I made the decision in September 2009 to focus on making enough gold to hit the gold cap. I had a starting gold total of 1,500g and didn’t even have my epic mount yet. In that time, devoting 2 hours a night, I am now at around 140,000g worth (inventory stock + 73,000 gold liquid) *look on the right sidebar as I update my gold amount very frequently there.
As I work towards the gold cap I am always researching new ways to increase the rate at which I acquire gold in WoW. I only have around 2 hours an evening to devote to gold making activities, as I have a full time job and other social activities that I make time for (including posting here).
Giving myself this small time limit to make gold ensures that my gold making strategies can be used by all other players who don’t want to spend too much time making gold as they would rather be playing other parts of the game such as PvP and PvE but want to know how they can best utilize their time to get as much gold as possible.
These are all the gold making methods I am using as of patch 3.3 (January 30, 2010 at the time of this writing) and links will be added at the top here to any future posts I make when there are major changes in my gold making strategy.
The methods listed below are some of my highest earners, but I make a lot of gold using WoW School’s guide and developed my gold making skill after reading his guide.
Making Gold With Inscription
About 99% of my gold has been made from inscription, there have been really great weeks where the competition was low, and other weeks where I was selling glyphs for 3g each and was still getting undercut so I had to accept lower profits while I developed my undercutting strategy and at a point left the market to wait for the competition to get bored of profiting 20 silver per glyph.
1) Crafting Glyphs = 62,644g
While the average price of glyphs can range greatly from 3g – 90g, I calculated my “rate” an hour to be 1,000g an hour at minimum, seeing as how you can craft 390 glyphs an hour this comes to roughly 3g 50s profit per glyph needed to maintain that rate.
Since the snowfall inks you get during the process of making glyphs covers the cost to make the glyphs themselves you can assume that the money gained from making glyphs to be 100% profit.
2) Darkmoon Cards = 32, 781g + 7,400g = 40,181g
The darkmoon fair happens once a month and this is the time when I really realize my profits. For 3 weeks I’ll start accumilating tons of snowfall inks in my bank waiting to be converted into darkmoon cards (since they rarely sell outright on the auction house)
I will typically get around 1,000 snowfall inks saved up before the next darkmoon fair hits and then I can turn in the decks for completed cards such as Darkmoon Card: Greatness, Darkmoon Card: Illusion and so forth.
Another source of income from darkmoon cards are selling the cards individually to those who are looking to turn them in for reputation and also for completing their own decks. This comes in handy when you find yourself having excess cards after making all your decks, trade or sell them off.
3) Armor Vellums II, III and Weapon Vellums I, III = 19,466g
While this figure does include all vellums I found the only ones on my server worth the hassel to craft were the ones listed here, the profit/time to craft Armor Vellum I was just so low given the amount of volumn I could move a day.
These are a very steady source of gold for me, competition doesn’t undercut these auctions as much and I usually sell around 100 vellums a day.
4) Offhands – Faces of Doom and Iron-Bound Tome = 12,951g
I sell maybe 1 of each offhand a day, but the profit margins can be significant as some days I am the only one selling them at my fallback price of 285g each. At a cost of 70g to craft this is a nice profit amount for something that is very quick to craft.
5) Snowfall Inks = 4,292g
When you mill Northrend herbs you get azure pigments and icy pigments. Azure pigments go towards inks of the sea to make glyphs and icy pigments are made into Snowfall Inks.
I use these inks in runescrolls of fortitiude, the offhands and darkmoon cards. However each month I have an excess of 1,000 inks that I need to get rid of no matter how much I try to use up in the other items.
That’s why I do sales outright on the auction house of snowfall inks, I will sell them at a minimum of 11g each (in stacks of 5) and the highest I’ll post them is 19g each. Not that many of them sell on the AH but that’s fine as I make good profit putting them into darkmoon cards.
6) Runescroll of Fortitude = 4,144g
A steady seller, not a ton of gold made from this but it is a great way to get rid of all those snowfall inks that build up in your inventory.
Making Gold With Engineering
7) Mammoth Cutters and Saronite Razorheads = 5,817g
I used to make a nice steady income from ammo, but when the new Iceblade Arrows and Shatter Rounds came out they took over the market and are now so cheap to craft (about 1g 50s per 1,000) that they only sell for 3g/stack and the profit is very minimal.
Auction House Flipping – Buying and Selling
8 ) AH Buying and Selling = 4,210g for 28 days, Jan 1 – 28.
I used to buy and sell as my main source of income from auction house flipping but since I’ve focused on Inscription I have slacked off on my buying and selling activities.
I just recently started getting back into it as I found that /auc getall speeds up the flipping process a lot by taking only 5 minutes to scan the AH rather than 30 minutes. So we’ll see how much higher the profits go from this in the future.
Dailies
Haven’t done these in forever! The highest gold/hr daily I found to do was the Argent Tournament as you could sell off the pets and also choose to take sacks of gold coins as rewards as well but the most you could get from this is around 410g/hour.
It would be a great way for a player to make gold to put towards leveling Jewelcrafting, Inscription or Enchanting so they can start making a lot of gold with those methods.
I will continue to update this chart when big changes occur, in the mean time you can see my gold progress on the right sidebar to see how close I am getting to the gold cap and progress towards further gold goals and subscribe to the RSS to be alerted of new articles.
I will be delving into the Jewelcrafting and Enchanting markets very soon as I heard they are amongst the best for gold making. I also use a lot of strategies in WoW School’s guide to make a lot of gold, be sure to check it out.
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this is a great guide are you a herbalist also on your guy??
nope, I buy all my materials from the AH since crafting activities provide thousands of gold profit for time spend, whereas farming herbs can be at most 500-800g/hr.
ok thanks for the help cant wait to try this out
Keep going m8, u only have 100,000 gold to go!
Hi i´am trying to make money and i try this but do you have any tips on what i should buy becuse i´am not so good at this.
follow the blog, and I have some other posts here that have shown exactly what I buy and sell:
http://www.wowconfidential.com/2009/12/15/my-highest-profit-auction-house-buying-and-selling-finds-report-1/
http://www.wowconfidential.com/2010/01/28/best-auction-house-items-to-flip-for-resale-profit-report-2/
I start on 45g and now i´am total (bigpicture) 1200g this thing work!!!
By chance I was already a maxed enchanter on my main when I found this site 2 weeks ago. I never figured people would waste the money that it takes to buy enchantment scrolls over just buying the mats themselves. But it works. Ive since gone into older content to get the obvious ones like Crusader and Mongoose.
Thanks for the tips on what to start with for enchantment scrolls, made enough to get some nice gear crafted that I previously though was too expensive to be worth the time.
About to drop skinning for Inscription or Jewelcrafting once I make some money to put into it.
I was wondering if Darkmoon Cards are still worth the bustle. Eternal life is up at 25g a piece on my server, and it’s hard to determine if it’s profitable. On top of this, it’s difficult to sell them.