How to Make Gold in WoW for Beginners – Part One

After spending a lot of time reading many fantastic WoW gold blogs, I realised that there is not a lot of information out there for people looking to get started making gold. I had a hard time finding any kind of step by step guide to just get me up and running with the basics. After a lot of reading and experimenting, I’ve figured out a lot of stuff…so I’m going to share it with you!

I’m going take you with me a journey from pauper to rich man (or rich Worgen). I am going to start with a level one character with no BoA items or gold from other characters and follow him as he uses different gold -making methods. I’ll explain exactly how to use each one and show you how successful (or not…) each one was for me. Most of these methods will work whatever level you are; you don’t have to be low level. But all of them will be easy to get started with, even if you don’t have much capital or level 85s with maxxed out professions.

The Character

My character is Xennith, a Worgen Mage (because everyone loves a wolf in a dress). He is the inspiration for the Lord Xennith Ambrosius, Gentleman Auctioneer character who you will see around this blog. Here he is on the left. This is him at about level 11 or so (after he got the hat; more on that later). He is a mage, mostly because I don’t have a max level mage yet. The range dps thing doesn’t usually do much for me, so we’ll see how that goes.

Level 1-10

I’m going to get started by picking up mining and herbing and working through the Worgen intro quests, which I’ve never done. They also lead to you getting the Top Hat seen in the pic. The Hat is Win. I will wear it always (thank you transmog!).

I picked mining and herbing, because gathering is the fastest way for a leveling character to make gold ‘out in the field’. One of the important factors in making gold when your leveling is leaving time for actually leveling. Gathering take up less of your time since you can do it while you are out and about questing and then just sell the raw or refined products at the Auction House.

A quick look at the Auction House prices for low level gathered items (ore, metal bars, herbs, skins etc) on The Undermine Journal tells me that mining and herbing could be slightly more profitable than mining and skinning right now. I like skinning because you are often killing those animals as you quest, so you don’t even need to go out of your way. But I will take a chance on the extra gold for the herbs being worth it.

The Undermine Journal

So back up a second. You heard me mention The Undermine Journal right? Well you should note it well, because this will become one of the most useful tools in your goldmaking tool box. The Undermine Journal is a web site that collects historical data from the auction house on every server and faction. So you can use it to check the market value of just about anything. Just select your server and faction and start finding those profits!

First Auction House Visit

So here is what my bags look like after farming up copper and herbs through the whole Worgen starting zone. It’s taken some inventive bag space juggling to get this much to the Auction House, so hopefully it will pay off by getting me a nice nest egg to get started with. And by the way, not being able to buy bigger bags for a new character really sucks .

Auction House Add Ons

Before going any further, we need to talk about add-ons. You really will need some add-ons to help you manage your auction postings and purchases. Add-ons will also help you analyze the current market so that you know how much to sell items for and, most importantly, how to spot a bargain when you see one.

Auctioneer is the grandaddy of all Auction House add-ons. It will help you with posting and valuation but its most useful for finding cheap items that you can sell at a profit. Xennith will be doing a lot of that kind of thing.

Auctionator is much simpler than Auctioneer but does a great job at helping you just buy and sell stuff quickly. I actually prefer it for that over Auctioneer so I will use it to post my copper and whatnot. It makes it easy to post your items cheaper than everybody elses. Just drag an item into the sell window and it will set the price for you. Undercutting this way is not always desirable, but in this case, I just want to move my stuff fast and get some quick cash.

Auctioneer can give you much better methods for valuing items, like the market price calculated from data it has gathered from the AH over time. But don’t try to post using any clever valuation method before Auctioneer has enough data to work with. Auctioneer only becomes useful after it has gathered enough data from the Auction House on your server/faction to determine what any particular item is worth. You should not rely on Auctioneer for pricing (that includes buying items to resell) until you have about two weeks of daily scans. Until then, you can use The Undermine Journal (Henceforth TUJ) to fill in the gaps. You can find more about how to scan in Auctioneer in my Auctioneer Tutorial.

Back to the Auction House

A quick check of TUJ reveals that bars sell for more than ores, so I hit the forge before heading to the Auction House. I get my first Auctioneer data scan while I am there.

Now its just time to wait for the gold!

It doesn’t take to long to sell my stuff, because I undercut everyone . So by the next day I have nice empty bags and a total of 76g 6s 88c!

The copper bars were by far the most profitable item. They netted me over 47g by themselves. Herbs were worth about half of what the bars were. The Rough Stones were a waste of bag space. I should have vendored those and used the space for more ore. Oh well!

76g is more than enough to start making gold using a couple of other different methods. I’ll talk about the first one of those in the second part of the series.

Series Navigation

How to Make Gold in WoW for Beginners – Part 2 – Vendor Items >>