This week we take a deep dive into transmog sales and the realities of if it is worth the time and effort involved as a gold making method. We also have a great guide to getting alts ready for Dracothyst transmutes by Drizzling Rose and some insights into crafted transmog sales by Erosium.
My name is Samadan and I’ll be your guide through the World of Gold Making!
Is Transmog Worth it?
The age old question often surfaces as it’s seen as a chill way to play the game, run old dungeons and makes some gold on the side. The short answer is yes, if you enjoy it, nobody else can tell you how to play the game. However, if you are going to get into it, be aware of the time involved vs. the infrequency of rewards.
Yeah, you had a ton of junk mog. But you could usually farm a few dozen dungeons and end up with at least ONE piece that has a few grand AH value + a 0.02+ sell rate.
I went through my same old dungeons a bunch, since I got back. Almost ALL of the transmog is 100-200g and I have found that < 1% of the total mog I pick up has a sell rate of even 0.01 or higher.
So… the hell happened?
I have a gold source I’m going to keep working on. But I really dug farmed old transmog. It was a bunch of fun.
There will always be times when transmog sales peak and ebb, usually in line with what else there is to do in the game. Dragonflight has been chock full of things to do and the pacing of patch releases has been regular and rapid. That will certainly play a part.
Like others pointed out, it’s a buy once, learnt for life deal. If I buy a 2h axe say, then all my chats that can use 2h axes now have the mog. This becomes a MAJOR issue as wow has a lot of players who have been playing for years, but currently wow is still struggling to bring in new players. Yes obviously there are new players, but how many make it to 70, how many get to a point where they have gold and how many get to the point where they actually care about xmog to spend serious gold on it. So really you have a finite market to sell it.
On top of that Xmog is now very overdone. Every semi serious goblin knows about Ulaman, Zul Farak, Diremaul etc. You have so much more competition now, definitely not helped by the rise of YouTube. The likes of Studen have many popular videos out on Xmog farms, which ones to do as a beginner etc etc. So again, now anyone looking to get into gold making can now also see which dungeons to farm, hence over saturating the market.
Also, player numbers are way down right now. Blizz have made some questionable decisions around PVE particularly in the last 4 weeks, and a lot of higher end players have just said gg go next season. This obviously also coincided with Diablo 4 release, as well as this season being literally the easiest season to gear a character in history. You can get a char 7 or so ilvls off max in 2 weeks without being sweaty. Majority of my guild (albeit relatively casual) hit Aotc 6 weeks ago and now all just raid log for the socializing. The rest of the week they’re all off playing other games.
So you have a combination of multiple people giving it a go, hence flooding the market with Xmog, likely giving up and selling it for cheap in the end – as well as a lack of newer players to actually sell the transmog to.
There is certainly still good gold to be made but just doing the bare minimum farms everyone else does won’t cut it, and if that’s all you do, then there are far, far better ways to make gold right now.
That certainly gives some extra perspective on possible reasons it might be perceived as slow right now. u/SearchForLoot has been logging some data collection around this very thing to give a sense of time vs. reward..
I am doing this to help answer some questions those of you may have about transmog farming and basically stuff that I would have liked to see when I was getting into it. So if you have any questions or suggestions let me know.
I had some issues with my TSM this week and while all the important information like how much gold I made and screenshot proof of sales (on my blog) is all there. I unfortunately can’t determine exactly how much of my sales was made from trade goods or transmog.
I did do my best to have an accurate gold breakdown with the information available to me though.
Week 2
What I farmed this week:
- Iron Docks – 30 runs in 3 hours 29 minutes
- Scarlet Monastery – 20 runs in 1 hour 26 minutes
- Wailing Caverns – 50 runs in 2 hours 28 minutes
- Blackfathom Deeps – 30 runs in 2 hours 24 minutes
Total hours farmed this week: 9 hours 47 minutes
Notable Drops
Last week I was using NA and EU average prices off of the TSM website which I now think is inaccurate so I’ve moved over to using the Undermine Exchange. I’ve also decided to use medians rather than averages as I feel it’s more accurate.
Iron Docks
| Item | Price/Gold (my realm) | NA median | EU median |
| Caniki’s Cane of Command | 258,900g | 390,500g | 157,100g |
| Vinewrapped Greatsword | 7600g | 10,700g | 14,500g |
| Stonebreaker Shield | 11,600g | 15,400g | 9000g |
Scarlet Monastery
No notable drops
Wailing Caverns
| Item | Price/Gold (my realm) | NA median | EU median |
| Barbaric Loincloth x 2 | 6963g (Sold x 2) | 21,500g | 6,800g |
| Grizzly Jerkin | 8000g | 23,100g | 25,200g |
| Barbaric Cloth Vest | 6000g | 20,000g | 27,200g |
| Bloodspattered Loincloth | 24,300g | 21,500g | 6800g |
Blackfathom Deeps
| Item | Price/Gold (my realm) | NA median | EU median |
| Spiked Chain Leggings | 14,200g (Sold) | 21,500g | 6,800g |
| Feral Shoulder Pads | 10,000g | 40,000g | 63,800g |
| Grunt’s Legguards x 2 | 18,200g | 19,000g | 8200g |
| Sanguine Star | 347,000g (inflated) | 32,000g | 30,300g |
| Greenweave Branch | 28,200g | 40,500g | 37,600g |
Additional Notable Drops from Blackfathom Deeps:
- Spiked Chain Shoulder Pads x 1
- War Paint Shoulder Pads x 1
- Feral Harness x 3
- Prospector’s Chestpiece x 2
- Ritual Shroud x 2
- Mystic’s Shoulder Pads x 1
- Mystic’s Wrap x 1
- Ritual Tunic x 2
- Watcher’s Cinch x 4
- Sentry’s Gloves x 1
Gold Earned
As I mentioned earlier, due to my TSM tracking messing up while my gold made is accurate the gold breakdown between trade goods and transmog is based off of my limited available TSM information.
This week I had a total of 66,109g in sales. Here is the breakdown:
- 61,501g from transmog sales
- 4608g from trade goods sales
- 9689g from raw gold and vendored items
So with my auction house sales + raw gold and vendored items I made a total of 75,798g this week. (about 50,000g more than last week).
Top Sales This Week
| Item | Sold for |
| Spiked Chain Leggings | 14,250g |
| Barbaric Loincloth x 2 | 6963g x 2 (13,926g total) |
| Hardened Leather Tunic | 1805g |
| Plans: Mighty Iron Hammer | 1709g |
| Plans: Golden Scale Leggings | 1495g |
Wrap Up
Despite some TSM trouble this week I’ve now begun to see daily sales which I started seeing around the 700 total item count. To date I’ve now farmed for a total of 23 hours 21 minutes.
I end this week with a total of 101,309g and 762 transmog items with a total market value of 2.3 million gold on the auction house.
Some Speculative Statistics
I now have 762 transmog items on the auction house worth around 2.3 million gold. However as was inevitable with this many transmog items, this gold amount is quite inflated due to a few select items.
So if I were to make my best guess and say my items are worth maybe 1.7 million that means per hour farmed I’ve collected 73,000g in market value.
If we take my best guess of 60-80 transmog items sold this week and with a total of 762 items on the auction house. This means I sold roughly ~10% of my total items this week.
A total of 61,501g in transmog sales this week with a total of 2.3 million in auction house value equates to selling ~2.7% of my market value this week or 0.39% a day.
If you’d like to read a more detailed breakdown of my week 2 you can do so here:
https://searchforloot.com/week-2-daily-sales-transmog-gold-farming/
Thanks for reading!
This is a nice writeup, thankyou SearchForLoot for sharing! CanadiaTV also points out that for time to factor in just how long it takes to list and relist this stuff …
I think you should consider the amount of time it takes you to post these items. I’ve done tmog for several years and i would never consider having 762 items on my auction house. Rarely have more than 300. It has to be considered in the time spent. If you spend one hour a day posting, it’s 7 hours a week. Also posting cost. To calculate that, make sure only one guy is your banker and track his gold , not his sales.
It certainly can be a time trap and that time could be better spent elsewhere, but I would argue as at the beginning – do what’s fun for you. I hope this at least gives some insight into the effort involved and the time it takes vs. potential rewards.
What About Crafted Transmog?
Like farmed transmog, there is also a niche for crafted transmog and by extension crafted mounts. It still has a declining market as once earned, forever remembered, but still can be another addition to the gold making pool of opportunities. Erosium has a video going through his sales methods which include a large number of crafted transmog items.
What’s worth noting here is the emphasis on hard to get, but valuable items which command the best profit margins when they sell.
Dracothyst Guides
Alchemy transmutes and cloth cooldowns seem to be strong favourites for steady gold making especially for those with many alts. The Queen of the alt army – Drizzling Rose has extended her Miro board to include her steps for getting alts all ready for the Dracothyst transmute…
This is a great way to get started in gold making. The returns may be diminishing over time and it can rely on multicraft procs, but the methodology is simple and predicable, scaling with the number of alts you have access to.
Naxx Raid Farm
DalaGG has put together a nice little video going through why running Naxxramas for Frozen Runes is particularly worth it right now and what other things you can find to sell there…
The Wowhead link to the locations of the Frozen Runes is in the comments section for the runes themselves.
Further Reading
Most of this information was discussed and originally posted on the /r/woweconomy subreddit or in the accompanying Discord Server.
I hope you found this useful and If you have any suggestions or feedback, please do say so in the comments below..
Until next time, Happy Goldmaking!
Samadan
