So, you just popped out of the nether and landed in your faction's starting zone. There is one lonely yellow ! on your minimap. A check of your inventory shows....some really crappy gear and no money. What should you do now?
Grab that quest but keep in mind the following 5 key ideas about gold in WoW....
Number 1: Develop an “Earning Gold” Mindset
Yogi Berra (famous baseball player known for malapropisms) reportedly said that “baseball is 90% mental—and the other half is physical”. Whether true or not, something similar can be said of earning gold in WoW. As a player, you must develop a mindset that earning gold is just as important as earning experience or completing a quest. That means maximizing every opportunity, no matter how insignificant, to put money in your pocket.
Turn on “auto loot”, keep the grey items you get from mobs and sell them when you get back to a vendor. Install "Auctioneer" addon, run scans to develop your background data, and use the "search" feature for "Vendor" items--things listed for sale in the AH for less than what a vendor will pay for them. Buy them, go to the nearest vendor, and flip for profit.
A few silver here and there add up, and done day over day, you will begin to note the impact of more coins in your pocket. My L38 Warlock earned 1g 24s in SM Cathedral just from greys—and 7.5g overall for that run. That’s 16% from trash!
Number 2: Start a Bank Alt
If you have already done this, then bravo! If not, do it today.
You get 10 characters per realm. Use one slot for a low level toon that you plant in the closest major city (Ogrimmar or Stormwind, for example). You can easily mail items and then post in the AH without having to fly or ride to an AH. ((in game mail from one toon to another on the same account is delivered instantly—log off of your questing toon and onto the AH toon, and bam! your mail is already there)). Oh, and please don’t name it “bankerbob” or “myauctiontoon”—use a “real” name.
Tested with a L1 human warrior last week: he ran straight out of the starting area, down the path into SW, encountering only a spider (who killed me) and a Defias bandit (who killed me). Squinteye now resides outside the SW AH—wave if you see him!
Number 3:Use Your AH Toon Wisely
If you don’t read trade chat, then start. Yes, most of it is juvenile, but in peak times you see “paying 10g for guild sigs, kick you when full, outside Ogrimmar bank”. When you see this, wsp back “I’ll sign” and go earn 10g the easy way. It’s legal, and as soon as the guild is formed, the GM will kick you out and you can do it again. If you are on your main, you can wsp back “my alt will log in and sign—friend squinteye”. Most of the time they will wait for you to log that toon—they need the sigs to make the guild. Squinteye earned 30g this way in the first 4 days he was in SW.
Number 4: Ready Made Bank Slots Let You Stack and Sell
Did you know you can store 50 mails in your inbox, each with 12 slots of goodies, for up to 30 days? Well, a lot of players don’t, and they face storage issues as the price of bigger bags and more bank slots become cost prohibitive.
Keep in mind that the more inventory you have the more economic power you wield. Buying bigger bags should be a priority but the few silver you own are hard to part with for a utility item like a bag or bank slot.
Stacks of an item always sell better than singles. This is true for cloth, ore, and herbs—all of which sell better in the AH in stacks of 5x and 10x. You don’t gather them in 5s, so you have to save them somewhere. As your bags fill with stacks of 20, and you mail them to your AH toon, you may see that listing in the AH right then is not a great idea. Maybe prices are low, or supply is really high now. You want to list them when you can earn more gold per unit.
A stack of 20 may seem manageable, and alone, it will be. But as you quest your bags will fill with quest items, drops you want to sell, and extra equipment. Add to that wool, linen, copper, tin, silver--well, you get the idea. You may only have 20 slots in your bags, and they will quickly fill up, especially if you follow the above tips and don't throw anything away.
Use the mail!! Send your non-soulbound items to your AH toon. As his mail fills up, he can combine mail by taking those with 2 or 3 items, putting them in his bags, and mailing to your other toon in full, 12 slot usage. Then just hit “return” and the mail goes back to your banker toon. You just turned 3 mails into one!
Number 5: Gather, Gather, Gather
This will be a topic unto itself in future weeks, but suffice it to say that the easiest and best way to earn gold is to sell things that you gather—in other words, 100% profit is the best! ((opportunity cost is a factor here, and we will examine that in future posts))
If you are an herbalist, every herb you can pick that you leave on the ground is like a pile of money. Pick it, mail it to your alt, and list it in the AH. If you are a skinner, as you ride to the next quest, you see skinnable corpses littering the countryside. Help keep Azeroth clean and skin that kill—even the scraps will sell. Miners, you may be leveling with adamantite nodes, but why fly past that silver vein or tin ore and not farm it?
Even if you only sell these items for 1s each (and we will discuss how make much more than that), you can make a few gold just taking a step or two out of the way as you go from point A to point B. Easy money.
Hopefully, these five tips will help you immediately, and for the long run too!
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