold.

[Nitro]

I tried glyph sales, and they were not a consistent money maker on my server.
At some points, on a weekend you'll find only one copy of a glyph on the AH, and a price of 40g for it.
I'm not sure if this is a glyph seller or just a buy-low, sell-high person who noticed no competition for the glyph.

But 95% of the time, glyphs are undercut and re-undercut and will generally sell for under 1g each.
Even the new ones from the inscription books rarely have much more then 5g as the lowest price.
Selling the herbs for those glyphs is a lot more gold.

Did you cover every glyph on the market?

[Whowantstoknow]

Yeah since the guide on MMO-Champ everyone on my server joined the Glyph bandwagon. Really killed the market. I still make some gold but nowhere near as much as before.

[Lyonheart]

The most fun way I have found to make money is to PvP in WG and AV and buy epic gems with honor. I cap honor every week, sometimes more. I would say about 100k honor a week. thats 10 gems x7 ( i 7 box when i PvP ) I sell them for an average of 200 each ( cut>>bold..runed and delicate cardinal rubies )

[accretion]

Honestly, xmutes alone could keep most 5-boxers in the money to the tune of 1-2K/day. I currently have 6 Alchemists (6-8 epic gems/day), 2 Miners (Titansteel) and 2 Tailors (Moonshroud/Spellweave/Ebonweave). Toss in 4 Jewelcrafters spending 15 mins on the daily which adds gold and Dragon's Eyes, and that's an easy way to keep a steady income.

Skilling up is a bit of a pain, but well worth it after the second or third week of watching your net worth grow steadily. Most of the professions can either be bought or farmed without too much trouble, especially Tailoring. No excuse to not have at least a few Tailors doing a bunch of xmutes.

[Ualaa]

If you start with something or get into it early, you have the potential for pretty massive profits.
However, over time, others move into the market and compete which drives prices down.

For six months or so, I was doing Arbitrage on my server.

I made an excel spreadsheet of most items in the game and what they could disenchant into.
If the range for a given item level armor was 80% chance of 2-7 dust, my formula was (2+7)/2 * 0.80 * 0.95. But almost everything had a dust, shard and essence chance on DE.

Then I would scan the AH for a 10 level spread of gear.
Mainly interested in green armors for one scan and green weapons for another.
For a month or so, you could buy blue armors and DE for a profit too.

My auction mule was up to 22,000+ items disenchanted when I got out of that market.

Initially, dust would average 4g each, selling singles.
And I could easily sell an average of 500 dust per day.
It was an awful lot of time wasted for DE's, but that's what DVD's are for.

However, with competition, the price for a dust is now less then the cost to buy the greens.
I cannot make a profit. Too many idiots driving the price down.

[Volch0k]

With the current price of abyss crystals on my server (always over 40g, peaks 50g) there is nothing better them farming toc normal. 1000/g hour minimum, and atleast I can do this in my sleep (aka while watching tv at the same time)

Ofcourse, I've had my share of DE bought items, crafted earlier in wotlk.

[SideWays]

Yea I agree selling abyss crystals(farming ToC) is the best way of making easy money right now.. Although some idiots cut down the price to 40-45g per crystal I still make a LOT of money :)

Oh and dream shards arent bad too if you are running heroics for badges (sell for 25-30g each).

[Alemi]

I'm covering so many markets iit's quite enjoyable.

Tailoring: Netherweave bags, spellthreads, specialty cloth
JC: Gems, taking green gems and making rings and deing them for shards/dusts/essences
Glyphs: posting all the glyphs, darkmoon cards, tomes, snowfalls, etc.
Enchanting: all the scrolls are covered, shattering abyss crystals because 25g essences move too fast
Alchemy: daily transmute, reset the flask market every few days. I haven't made a single flask in 3 weeks? And I have stockpile of about 100 flasks ready for ICC.

Leatherworking is my last to level, but be damned if I can find enough freaking leather to get it up there. And the motivation to level them. I'm pulling in 3k-5k gross, spending 2k-3k on mats a day atm with about 1 1/2 hours of milling/prospecting/crafting a night.

[Fuzzyboy]

Honestly, xmutes alone could keep most 5-boxers in the money to the tune of 1-2K/day. I currently have 6 Alchemists (6-8 epic gems/day), 2 Miners (Titansteel) and 2 Tailors (Moonshroud/Spellweave/Ebonweave). Toss in 4 Jewelcrafters spending 15 mins on the daily which adds gold and Dragon's Eyes, and that's an easy way to keep a steady income.

Skilling up is a bit of a pain, but well worth it after the second or third week of watching your net worth grow steadily. Most of the professions can either be bought or farmed without too much trouble, especially Tailoring. No excuse to not have at least a few Tailors doing a bunch of xmutes.

I have no idea how people make 1-2k from transmutes. I have 4 alchemists and the mat cost of an epic gem on my server is around 25g. The uncut gems sell for around 150g, that's 500 gold per day (or a bit more when transmute mastery procs). Where do you get 1-2k from?

[Fuzzyboy]

The most fun way I have found to make money is to PvP in WG and AV and buy epic gems with honor. I cap honor every week, sometimes more. I would say about 100k honor a week. thats 10 gems x7 ( i 7 box when i PvP ) I sell them for an average of 200 each ( cut>>bold..runed and delicate cardinal rubies )

100k honor per week is pretty impressive - what is your honor / hr ratio? :-)

[Ualaa]

Having high end tradeskills for a range of trades is another method.

Let's say you have a Blacksmith, Enchanter, Leatherworker, Jewelcrafter, Scribe and Tailor.
Look for the high end recipes, which create the best crafted options available.
Look at the cost of the materials to make.
And what the final product is going for on the AH.

Many of these products will not be profitable to craft.
But you can do free combines and accept tips.

The ones which are profitable, get an idea of the mats you need.
Then have a few macro's made up. Something to the effect of:
/Trade Buying stacks of AAA, BBB and CCC, send to Toon CoD
Have a few spam macro's, which you click every hour or so, or whenever you pass through a densely populated zone.
You don't want to irritate people with the spam.
Price your stacks so they're cheaper then what you'd pay buying them on the AH, but fair enough priced that you're still a decent deal compared to listing stacks 2-3 times before they sell. A lot of mass farmers will CoD to you for a guaranteed sale now, rather then risk the AH.
List your items on the AH, but don't flood the market.

An example of this... One stack of Netherweave is enough cloth to make a Netherweave bag.
Price what a netherweave bag goes for, if you can get a stack of cloth for less then this, you can sew for a profit.

And netherweave bags are consistently one of the best selling items across all servers.
For proof, go to www.worldofwarcraft.com/toplist (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/toplist)
Then click on the "Auctions Sold" tab and choose a 7-day view.

[zanthor]

The Glyph industry is by far the biggest money maker I've ever had. I run a sizable chunk of the industry on Blackhand and utilize 2 scribes for my production cycle and 5 sales mules. Why 5 instead of 3? Time taken.

2 scribes means I can mill herbs faster. I'll be scaling up to 4 scribes soon (not 5 because my 5th guy already has two maxed tradeskills I intend to keep for raiding.) This means I can make inks faster and mill herbs faster than any single player can hope to.

5 auction house mules because again, I can post 5x faster, get mail out of the box 5x faster, etc... most people think thats not a big deal, but when you consider I keep 2500~ auctions listed at any given time, and you can only get 50 mail items out of the box / minute... it's the difference between 50 minutes at the mailbox and 10 minutes at the mailbox.

As far as results go, I earn 750G a day (pure profit, thats after expenses for ink, papers, etc are tallied) like clockwork. I spend about 2 hours every 2 days to do this.

[Moorea]

I didn't know about
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/toplist/index.html?en,auctionsold
thanks for the tip - anyone else surprised that the #2 seller is Runecloth ?

[Whowantstoknow]

Not really its farmed for rep to get the Argent Tournament title and access to the vendor

[accretion]

I have no idea how people make 1-2k from transmutes. I have 4 alchemists and the mat cost of an epic gem on my server is around 25g. The uncut gems sell for around 150g, that's 500 gold per day (or a bit more when transmute mastery procs). Where do you get 1-2k from?

Well, it isn't JUST the Alch transmutes themselves, although that's the payoff step. The reality is a bit more involved, though not a lot.

Step 1 - Buy Saronite Ore for 14g/stack (avg.)
Step 2 - Prospect; re-purpose greens for DE recipes and JC dailies
Step 3 - Purchase Eternal ____ from AH

Now for Math. Let's assume it costs me roughly 5g per blue gem from prospecting (it's actually less). And let's also say that the Eternal ___ costs 15g on average. Two recipes use Eternal Shadow, which can usually be purchased for 5-7g/each, and the other three fluctuate between 10-30 depending on the day. Anyway, 15g seems reasonable to me.

So, 5g + 15g = 20g invested per xmute. Assuming a 15% proc rate for xmute mastery, that means I average 7 epic gems per day from my 6 Alchemists, at a total cost of 120g. I sell these gems between 140-220g each, so let's assume 175g as the average. That nets me roughly 1050g once I take out original costs and the AH cut. I don't always sell out every day, so the actual number is lower some days, but my inventory nearly always sells on weekends, so those days net more. The same principle applies for cloth procs. And following Ualaa's principles, you can convert them into robes, gloves, bags, etc. for a better margin.

As for JC dailies, it's pretty straightforward. Invest 10-15 minutes, collect 13g for each toon, plus 90-120g per Dragon's Eye that you redeem. That's 100-135g per toon, per day.

So, once you level up the right professions, for a minimal investment of time (an hour of AH & prospecting every week or two, plus one daily), you can easily rake in 1-1.5K/day.

[Whowantstoknow]

I have more than enough saronite ore to last me until next expansion :P I make around 3K a day selling gems. My JCer is definately my most profitable (I have at least 1 of each) but I think I am unlucky with Xmute procs as its seems I never get any