Going for the Gold, WoW Gold

The World of Warcraft (WoW) is a game that is played by some 10,000,000 people and is still growing. One of the things that every one of these people has in common is a need to have a sufficient cash (gold) flow for their characters.

Now, some people are pretty clued in on how to make gold in WoW and some have actually made a business of it. They farm the items that they then sell to vendors or other players, amass large amounts of gold, then sell that gold to players for real cash. Some go insane and hit the wow gold cap. Yes, there really is such a thing.

Blizzard, the Creator of WoW, frowns on buying gold (and items,) by the way, and has been known to ban the accounts of people who do so.

So for the rest of us here's a short guide on how to increase your World of Warcraft Gold account.

Auctioneer is essential

Download the Auctioneer Addon (google it) and install the thing. You want the full suite and you'll want to read the documentation and learn how to use it. Why? You'll find that it's a really big help in learning the market for your server, which is an essential step to making real gold.

Make Your Banker

Make an alternate character as your dedicated banker. You'll take this character to level 5 (class and race don't matter) and take it to the nearest big city. Then pick up the "enchanting" skill, which you'll use to disenchant low level items.

Your banker will never level again (unless you want to buy up that enchanting skill someday.)

All your other characters will use the banker to sell their stuff, buy stuff, and send stuff here and there. Find a stack of ore? Hit the nearest mailbox and send it to the banker to sell. A pile of green items from your last instance run? Off to the banker.

Need gear for your main character? Your banker buys it and mails it off to you. Need more storage space? Use the mailbox. Mail stuff to your banker, the banker returns it, and you let it sit in the mailbox until you need it.

Gathering the gold

Pick up Mining and Skinning as your two professions (make sure you buy a pick and a skinning knife!) Skin everything that's skinnable all the way to level 70. Skins always sell well and some sell for several gold per stack of 20. Some of the Outlands skins sell for several gold each.

Ore is all over the place. Start with copper and mine everything you can. Use your "smelting" skill to smelt the ore into bars which will drive up your mining skill. Ore always sells well, the better stacks going for 30 gold or so each, but those Outland skins are far more valuable.

Gathering Items

The Gatherer Addon is a big help here in that it will mark your map as you find stuff, so you can do efficient gathering routes later on.

As you kill, main, and slaughter your way across Azeroth and the Outlands you will see plenty of item drops in addition to the skins you pick up. The item names will be colored grey, white, green, blue (rare), and purple (really really rare.)

Everything white or better goes to your banker (unless your main can use it) for sale on the Auction House. Many green items won't sell very well so those should be disenchanted into their magical parts and those parts are then sold.

Learn the Auction House.

Use Auctioneer and your own observations to best estimate the best price to sell any particular item, which will vary from time to time. Thursday through Saturday is the best time to sell stuff, Sun eve through Tuesday is the worst.

For example, you collect some "Large Fangs" from StrangleThorn Vale. They're white, but you might be tempted to sell them to the vendor. DON'T!! Looking at your Auctioneer tooltip you might notice that they sell for around 1 gold each (which they really do.)

Ship them to your banker and have that character search the Auction House. Find out what the going price seems to be (which may even be more than 1 gold each) and price those teeth appropriately. Price too high and they don't sell, price too low and I'll buy them and resell them at a (much) higher price.

Keep your eyes open for the prices of items as you gather them and you'll start to learn what to gather, how to best sell it, and how to make some serious gold.

If you really want to learn all the gold making ticks and tricks you'll look at this Warcraft Millionaire dude, who's hit the gold cap on four characters. That's close to 1 million gold.