How viable is paying monthy subs via farming gold?

[alcsaar0]

I'm semi curious about trying out multiboxing on retail servers, after having played around with it a number of times on private servers.

However, I don't want to spend $45+ a month for subscriptions. I was considering whether it was possible to farm enough gold with out wanting to kms every month to fund subscriptions.

WoW tokens are ~110k gold each as of a couple days ago. I did some calculations. Even if I had herbalism on all my chars, most herbs sell for an average of 10-11g/each. If I average 3.5 herbs per done per char I'm making something like 115-140g "per" herb node.

That comes out to roughly 2600-2800 nodes I'd have to gather per month to pay for 3 subs. (I could just pay for one acc with $$$ and try to fund the other two, but still)

Obviously this is a real base line estimate/calculation. I'm sure there are other ways to make gold multiboxing. What are your guys' suggestions? Is it even possible with out driving me insane doing it every month? I've never been great at making a lot of gold in WoW

[JohnGabriel]

I could pay for my 5 with tokens, without any farming. My main teams have herb/mining and I just collect while I am out doing other things. The combination of herbs, ore, WQs, emmisary chests (2000+ gold each), and just playing and having fun makes me about 1.25 million gold a month.

This late in the expansion the herb/ore market is low, as well as pets, BoE gear, all very low. So many have unsubbed and waiting on the next big patch or expansion then the market will pick back up. You can still make gold doing the AoE semi-standstill hyper-spawn farming. The BoE market has tanked but just the raw gold and vendor trash is good. You do not even need to multibox, just join a 2x4 group in LFG.

I prefer the fun method over the farming method.

[alcsaar0]

I could pay for my 5 with tokens, without any farming. My main teams have herb/mining and I just collect while I am out doing other things. The combination of herbs, ore, WQs, emmisary chests (2000+ gold each), and just playing and having fun makes me about 1.25 million gold a month.

This late in the expansion the herb/ore market is low, as well as pets, BoE gear, all very low. So many have unsubbed and waiting on the next big patch or expansion then the market will pick back up. You can still make gold doing the AoE semi-standstill hyper-spawn farming. The BoE market has tanked but just the raw gold and vendor trash is good. You do not even need to multibox, just join a 2x4 group in LFG.

I prefer the fun method over the farming method.

How many character's are you running to make that much?

[JohnGabriel]

How many character's are you running to make that much?

I have 3 teams of 5 that I do the daily emissary with, the warfronts, the Island Expedition weekly, mission table, world bosses. Then I have 4 teams of 5 that are just used occasionally for something special, like having two 2000 gold emissaries in a row during an invasion, just 4 world quests gives you 20k per team.

Sometimes if I am bored I'll level more teams, currently have 2 teams I am leveling exp locked through dungeons to collect all the transmogs.

About 3 to 5 hours a day playing or so.

[alcsaar0]

I have 3 teams of 5 that I do the daily emissary with, the warfronts, the Island Expedition weekly, mission table, world bosses. Then I have 4 teams of 5 that are just used occasionally for something special, like having two 2000 gold emissaries in a row during an invasion, just 4 world quests gives you 20k per team.

Sometimes if I am bored I'll level more teams, currently have 2 teams I am leveling exp locked through dungeons to collect all the transmogs.

About 3 to 5 hours a day playing or so.

Right. That's a lot of teams I wouldn't have for many months time at best, so affording subs with just one team might be sketch...

[Fat Tire]

I pay 28-32/month for 4 accounts, I buy in 180 day lots in which as I play I gather gold and buy a tokens when I see prices low. Usually pay for 6 months and token 6 months. Comes out to ~4 dollars a month per account for the year.

[JohnGabriel]

If you plan to run mythic+ with your team, thats a huge gold sink as well.

You're probably just going to have to set aside some time for farming herb/ore. The nodes are plentiful and close together, your 2800 node estimate may not be too difficult to reach. Theres a potion and glove enchants to speed things up.

I have been paying a subscription lately, had to save up for that 5 million gold mount, and all the other expansion gold sinks. Back to tokens later.

[Agent 0013]

I 8-box and I haven't had an issue paying with tokens. I always buy the 6 month codes to save. To keep 8 accounts going you only need to make ~25k a day. Three subs is less than 10k a day. I do not farm, I gather ore and herbs while I go about my WQ and I make more than enough to keep me going. Aside from buying tokens I don't have many expenses since I haven't been pushing mythics or anything like that.

[MiRai]

Right. That's a lot of teams I wouldn't have for many months time at best, so affording subs with just one team might be sketch...
This may seem like an obvious statement, but unless you have millions of gold to initially invest into both the cost of the expansions and subscriptions required, you're going to have to either farm quite a bit, or pay out of pocket—that's just what it comes down to. People who pay for their subscriptions primarily through gold generally fall into two categories: A) they farm a lot, or B) they are established with several teams that they can do basic tasks that reward gold (like World Quest dailies).

[Agent 0013]

To add to my previous post; I definitely fall into MiRai's B category but I still think it is possible for anyone to pay their subs by doing what I do with the assumption that your economy is similar to mine and token prices stay stable, which they have for some time now. Yes, I do have the advantage of having 96 max level characters and I can take advantage of things like the 2k emissary reward when it comes around. However, gold from that sort of thing gets kept separate. All of the gold collected by toons from quest rewards and vendoring items gets put into my guild bank. Just from that I have made at least 7M gold so far this expansion. I used that to save up for gold sinks. The money I use to pay my subs comes from my bank toon. Everything that I don't vendor goes to the bank toon and gets sold on the AH. For the AH stuff it isn't so much about how many toons you have, it is more about how much time is played.