Comprehensive WoW Classic Gold Guide

Thanks for taking a look at our comprehensive gold making guide for WoW Classic! Gold serves as the primary form of currency in Azeroth and is required to purchase several important things for your character. Without gold, you’ll quickly realize just how limited you are – both in power and speed!

One thing that is really nice about farming gold is the different number of ways you can actually make it. Whether you’re interested in making crafts with professions, farming for mob drops, flipping on the auction house, or creating a service, there’s definitely a gold making method for you. Fortunately for you, this guide will completely explain all of these gold farming strategies and how you can use them to start creating your own stream of gold revenue!

Why is gold a necessity to fully enjoying Azeroth?

• New abilities!
• Mounts!
• Enchants!
• Gear!
• Anything else!

While gold isn’t technically required to play World of Warcraft, you literally will not get far without it. Anything you need to purchase will require gold (or silver and copper), including your character’s class abilities. Leveling does not necessarily make your character much stronger, but the addition of new ranks for core abilities and stronger equipment will make a much larger impact. Simply put, you’re going to need gold just to deal some decent damage!

Getting all the way to level 60 will surely take you a long time and is a majority of the game’s beauty. One of the most effective ways of increasing your leveling speed is with a mount. At level 40, you can ride a mount specific to your faction (or others if you are exalted with them). This will increase your movement speed by 60%, which is absolutely massive even if it doesn’t seem like it. You won’t be able to summon your mount in combat and there is a good chance of being dismounted when you are struck passing by enemies, but the time it takes to travel from point A to point B will go by much faster!

Mounts are spectacular, but like everything else in Azeroth, you’ll need to pay for one. You also need to pay for riding training so you can even summon your mount after purchasing it. Your beginner mount (level 40) will cost you a total of 100 gold (before any discounts for reputation). This might not seem like a large number, but gold is incredibly hard to come across in WoW Classic.

If you’re lucky, quests will reward you with a few silver. Collect 100 of those bad boys and you’ll have one whole gold. Most items dropped from mobs aren’t individually valuable either, but all of those will slowly add up over time if you’re careful to spend significantly less than you make. So when it comes to having 100 gold for a mount at level 40, you probably won’t have this naturally unless you’ve spent some time farming for gold! Don’t even get started on the 1,000 gold requirement to upgrade to 100% epic mount speed at level 60!

After enough effort and time, you’ll finally reach level 60 and begin the second part of your journey. You won’t need to buy new abilities anymore, but an epic mount and enchants are very likely in your future. Both of these can get quite expensive, so you’ll need a way to reliably generate gold to afford these luxuries. If you only quest and focus on leveling on your way to 60, there’s just no way you’re going to have a healthy supply of gold. Gold is ultimately the key to convenience and power, so you’ll definitely want to put the work in now so you can kick back and relax later.

Important Concepts to Consider

When it comes to actually making gold, there are several ways you can actually do it. How you end up making gold will ultimately depend on what you’re willing to do and how well you can do it. Your need for gold will begin immediately, meaning that even from level 1 you can (and should) start making gold! The most reliable ways of making gold often require you to be high level, but that doesn’t mean that your lower levels don’t matter. You can make the most of them by keeping these important concepts below in mind so that you stay in a gold-making mindset!

Class Matters

• Anything works.
• Mages have an advantage.

No matter what class you want to play, there’s some way for your character to make gold. However some methods of gold farming are certainly easier when playing a specific class. Mages in particular tend to be the best class for making gold from mob farming. The combination of strong area-of-effect damage and damage mitigation in the form of crowd control gives them the capacity to handle more enemies than most other classes. Not only that, but they also have a built-in service offering in the form of portals to major cities.

Despite this undeniable advantage, being a mage won’t necessarily cause you to make more gold than another class unless you know how to make the toolkit work. Other classes, like hunters and warlocks, also tend to have an easier time farming due to the assistance from pets. Mob farming may not be the best way for you to make money, so ultimately there is no need to worry about what class to play and instead focus on what gold farming technique you are most skilled at!

Cautious Spending

• Only buy what you need.
• Don’t buy something that is quickly outdated.

While you are leveling, you may be tempted to buy a wide variety of training and items. One of the simplest ways to increase your overall gold pool is by adapting your mindset to spend gold only when you need to. There are several things you’ll arguably need while leveling, like updated food and water, training for new abilities and professions, and even a mount. All of these provide a direct benefit to your leveling experience, whether it be through convenience or added power.

There are also several other items in the game that may seem like they are worth buying, but aren’t actually worth the long term investment (did someone say Fiery War Axe?). Generally speaking, you should try to avoid buying any weapons or gear as much as possible. There are a few exceptions to this rule, like purchasing vendor sold weapons, but you should generally avoid the auction house when considering equipment.

Some of the guiltiest offenders are epic items in around level 35-40, like Bow of Searing Arrows, Ardent Custodian, Dazzling Longsword, and Gut Ripper. All of these items are indeed quite powerful, but they are almost always prohibitively expensive. It is very hard to justify paying often more than the price of a mount for an item that is 20+ levels below max, especially because they will not increase your leveling speed by much in comparison.

The gear you receive will make you stronger, but there’s a great chance of finding something comparable or better in a few levels. And if you were really dedicated, you could simply find any upgrades you wanted by running dungeons. Try to pinch your copper and only spend it when you really need something. This will let you naturally have more gold over time, making it much easier for you to afford your mount and anything else you’d want!

Make and Use a Bank Alt

• Mail items that you want to sell.
• Use your mailboxes as more inventory space.
• Hold investment items in your bank.

Believe it or not, an alternative character made specifically for banking and auction house activities is a key part of your financial success. This isn’t very difficult at all, only requiring you to run to your faction city after creating a character. If you are interested in at least reaching 75 in a profession, level 5 will also be needed. Like the name suggests, this character can be used for another bank inventory to hold items as investments and stock up on any materials you want.

Bank alts are also fantastic because they give your main character ultimate freedom. One of the biggest constraints with trying to make gold on one character is that you can only be in one place at a time. This means that anytime you want to sell something on the auction house, you’d need to actually go locate an auction house in a major city to do so. And if you ever need materials or consumables, you’d need to stop what you’re doing to restock.

With a bank alt, you now have a permanent contact point at an auction house. You can send in-game mail between your characters, meaning that everything you farm up on your main character can be sent to your bank alt and listed on the auction house when you switch over. Even better, the mailbox effectively becomes a huge source of storage. Unread mail will stay in your inbox for 30 days, meaning that you can send hundreds of items between your characters without ever actually holding them on either. Just don’t forget to take them out before they expire!

How to Make Gold

Now that we’ve got all the general advice covered, it’s time to talk about how you can actually make all this gold. The honest and simple truth is that it is not inherently difficult. There are many different ways to go about it, some of which are definitely more effective than others. However, it will almost always require time and effort to see a return.

Something like using your professions not only requires you to level your professions, but you’ll also spend plenty of time gathering materials or making goods once you actually have the skill level. Farming for item drops is luck-based, so you can end up spending several hours and make very little gold, or be there for 10 minutes and walk away with a few really nice items.

Even offering a service will require you to spend time finding buyers and then actually performing the service itself, but this can easily be the most lucrative option when you start talking about selling raid clears. The last option is flipping on the auction house, but even this will take time for you (or an addon) to analyze the auction house, find deals, relist them, and wait for them to sell. Regardless of what you try and do, understand it usually isn’t a get-rich-quick method unless you get really skilled!

Professions

• Start immediately at level 5.
• Try to pick professions that complement each other.

Professions are great for crafting gear, consumables, and item enhancements to make your character stronger, but they’re also one of the most consistent techniques for actually generating gold. You certainly can create and sell crafted good, but you can also pick up gathering professions and sell the raw materials required for crafting. Other players will always need metal ore, herbs, leather skins, and cloth to level up their own profession skills and make items of their own.

You can have any two primary professions, of which you can view them all here! You should learn them as soon as you can (level five) to maximize gold income. By default, gathering professions like skinning, mining, and herbalism are all used to directly support crafting professions (in this case, leatherworking, blacksmithing, engineering, and alchemy). This means that some profession pairings can be quite odd. If you pick up alchemy, it does not make a lot of sense for you to learn mining or even another crafting profession.

Having two crafting professions at level 60 can be great for boosting your combat power, but they do not work for each other, therefore meaning that your professions are working against each other. Once WoW Classic has enough players around max level, crafting professions do tend to make more gold as demand for max-level profession crafts increase.

However, intentionally limiting yourself from access to raw materials for crafting will reduce your gold income significantly if you don’t have an alt with corresponding gathering professions. You may even find that selling the raw materials you collect can actually net you more gold than trying to craft it into something else, especially within the first few months of launch. It’s pretty difficult to go wrong with gathering professions, but whatever you choose, try to pick two professions that actually work well together!

Material Farming

• Try to use skinning and/or herbalism.
• Fishing is an excellent investment.
• Farm in optimized locations.

Farming raw materials is undoubtedly the most accessible technique to make gold. This is because anyone can do it, regardless of class, level, or skill. When it comes to collecting raw crafting materials, there are definitely optimal locations where you can find them. Most often this involves just finding a zone of the corresponding level range, but even within them there are ideal areas that make farming more efficient.

If you’re going to farm for raw materials, skinning and herbalism are generally your best options. Mining isn’t a bad choice for low levels, but high amounts of competition make it not as good. Skinning is fantastic because you will inevitably kill hundreds of beasts by completing and traveling to quest objectives, almost guaranteeing yourself corpses to skin.

On the other hand, herbalism can also have a lot of competition, but the high income potential (especially at max level) makes it an excellent choice regardless. And even if you don’t have tailoring, you’ll also still pick up cloth from humanoid enemies. This should also be saved to sell on the auction house.

Outside of the big three gathering professions, you can also make a pretty penny with high level fishing. With 300 fishing, you can easily catch expensive fish all around Azeroth. These are used for important cooking and alchemy recipes, which means they will always be in demand. Fishing is an extremely boring skill for many people, which means most people just don’t have the patience to reach 300. If you’re willing to make the time investment, then you’ll definitely appreciate the ability to literally fish for gold whenever you need some!

Below we’ll include all of the best spots to farm for materials with your gathering professions. For skinning and cloth drops, these locations are also chosen based on what other drops can be acquired. For example, the location for farming Medium Leather is also fantastic for picking up uncommon equipment highly desired by level 19 twinks.

Best Skinning Spots

Medium Leather – Wetlands, Level 27+, Mottled Razormaws and Mottled Scythemaws (Raptors).

For this spot, you’ll want to massacre raptors found at Whelgar’s Excavation Site. You can also save any Raptor Eggs and level 19 magical equipment you find to sell on the auction house. The raptors will also drop plenty of grey items, so make sure to have some open bag space.

Heavy Leather – Swamp of Sorrows, Level 37+, Swamp Jaguars (Cats).

Within the sorrowful swamp, you can find some vicious cats that are worth your time. Not only can you farm Heavy Leather and Thick Leather, but you can also collect Large Fangs and Wicked Claws. Swamp Jaguars will also drop a Large Knapsack (12 slot bag) on occasion. You can be sure they’ll drop plenty of grey items too.

Thick Leather / Hide – Felwood, Level 50+ (52 recommended), Angerclaw Bears, Angerclaw Grizzlies, and Angerclaw Maulers (Bears).

Felwood is definitely one of the best zones for making gold in all of Azeroth. For Thick Leather and hide, you can kill the Angerclaw ursine found across a majority of the zone shown in purple. You can also collect Rugged Leather and hide less commonly and even Warbear Leather from them. In addition, these bears can drop both Journeyman’s Backpack (14 slot bag) and Traveler’s Backpack (16 slot bag).

Rugged Leather / Hide – Eastern Plaguelands, Level 56+, Plaguebats and Monstrous Plaguebats (Bats).

Plaguebats = Yellow (Ranged)

Monstrous Plaguebats = Orange (Melee)

If you’re interested in a better source of Rugged Leather, the bats of Eastern Plaguelands are your go-to. These creepy screechers will also drop Wicked Claw and plenty of grey items to sell to a vendor. Traveler’s Backpack (16 slot bag) can also be seen as a rare drop here. Importantly, ordinary plaguebats have an area-of-effect fear, making them quite infuriating as a melee attacker. On the other hand, monstrous plaguebats have a silence lasting 10 seconds, making them equally frustrating as a spellcaster.

Feralas, Level 60 + friend, Chimaeroks, Arcane Chimaeroks, and Chimaerok Devourers.

If you’re max level and have a friend with you, then the chimaeroks on the Isle of Dread are an excellent alternative. They are a good source of Rugged Leather, but you should seek them out for their Chimaerok Tenderloin in particular. Good tanks will always use Dirge’s Kickin’ Chimaerok Chops, which requires Chimaerok Tenderloin to create. This rare meat can’t be found anywhere else in the game!

Best Herbalism Spots

Gromsblood – Felwood, Level 48+ (240 Herbalism).

With 240 herbalism, you can collect Gromsblood. 30 of these are required to craft Flask of the Titans, the raid consumable for tanks. Most of the nodes in Felwood can be found by following the path in orange.

Ghost Mushroom – The Hinterlands, Level 49+ (245 Herbalism).

When you have at least 245 herbalism, you can gather the uncommon Ghost Mushroom. There are less than 10 nodes in all of The Hinterlands and they can be found at both areas circled in blue above. These fungi are used for invisibility potions and shadow power potions, both with important functions.

Dreamfoil – Azshara, Level 54+ (270 Herbalism).

Another important herb is Dreamfoil, requiring 270 herbalism. There’s no surprise why Dreamfoil has such a high demand because it is used to make Mageblood Potion, Major Mana Potion, and Flask of Supreme Power. It’s honestly all over Azshara, but you’ll find a majority of the plants by sticking to the green route.

Mountain Silversage – Winterspring, Level 56+ (280 Herbalism).

Once you’ve reached 280 herbalism, the icy reaches of Winterspring are now a good choice. Here you can find Mountain Silversage, another essential component for Flask of Supreme Power and a requirement for Elixir of the Mongoose. Unfortunately most of the nodes are fairly spread out across the zone, but try to stick to the heart of the area with the path below.

Black Lotus – Silithus, Level 60 recommended (300 Herbalism).

The most expensive herb in the game is Black Lotus. The reason why? Every single flask requires a Black Lotus to craft. While you can find them in any zone with enemies above level 54, you’ll find most of them in Silithus. They are loosely scattered across Silithus, so you’ll definitely miss some unless you scour every inch of the zone. If you stay around the edges for the most part with the blue route, you should still find a good number of them.

Best Fishing Spots

Oily Blackmouth – Darkshore, Level 16+ (55 Fishing).

One of the earliest fish worth farming is the Oily Blackmouth. These can be turned into Blackmouth Oil, which is then used to make either an Elixir of Waterbreathing, Elixir of Waterwalking, Swim Speed Potion, or a Free Action Potion. Stick to the coast of Darkshore between Bashal’Aran and Grove of the Ancients to find Oily Blackmouth Schools to fish from.

Firefin Snapper – Wetlands, Level 26+ (130 Fishing).

At 130 fishing, you can now catch Firefin Snapper. These colorful fish make Fire Oil, an essential component for Elixir of Firepower and Elixir of Greater Firepower. In Wetlands, you’ll find Firefin Snapper Pools around Menethil Harbor and along the northwestern coast. If you’re a horde player, you can alternatively fish along the southern coast of Hillsbrad Foothills.

Stonescale Eel – Stranglethorn Vale, Level 36+ (205 Fishing).

With 205 fishing, you can catch some slippery eels that are required for several useful tank potions. You’ll find Stonescale Eel Swarms around the southwestern coast of Stranglethorn Vale. Fish in these to find Stonescale Eel, which is used to make Stonescale Oil. This can then be made into Elixir of Superior Defense, Greater Stoneshield Potion, Flask of the Titans, or Flask of Petrification.

Best Cloth Spot

Mageweave Cloth, Runecloth, and Felcloth – Felwood, Level 52+, Various Furbolg & Satyr.

Mageweave Cloth = Yellow

Runecloth / Felcloth = Blue

Another important material you can farm is cloth. Not only is cloth used to mark armor through tailoring, but it is also required in several engineering, leatherworking, and blacksmithing recipes. Cloth can also be used to make bags. Felwood happens to have great farming locations for all three of the most desirable cloths, Mageweave Cloth, Runecloth, and Felcloth.

South of Emerald Sanctuary (yellow circle), you’ll find plenty of furbolgs to annihilate for Mageweave Cloth. They will also drop Runecloth less commonly. For a better source of Runecloth, head just north of Jaedenar to find an abundance of satyrs. You will still get some Mageweave Cloth farming here, but you’ll also find more Runecloth and also the occasional Felcloth.

Crafted Goods

• Create desirable products.
• Buy materials when they cost less than your finished product.

Gathering the materials needed to craft items is one way of making money, but actually turning those raw materials into finished goods is another way of doing so. This is definitely a sustainable long-term way of making gold, but it won’t make you very much money to start off with. When you’re beginning fresh and don’t have a bank roll to maneuver with, you don’t necessarily have the luxury of picking the best long-term choice when you need immediate benefits.

That said, you can still make great money with crafting professions with some careful planning. This starts with setting yourself up with a reliable way of leveling your crafting profession. If you have something like leatherworking, then you should definitely have skinning so you will naturally acquire materials during your adventures. In the even that you don’t have enough leather to raise your leatherworking, you still have the ability to go out and collect more because you have skinning as your other profession.

Whatever profession combination you choose, make sure you’re only creating items that are desirable. You can typically determine this based on what the item is (armor, consumable, enhancement), how powerful it is, how expensive it is, and who can benefit from it. Once the auction house economy stabilizes, you can also take a look at what is actually being listed. Items that have several listings may be a good choice, but this is also an indicator that there is a high level of competition for selling the item.

At this point, you could undercut other players, but this is inherently detrimental because it will cause the price of what you are trying to sell to go down. When a market is flooded with sellers willing to be just a little bit lower than anyone else, buyers have all the power and there is no longer a strong demand.

Your best option here is to find an item that doesn’t have a lot of competition, yet still offers great value. In particular, having a maxed level profession very early on after launch will be quite useful because you can make items that nobody else can yet. When nobody else can do something, you have the ability to set the price because you have no competition. Something like max level cooking is also great because most players don’t even care reach 300 cooking, meaning there will be very few people selling the strongest foods you can eat.

Sourcing your materials will generally come from what you gather, but that isn’t the only place. You can also buy your materials directly from the auction house as long as they cumulatively cost less than your finished good.

Say you want to make something like a Runecloth Bag, which requires 5 Bolt of Runecloth, 2 Rugged Leather, and 1 Rune Thread. Bolt of Runecloth requires 5 Runecloth to make, so your total material needs would be 25 Runecloth, 2 Rugged Leather and 1 Rune Thread. If one Runecloth Bag sells for 20 gold, then it is worth purchasing all the necessary Runecloth, Rugged Leather, and Rune Thread to make a bag if you can buy the materials for less.

However, there are a few other things to consider. The auction house will charge you a 5% fee, meaning that you will only receive 19 gold for your Runecloth Bag. Before you even sell the item, you’ll need to pay a fee just for listing your item. There’s also a great chance of being undercut and not selling the first time around. This means you’ll pay another listing fee and need to sell at a lower price. Before you know it, you could easily end up selling your Runecloth Bag for just 16 gold, a whole 20% less than what you had in mind.

Item Drops

If focusing on a profession doesn’t sound like fun to you, then there’s always the option of seeking item drops. This requires far less analytical effort, as the only thing that you will need to do is kill enemies repeatedly until you have enough of what you’re looking for. Grinding for item drops is definitely easier, but it is much less reliable for actually generating gold. Unless you’re really lucky, you aren’t going to make more money than you would by just farming materials.

When it comes to mob drops, there are two categories of items; common and rare.

Common Items

• Kill in packs whenever possible.
• Check the value of all non-grey items.

Common items are the things that you’ve probably seen before. These are anything that has a grey or white colored name. All grey items are useless and should only be sold to a vendor, but some white items are worth keeping to sell on the auction house. Any item you have that isn’t grey should be checked for value on the auction house before vendoring. You’ll come across many of these naturally, but any of the skinning spots listed above are also great for collecting “vendor trash”.

If your goal is purely to kill as many enemies as possible, then this is certainly a scenario where a mage has an advantage. Mages are the best area-of-effect farmers in the game, allowing them to rapidly kill large groups of enemies. Any time you do choose to farm, you should try and do it as quickly as possible to make the most of the time you spend. This makes a mage naturally faster at making gold from grinding mobs, but you can still do this on any class.

Rare Goods

• High likelihood of never receiving a drop.
• Great value, but will also take a while to sell.

When it comes to farming for rare items to sell, it is extremely difficult to say that is a good and/or reliable method of making gold. This is because farming for extraordinarily rare (yet expensive) items gives you absolutely no guarantee of making gold. We have whelplings locations listed below, but even these have just a 1 in 1,000 drop rate. Whelplings (such as Dark Whelping) may fetch you a nice value in a trade, but you really need luck in order to get a drop.

For example, if you were to kill 1,000 whelps with a 1 in 1,000 drop rate for a whelpling, you would only have a 63.23% chance of looting a whelp in those 1,000 kills. If it takes you an average of 15 seconds per kill, then it would take you more than 4 hours to kill 1,000 whelps, not including any downtime or breaks you take. So there is still a 36.77% chance that you can not receive a single rare item after 4 hours of dedicated focus.

Having said that, farming whelps is not entirely a waste of time because luck can give you a whelping drop on your first kill, your fifth kill, or even your twentieth. Even better, they also drop Small Flame Sac, which is valuable for its use to make Dragonbreath Chili and Fire Protection Potion. You’ll also pick up some grey items to sell, and you can also collect some leather if you are a skinner.

In the event that you do find a desirable rare item, you may be dismayed to learn that it won’t be easy to sell. Especially early after the launch of WoW Classic, many players just won’t have the gold to afford the value of a rare item. Any offers you do receive will be far lower than you hope. This isn’t to say that you won’t ever receive full price for your rare drops, but it will absolutely take longer than selling a stack of crafting materials.

There are dozens of rare items you could farm for in the game, but whelplings are a great choice because they’re easy to kill and also a great source of leather. The three you can find are Tiny Crimson Whelpling, Tiny Emerald Whelpling, and Dark Whelpling.

Tiny Crimson Whelpling – Wetlands, Level 26+, Crimson Whelps.

You can find the first of the three whelplings in Wetlands. Here you’ll be hoping for a Tiny Crimson Whelpling drop from a Crimson Whelp.

Tiny Emerald Whelpling – Swamp of Sorrows, Level 36+, Dreaming Whelps.

The second whelpling you can hunt is found in Swamp of Sorrows. This is the colorful Tiny Emerald Whelpling, which can be dropped by Dreaming Whelps.

Dark Whelpling – Badlands, Level 40+, Scalding Whelps.

The final whelpling to grind for is the Dark Whelpling. This one is in the corner of Badlands. Kill the Scalding Whelps in the area to try for a whelpling.

Offering a Service

• Provide value.
• Make it enjoyable.
• Think outside the box.

Something else you might not have thought of is creating a service to sell to other players. While the auction house certainly is an excellent place to buy and sell items, trading gold for an item is not the only way you can receive it. Your gameplay and unique abilities may make you particularly helpful and desirable to other players. This can become valuable enough to justify paying you gold for your provided service.

At the core of any service is providing great value. Many times you will perform a service that someone else can already do themselves. Because of this, you’ll need to create a reason why you should be doing it instead of them. Often times the easiest way to do this is to make something easier and convenient.

WoW Classic is a fun game, but there are some aspects of the game that can feel like a chore. Any time you eliminate perceived pain, there is an excellent reason for a player to pay you so they can focus on enjoying the game how they want to instead. Whatever service you decide to offer, don’t be afraid to think outside the box and sell something nobody else has even thought of. If nobody else is doing it, that just means you have no competition and every opportunity to make yourself the go-to when anyone needs the service that you can do.

Exclusive Class/Profession Services

• Mages can make portals and food/water.
• Rogues can open locked chests.
• Crafting items will often net you tips.

Once again, mages have the advantage when it comes to selling a service to make gold. This isn’t because they magically sell items faster or for higher prices, but instead because of the toolkit they have. Mages are the only class in the game with the ability to create portals for other players. These portals will go directly to major cities, eliminating several minutes of travel time. The one catch about a portal is that it can only be entered if you are in a group with the mage who created it.

This means that a mage must allow you to enter their portal. As a mage, you can effectively offer a portal service to other players. Many are willing to pay for this convenience, others may just expect it for free. Either way, there is no denying that it is a service with value. Mages can also conjure food and water to use. This means that players won’t need to buy new food or water from a vendor if they run out. Trying to sell conjured food/water is downright silly, but offering some to anyone who you give a portal to is an excellent way of adding a personal touch.

Another class with an advantage here is the rogue. Rogues have the ability to pick locks, which can allow them to open locked boxes you may have. Mage portals are often hit or miss on whether players are willing to pay, but rogue lockpicking is definitely an acceptable expense. The key difference here is that mage portals are a convenience, but rogue lockpicking is a necessity if you want your boxes opened.

If you’ve taken the time to level up your professions and learn rare crafting recipes, simply using that ability and crafting items for players (with their materials) is another way of making money. Many players are willing to pay extra (on top of all the materials) to have specific items or enchants made. Even if you don’t charge, tips are often freely given out of gratitude. Try to look at whatever your character can do that not every other player can as well. Use your natural skills to your advantage!

Gameplay Assistance

• Some players will pay for leveling help.
• Others will pay for dungeon runs.
• Open locked doors with dungeon keys.

Your skills as a player can also translate to making gold. There are many different ways that you can help other players. The nature of an MMORPG creates a world where you’ll frequently interact with the environment and other players. One thing that is definitely true about multiplayer games it that there is a wide variety of skill levels and interests.

Some players are simply better at dealing damage and utilizing their character’s full toolkit, while others are masters of the auction house. There’s surely something that you can do quite well and better than most other players. Honestly, you don’t even need to be better than other players in most situations. You just need to be willing to help and pleasant to work with!

Something you can definitely find a niche in is offering leveling assistance. You can help other players kill mobs for their quest objectives and defend them from other players and/or enemies. Leveling can certainly be done alone, but it is much easier with a higher level, more powerful character to back you up. You can usually charge a per-hour rate or per-level rate, but you should try to make sure you’re leveling in optimal areas, like a dungeon.

Speaking of which, dungeon runs are another service you can offer. They are fantastic for giving low level characters experience, but you can also change the loot rules so that they can keep everything! They can stay far behind while you charge through and destroy everything in your path. This lets them soak up all the experience and slowly pick up loot as they keep their distance behind you.

You can even help higher level characters run dungeons too. Some dungeons require the use of a key to unlock more areas, like The Scarlet Key for Scarlet Monastery. Others are required to access the dungeon outright, like Skeleton Key for Scholomance. These require just one player to unlock the door for all five players in your group, meaning your keys can open up doors for dozens of different players.

Bind-on-Use Profession Patterns

As you enter new zones and complete quests, you’ll come across a wide variety of vendors. A good number of them sell patterns in limited quantities. Sometimes these patterns are bind-on-pickup, but many times they actually bind-on-use. The placement of many of these vendors is often quite random, meaning most players will have no clue where they are without looking it up. Because of this, they’ll typically search the auction house for the recipe instead. Anytime you come across a profession recipe in limited quantity, buy it to resell on the auction house!

Auction House Flipping

• Sell for more than you buy something for.
• Know what your buyer wants.
• Take advantage of early market flooding.

Auction house flipping is probably the most popular method of making gold. Flipping on the auction house refers to buying something with the intention of reselling it. It requires fairly minimal effort and yields you fairly significant return. If you get really good at flipping on the auction house, you can easily afford an epic mount and more in no time. Flipping has some of the highest potential for making gold, but it does come with a fairly decent skill floor!

You can easily learn this by understanding the concepts of buying low and selling high, learning what your buyers want, and stocking up on crafting materials to prepare for upcoming phases.

Buy Low, Sell High

• Use addons to track market data.
• Don’t make expensive, slow-moving investments.

A concept seated at the root of mercantilism itself, to be successful in trading, you need to buy items at a low price and sell them for a higher amount. If you’re buying something for 10 gold, you aren’t going to want to sell it for anything less than that. But you also need to factor in other costs, like the time it takes to hold/sell the item (and effectively your gold). Unless your actively watching the market like a hawk, you probably won’t know the price trends for a given item.

You can easily solve this with the use of addons! Auction house addons like Auctioneer are extremely useful for easily posting items. But they’re also excellent for tracking market data! Check out the screenshot below and notice how the right tab is tracking historical value. According to this, the Crafted Heavy Shot is currently being sold for 94% of its historical value. If a stack is 15 gold right now, then a stack has historically been sold for just over 15 gold and 95 silver. Some examples are more dramatic, but addons are fantastic for allowing you to identify good deals and potential investments.

One of the hardest things about using the auction house is understanding when an item is a good investment. For example, the Crafted Heavy Shot from above might not ever reach the price of 15 gold and 95 silver again. For a gain of just under a gold, you’re investing fifteen times that value to potentially make a small margin.

The longer your item sits without being sold, the longer your gold is not actively working for you. It would be much better spent on quicker moving items that make a guaranteed return. Try not to invest any significant portion of your wealth at one time either. Expensive items may seem like the best option, but they will often take far longer to sell. This can make the investment far less lucrative than it originally seemed.

Understand Your Buyers

• Buyers want convenience.
• Make buy-it-now auction listings.
• Sell in stacks or logical quantities.

Another important thing to learn is how your buyers think. More specifically, you need to know how you can present your item or services in a fashion that makes it easy and convenient for them to purchase. The WoW Classic economy will likely be flooded for a few months after release due to so many players trying to establish a financial foothold. When this normalizes, there will often be established prices and expectations for how transactions should occur.

What this means is that you can’t just sell things however you want. You need to have a strategy to make your auctions or services the ideal option. Buyers often purchase from the auction house because they want convenience. This also means that prices are naturally more expensive. Because of this, most buyers go to the auction house to buy something immediately.

There are two ways you can list items, fixed price or auction style. Auction style may seem useful because there is the potential for your price to go up from competing bidders, but it doesn’t adhere to what most of your target buyers want. Fixed price auctions have an entry bid amount, but there is also a higher amount that allows a bidder to win the auction immediately. Make it a point to always list your items at a fixed price to give your items a greater chance of selling the first time.

They are also purchasing your items for a reason. If someone is buying something like herbs, then they probably want to make something with alchemy. Many buyers want to purchase in bulk, but others just want to make a single potion’s worth. Try to create listings in item quantities that correlate to what they would be used for. Full stacks are almost always a safe bet, but consider breaking uneven quantities into more usable amounts.

Stock Up on Crafting Materials

• Prices will be low following the launch of WoW Classic.
• The release of phases will introduce new demands for different materials.

When WoW Classic launches, there will definitely be plenty of other players with gathering professions selling their finds on the auction house. With so many people doing this, prices will undoubtedly get fairly low because of competition and undercutting. This will not always be the case, meaning that if you take the time to buy now rather than sell, you’ll net a much bigger return later on. Future phases of WoW Classic will make different crafting materials relevant, meaning that it will always be a good idea to stock up prior to release of a new phase. Use your bank alt and your mailbox to store all your investment materials!

Thanks for reading our gold making guide for WoW Classic! Farming gold might not always be fun, but with all the different methods you can make it with, there’s enough variety to keep things relatively interesting. The most important thing you can do is consciously remember that you’re trying to make gold because this will help you to make better financial decisions. Best of luck on the journey to your first mount and level 60!