This week we discuss the gathering professions and ask if they are worth the time and effort and what could be done differently in the future. We also have a look at some hot hardcore items worth looking out for and discuss which is better for a WoW Token? Retail or WotLK?
My name is Samadan and I’ll be your guide through the World of Gold Making!
Thoughts on Gathering
Gathering professions have been the mainstay of the economy, something any player could pick up and spend some time travelling around collecting resources to be used in other professions for a little bit of profit. With Dragonflight, we had the added complexity of quality, specializations and other bits like seeds, overcharge and buffs. u/Cerms takes a look at gathering and what they think should change next expansion..
To be blunt, I think dragonflight gathering failed pretty badly if longevity was the number one priority. There are some things I think works wonders and that I would like to see continue in the next expansion, but overall it’s a big letdown.
When you pick up a gathering profession and start farming, you’re getting the very minimum quality and quantity of the material, which you have to gradually and slowly improve over the course of a few weeks to guarantee faster speed, better materials, and the quantity of them. All while doing it for pennies that make dragonriding WQs a better option.
This system goes against what gathering professions should be. I’m in the belief that gathering professions should be the go-to profession for casual players who want to do up to 5 hours a week max of mining/herbalism to fund their consumables, crafting costs, repair bills and still have good gold left over for leisures like boe cosmetics. You can’t really do that in dragonflight.
However, you can still do this somewhat in the old world. In minutes I can pick up cata mining/herba in vashj’ir on my druid for 20K+/hr, wotlk mining for titanium farming in wintergrasp for 18K+/hr, and mining for khorium ore in old nagrand for 16K+/hr. There is no talent system restricting me to do that, and it makes me 2-3 times the gold I could make for the same effort in dragonflight. There was some saving grace for a few months when 10.1 released and spore farming was a thing with 0 requirements to do it, but now it’s drying up.
What I think should be scrapped for 11.0
– Material quality
I don’t think materials should have different qualities to them. Severite ore should be Severite ore, not Severite Ore 1/2/3. Leave it to the jewelcrafters to make it a higher quality gem. I want to go into a gathering profession and not feel like I’m only doing this to eventually reach greener pastures after a few weeks.
What I think should be reworked for 11.0
– Normal veins/herbs that are titan-touched/frigid/molten etc.
Instead of making one vein titan-touched, one herb frigid, I think they should return to the basics of tbc/wotlk/cata. Make every severite ore have a chance to contain 1-4 rousing fire/earth, make every herb have a chance to contain 1-4 rousing frost/order. Like they’ve done with primal fire, volatile life, and crystallized water in the earlier expansions. It’s so annoying seeing people leave normal veins because it’s just not worth the time to swoop down and pick them up.
– Profession tree
Simplify it, remove talent nodes for each specific herb/ore/skin/rousing. Make talent nodes that require the gatherer to achieve things for them to unlock instead of the traditional talent points. Example:
Cataclysm Mining Speed – Increases your Mining Speed by 15/30/45% in Cataclysm zones.
(Unlock Requirements: Mine 100/400/900 veins in Cataclysm zones)
Cataclysm Volatile Life – Increases the quantity of volatile lifes you loot from herbs by 1/2/3 in Cataclysm zones.
(Unlock Requirements: Loot 300/600/1000 volatile lifes in Cataclysm zones).
Universal Skinning Speed – Increases your Skinning Speed by 5/10/15% in all zones.
(Unlock Requirements: Skin 1000/2000/3000 beasts or dragonkins)
Not only will there be progression for your gathering profession, but it will also not be timegated by talent point drops that have a weekly/daily cap.
Just my take on what I’d like to see.
It’s an interesting discussion point as gathering is usually very lucrative at the beginning of an expansion and then tends to tail off as people get better/more efficient at gathering and demand for raw materials declines. Look at the price of Rousing Order, something that was difficult to initially gather, but was worth seeking out while gathering for the first 2 months of the expansion..
Graph courtesy of undermine.exchange
There is also the issue of bots –
As is always the case, the biggest problem for gathering professions is that bots exist, and as long as gathering/skinning/fishing bots exist, you as an individual are wasting your time doing what bots do. The regionwide AH’s make sure that bots will bottom out the prices on anything you can gather not very long into each patch. I’m not sure this is unintentional by blizzard, they like it so it’s hard to make gold in the game so you’re more likely to buy wow tokens.
With Dragonflight, it seemed that dragon riding itself and things like windswept nodes made it far more difficult for bots to navigate the terrain, but over time these appear to have been circumvented.
Gold making has always been about efficiency and anything where you are competing with something that can be automated en masse is likely to ruin your competitive edge. With the regionwide Auction House, we are all competing in the same pool
Like, how crafting cool downs exist in professions, add a weekly or few day gathering cool down that +1000% your farming for one hour and then scale back base returns on everything by 50%, maybe more.
Get rid of things that make it better to join a farming group. OR make it way more blatant/understandable that a group farm is good. Gathering instances akin to dungeons with a weekly gathering quest reward?
Get rid of 4×4 farming somehow. Idk how, but do it. It kills cloth prices. People shouldn’t be able to farm 20x the rate of individuals because they abuse a grouping format and hyper spawns. Personally I think any loot that isn’t a quest item should be lootable by one person only.
Figure out what makes skinning worse than herb/mining and finally fix it. It’s always that way in ever xpac.
It’s a complex issue, you can see. Ultimately, we want it to be worth our time..
I just want gathering to be worth my time. I like gathering and exploring DF. I won’t do it for 5k gold/hour.
Is it a case of being able to balance supply and demand? Zaralek Glowspores are required in large quantities for Draothyst transmutes and the quantity/price was relatively stable for a good couple of months ..
Graph courtesy of undermine.exchange
The system itself has a lot of flavour and possibilities. It seems more that pressures of mass efficiency, competing in the same pool as everyone else, the balance of supply and demand and the persistence of bots makes this a complex system to balance.
If you look at the list of dual gathering farms as listed by DalaGG’s addon WorthIT, you can see that current expansion mats are much lower down on the list compared to old world resources. Why is that?
What do you think about gathering? Do you enjoy it and do you find it worthwhile?
Expensive Rare Items in Hardcore Classic
GuideMMO has put together a video highlighting some items you might want to look out for in Classic Hardcore that might be very useful to players as the reach the higher levels.
These could be worthwhile investments to hold onto as the general pool of money available to players increases as more and more reach 60.
Which is Easier for Token? WotLK or Retail?
With 2 different options for making gold in WoW and using that to buy a Token for game time, u/rockywower asks which is easier?
I want to pay for my sub with tokens so I want to farm gold. Where should I do it? Currently I only have characters on retail, but the token costs about 400k gold (EU). It seems that in WOTLK the tokens cost 8k gold, but I am not sure if that is a lot of gold compared to retail.
I am bad with making profit on AH, so on retail I just stick to mining/herbalism, farming dungeons, maybe expensive toys or transmog.
It’s a question of perspective in many ways and what you prefer.
I make anywhere from 7k-12k~ (sometimes more depending on the items dropped) per TOGC currently, runs are about an hour long, in fact the longest part of the instance is the bidding. Token (NA) goes anywhere from 4-5k normally.
Personally think that paying for the sub via retail gold at this point is not a viable option these days, especially since the token keeps getting more expensive.
Make a prot pally and just boost people in HoS, idk EU prices but NA its about 1 token an hour
It would appear that WotLK is the clear winner here, but something worth considering is how long it actually takes to ramp up characters before they start to make gold and a few other questions..
- Do you need to be max level & how long does it take?
- Are there any rep or profession grinds?
- Do you have to be specifically geared or specced?
- How many characters do you need?
- Is it fun?
So it really depends. I think its worth mentioning that the wotlk token cannot be redeemed for blizzard balance afaik. So its only for game time, which is great if you need game time only but if you need to buy the new expansion or a character transfer or any other shop items the retail token is better. If you have a decent chunk of gold in retail its very easy at least for me to make a token through flipping. But getting started in that can be a bumpy road.
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
