It’s been a while since I’ve written on this site, but when you see the magnititude of this post I hope all will be forgiven. The following is essentially the result of a math geek with too much time on his hands. Read on for how this could benefit you now and in the future.

A friend and fellow gold-making enthusiast, Frontendloader, created an addon which scanned my realm’s entire AH and dumped it’s output information to a text file. The information file contains every item on the Auction House, it’s bid price, buyout price and quantity of items. I’ve then used Microsoft Excel to lookup this data, for the purpose of manipulating it and calculating things with it.

Exporting Auctioneer Data to Excel

Find Out Cost of Power leveling Professions

1) Obtaining a total figure on a profession power leveling mats shopping list.

Find Out Best Gold Making Profession

2) Calculating profit and loss for each profession. A lot of the individual profession spreadsheets out there do this already but with user input data instead getting mat prices fresh from the AH and comparing them with end product prices fresh from the AH.

Which Server Has The Best Economy

3) Comparing economies with friends or if considering server transferring.

4) I want to see more ideas in the comments section of what could be done with an AH snapshot. If you can envision it, I can make it!

I have so far done #1 from the list above and included some screenshots below. In doing so I learnt that people can corrupt data fairly effortlessly. For example, one goose on my realm listed linen cloth for 1000g per unit which blew out the power leveling budget for tailoring. I have since excluded such nonsense data.

The costs of power leveling jewelcrafting, inscription, alchemy, leatherworking, tailoring, engineering and blacksmithing are based on the material costs at www.wow-professions.com. I have excluded from them vendor items such as tailor threads and alchemy vials since the value of these is widely known. For cost to Power level Inscription, since there are multiple herbs that result in each ink you require, I picked a typical one for each ink group.

As you can see, this is a good way to find out how much it would cost to power level a profession. It is not without flaw however, some items can be obtained much cheaper off the auction house. A good example of this is the rods required for power leveling Enchanting; buying them from the AH is expensive (and in turn Blacksmiths make good profit on them) and much could be saved by having them made by an alt or friend. When looking at the figures, you also need to consider that you can sell or disenchant many of the items made to offset the total cost.

Cost of Power Leveling Professions

Cost of Power leveling Jewelcrafting

Cost of Power Leveling Inscription

Cost of Power Leveling Enchanting

Cost of Power Leveling Alchemy

Cost of Power leveling Blacksmithing

Cost of Power leveling Engineering

Cost of Power Leveling Tailoring

Cost of Power Leveling Leatherworking

Finding out Profit of Each Profession

I’ve already began work on spreadsheets to examine profit and loss calculations on crafting items and gear with Tailoring, Leatherworking and Blacksmithing using the data obtained from the AH Scan Snapshot. Check back shortly and I’ll show you the results of those spreadsheets. I also plan to make ones that lookup prices for ore, herbs, gems and glyphs, to assess the viability of Jewelcrafting or Inscription on your realm.

In the future, we are looking to produce an End-User version of the addon and spreadsheet so that you can all simply press the AH button ingame to get a spreadsheet full of useful information. Right now it’d require a couple steps like pressing the getall button at the auction house, using an .exe to convert that output file into a spreadsheet format then inserting that spreadsheet into the master spreadsheet we’d provide.

In the meantime, if you were able to find out any information about your servers auction house, be it the highest priced items, which items at the most profitable to make with each profession, figuring out which profession makes the most gold or anything else what would it be?

Update – Jan 26, 2010 Note: This post is out of date and I’ll be updating it shortly. In the meantime I have written numerous articles for patch 3.3 on Making Gold With Jewelcrafting and Making Gold With Inscription (Which I’ve made 68,000g with so far) which are the 2 best gold making professions currently. Go check them out.

This is purely from the perspective of which professions make the most gold/profit. It does not take into account which professions are best for your class, that article will come in the future.

I really recommend that as you level up you focus on gathering professions, this will give your character income to buy new equipment/enchants and save up for your epic mount. Gathering professions can also be done in unison with leveling whereas crafting will really slow down your journey to level 70.

You have a lot of options in World of Warcraft, you can choose 2 professions out of the following:

- Blacksmithing

- Enchanting

- Engineering

- Leatherworking

- Jewelcrafting

- Tailoring

- Mining

- Herbalism

- Skinning

Along with these 2 professions you can also have all of the secondary professions:

- Cooking

- First Aid

- Fishing

A very common question asked given all of these choices “Which profession makes the most gold?” here’s the simple answer:

“Pick two gathering professions; Mining, Herbalism or Skinning. Sell the raw materials on the auction house and you will make more than any crafting profession.”

Why are these the most profitable professions? It has to do with the economy in World of Warcraft where raw materials sell for more than the finished products that are created from them.

That sounds strange though, why would someone buy raw materials if they couldn’t profit from the end product? The answer my friends is that the majority of crafters buying those materials are trying to power level their professions and will pay absurd prices on materials just so that they can get to skill 375 and make their epic crafting items.

But you still want to craft?

However, crafting is a whole different side of the game that can be fun, I’m not saying a profit cannot be had and if you are the type of person who would rather sell potions, enchant items, and craft gems than fly around looking for flowers to pick then read further.

Here is my top 7 list of professions that earn the most gold:

7. Blacksmithing

- All of the great things created by this class are bind on pick up. Definitely a profession you should only chose if your class can benefit from the higher end weapons that this profession provides, ex. Deep Thunder.

6. Leatherworking

- Also a profession that only provides valuable bop items, no profit to be had from anything crafted here.

5. Engineering

- As is the case with most of these crafting professions the cost of the raw materials are just more valuable than the actual end products that are created. Engineering is expensive to level. From a make money standpoint it is much better to sell any ore mined on the auction house than to craft for a profit.

Ways to make gold: Things people buy from engineers

• • • Scopes: Sniper and Deadly Scope
  • • Deadly Blunderbuss is needed for a quest
  • • Pets: novelty and for fun, this is a game right?
  • • Mithril casing
  • • Fused wiring
  • • Bullets
      

4. Tailoring

- Fantastic profession for casters who are looking for higher end gear before SSC and Black Temple, horrible from a make money stand point. If you specialize in spellcloth or mooncloth make sure to use up your timers as soon as it’s up to make a little bit of a profit back. Bags have so much competition that it’ll usually cost more to buy the materials.

3. Enchanting

- Although very useful for its ring enchants, disenchanting unwanted drops in raids and being the guild enchanter (who gets all the sweet recipes), this money sink is not a get rich quick profession given the rarity of the recipes that people are actually looking for. You’ll end up spending a ton in recipes and get pennies in return via tips.

Ways to make gold: Disenchanting and selling mats on auction house, tips for enchanting other peoples gear.

Class Advantage: Rogues/Druids can go through lower level instances and disenchant the green drops.

2. Jewelcrafting

- If you combine jewelcrafting with mining you’ll have yourself a hell of a good money maker, use the rare gems you find on rich adamantite to create socketed gems, prospect adamantite ore when the prices on the auction house are low and sell the adamantite when the prices are high. Buy up the adamantite and prospect those and sell any rare gems that come from it. Get tips for crafting special gems for others. There are many ways to make money in jewelcrafting and people are constantly switching out gems and getting new equipment that there will always be a demand for jewelcrafters.

1. Alchemy

- Buying herbs off the auction house or gathering them yourself you can make potions to sell which will be your main source of income as all the raiders will need those elixirs and potions to take on the harder content. Has the potential to become the best gold earner if you find the right niche of potions to sell which aren’t overproduced on your server. Try to make friends with some herb gatherers who you can buy all your herbs off for a discounted price, both parties save the auction house cut. Offer to make their potions free of charge if they provide the mats.

Ways to make gold: Selling potions/elixirs, transmutes (primal mights), tips from making potions to people who supply mats.

I will be making guides for each crafting profession individually which will explain how to get the most profit and power level the cheapest.

Looking to stock up on eternium ore for your blacksmithing, or just to make some fast gold on the auction house?

Here is some information on Eternium ore

1. It’s an uncommon drop from Adamantite, Rich Adamantite, Khorium and Fel Iron deposits.
2. Rich Adamantite has had the highest % to yield eternium ore.
3. Eternium Ore sells on average for 36g per stack of 20.

So what does this tell you? you should be farming a route that has the most Rich Adamantite ore in it which I have provided in an earlier article here.

Here’s the map again for Rich Adamantite in Nagrand: