Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 316

Hey everyone. After reaching Keystone Master (what was my goal for this season), I wanted to get back into gold-making, my favorite thing to do during SL. During this last expansion I was able to make around 33 mil gold. most of that went into buying tokens and rare mounts on the BMAH. Since that time, I kind of lost interest in crafting since I always seemed to be behind on the new system (especially now at this point of the expansion). The change from just being able to put crafted items into the AH also did not resonate with me.

So, I wanted to try different things and see what works for me and if I could get back into making some gold. Maybe some of my experiences will help you as well. I am also happy to hear from everyone what I can improve or what low effort things I can implement.

These 3 topics were my goals for now.

1. Farming raw materials
2. World quests
3. SL Mission tables

The farming of raw materials:

I had some alts that were ore, herb, or leather gatherers. But these chars were not really skilled in their professions. These professions are ideal for farming while waiting for raids/instances to pop up, so I chose to look what the best ways to skill them were. I came to the following conclusion:

• Mining/Herb gathering: Try to get the skill to mine while dragon riding. Staying on your dragon saves a lot of time. Pair this with the dragon riding skill that gives you back some vigor when gathering.

• Elemental collection: After being able to always keep on your mount, you should invest in points that improve your gathering skills in collecting rousing elements. While ores and herbs are very low priced on my server, elements are still worth farming.

• Keep track of overloading nodes: There are some weak auras that can help with that.

• Ideal farming location: Zaralek caves. In my opinion the Zaralek caves are great for farming. A lot of elemental mining nodes and you can also gather spores, that go for around 10g each. Note that you can also overcharge these spore filled nodes.

• Skinning: Try to invest your skill points in baiting. First priority is to get the skill to summon elite creatures, then the skill to be able to get rare materials from them, and then everything to be able to reduce the timer on baits. (I will try to update the skill names later on)

• With this skills you are able to summon the lava snake in the Zaralek caverns for a good chance (once a day) on the Obsidian Cobraskin, needed for the legendary weapon. On my server worth around 2200g

• My favorite skinning place for improving your skill are the Ohn’ahran Plains. There are some places with a lot of mobs you can just bomb away (ideal for farming weekly skill items). And there are some places with striders that drop Tallstrider Sinew, ~5% drop-chance at ~250g at my server.

• Improving your skill: Accept the weekly quests in Valdrakken (grants I think 2 skill points) and just farm away. You can get 5 blue items per week that grant one skill points each, and after you get those, an epic item that grants another 3 points.

• How much farming do I do? Actually, just the weekly skill upgrades. If I have farmed those on one char, I will switch to the next. All in all I estimate it takes around 45 mins per char. Double gathering gets me around 10k gold per hour.

World Quests:

There are a few things to know when farming gold via gold quests:

• Each dragon riding quests grants ~525g. Most are done rather quickly when choosing the easiest difficulty. Each zone has at least 1 quest, Zaralek Caves and Emerald Dream have 2. Forbidden Isle also has one, but due to the distance I rarely to those. The quest get reshuffled once a week (3,5 days after weekly reset) so per char you can earn around 8.400g per week.

• Normal gold granting world quests are worth ~625g, many of which are as simple as flying through a few hoops. These quests can be worth 3 times as much if the dreamsurge bonus is active. Always check out if there are some goldquests up in the current area that the dreamsurge is active. Park an alt there to see what bonus is active/will be next. You can also start doing quests and leave them at 90% while waiting for the bonus. Do that on some alts, and rush them through when the bonus starts. Each bonus lasts 30 mins. Note that some elite world quests are worth up to around 820g.

Shadowlands mission table:

I also wanted to do some relatively passive income, that does not need a lot of concentrating on. During Shadowlands the mission tables were ideal for that, but those gold missions were nerved drastically for around 25g max each.

To see if they were still worth doing, I re-activated my old alt army and just went for it.

• Best covenant for doing this kind of farming are the Night fae.

• Use the TLDR missions addon to automate the starting of missions to really make it a brainless activity.

• There still is a weekly 1600g quest for collecting 1k anima. Self sustaining mission tables give you around 2k anima per week, so be sure to get that quest.

• Old gear also still sells for a pretty copper, so if the anima cost is low on that mission be sure to set up tldr to snipe those missions.

• There are also cheap Polished Pet Charm missions. Be sure to collect them as well, as you can sell pets for some thousands of gold.

• I am trying to collect 2-3 three times daily from the mission tables and resend the troops.

My Income (18. Jan to 18. Feb) for the last month:

1. Farming: 436.805 g (including some pets for pet charms)
2. World quests: 282.928 g
3. SL-Missions: 350.236 g (on 25 alts)

All together it just came out to around 1 mil gold this month. So 3 wow tokens on EU-Servers.

Honestly I was surprised that I could still make this much gold without any crafting involved. Since I relied so much on crafting during SL it was nice to see, that the mission table was at least still kind of worth doing now. As I was switching around some alts from different covenants to Night fae, I believe the potential is even higher, as it will take some time for them to reach renown level 80 and mission table level 16. Raw mission gold from each char is about 1.300g (at the moment). Adding to that is the weekly 1.600g quest, plus old equipment that sells at not too bad of a price.

I believe the world quest value can fluctuate highly, as there were not many opportunities where the number of gold quests and the bonus overlapped for me. I have 13 alts parked in Valdrakken to do world quests, but not many chances to use the triple gold bonus from dreamsurges.

I am looking into whether I should start crafting this late into an expansion, but maybe daily/weekly transmute/crafting cooldowns could be something interesting. I also want to skill some more alts into skinning. Who knows, maybe the legendary axe will drop for me, then I will be happy to get the cobra skin for cheap. And as I said, I want to optimize my SL tables. Maybe I will come back in a month and update those numbers 🙂 In the meantime I would love to hear your opinions and input! Let me know if I should go more into some details. I have a whole lot of TSM and spreadsheet data.

There have been quite a few posts about what to stockpile for P2 here and in r/classicwow. Interestingly, the advice was often bad, a lot of things didn’t go like the majority thought.

This is based on my experience on my server, so ymmv a bit. I spent about 1.5k gold in preparation for P2:

Recipes – They pretty much all went down in price, because either it was stockpiled a lot (like recipe for NPP) or it just dropped a lot during leveling.

Stranglekelp or herbs in general – Also a flop, Stranglekelp is cheaper right now than it never was in P1. Some herbs were ok to stockpile, like Liferoot, but in generall I lost gold buying herbs (like Kingsblood, Steelblossom) in P1.

Thick leather – Quite good, I bought about 3.5k for 6-7s each and could sell them all for in average 13.5s. Now they are slowly going down to that 6-7s range again.

Bolt of Mageweave – Very good, I could buy them for 20-22s each and they are still priced over 50s on my server right now. Here I actually spent the most gold since I knew as a tailor I could use them even if the price didn’t go up in P2.

Silk cloth – This was actually good to stockpile if you sold it around the release of P2. A lot of people adviced against it (I also didn’t buy them)

Truesilver bar – Good if you sold them between the reveal of the epic recipes and the release of P2, bad if you bought them very late in P1.

Superior HP/Greater MP – Decent, but now at least the mana potion is back to <40s on my server again because it became profitable to craft it.

I think a lot has to do with the fact that we didn’t have any inflation yet, rather deflation, because everyone spending gold on the mount and the epic recipes. So you couldn’t just invest gold into anything and expect it to rise in value.

What were your experiences?

As with SoD since it started potions have been my bread and butter.

Profits at the start of P2 were lovely, and made me a few hundred gold easily.

Now things are slowing down, but as long as I can make 1-2s per pot, I’m filling up the ah daily and slowly but surely making solid money.