In the course of my 30 days to a token challenge I had to spend some time farming to supplement my gold income and get to the finish line in time. I tried out 2×4 farming and it was surprisingly fun, so I thought I would do a quick write-up of what it is.
How good is it?
I haven’t tried every spot available, but from my testing it is certainly much less efficient than the auction house based methods over a longer time horizon. That being said it can be very lucrative when just starting out to build some capital or even to just get access to decent amounts of crafting materials. In my testing I’ve gotten numbers in the 20k per hour range, but it depends a lot on your realm and BoE/rare drops.
What is it?
2×4 (pronounced 2 by 4) farming is farming that tries to maximize the kill speed on mobs while taking advantage of group loot privileges. Usually only one group of 5 can tag a single mob, but if you only have 4 people in the group, then one person from the other group can tag the mob as well and all 8 players will be able to loot it. This means you know have 8 people to help you kill mobs quickly.
Hyper-spawning, the concept that makes it work
The reason why this is so effective is because of the concept of “hyper-spawning”. Certain spots in BfA can be forced to almos tinstantly respawn the mobs there. The spawn rate is based on how fast the mobs are killed, so the more damage you have, the faster they will respawn. This means you can essentially continuously pull and kill mobs with zero downtime to wait for respawns.
Hyperspawning is almost 100 percent contingent on a large group to kill mobs quickly enough so 2×4 farming is the main way to do this.
What do you farm for?
Generally most of the 2×4 spots are based on the same concept. You kill regular mobs at really fast rates. The main drops include raw gold, vendor thrash, uncommon BoEs, cloth world drop BoEs and mounts. Specific spots will have different focuses.
Getting into groups
The easiest way to get into a group is to look for one in the group finder. They are typically listed under “Other”. The only strict requirement is that you need at least one monk for the black ox statue to make sure that all of the mobs are collected in the same spot for easy AoE. Outside of that you want a healthy number of ranged dps that can effectively pull the mobs in, and of course AoE DPS. Balance druids are most effective, but you can get into groups with pretty much any class.
Groups will typically list whether or not they have war mode on, so make sure you toggle it correctly.
Boralus, cloth and world drops
The Boralus 2×4 spot is great for alliance players as you can get to it VERY quickly. The main drops include raw gold, Tidespray Linen, Deep Sea Satin, greens and world drops. It is better if you can get value from either disenchanting or scrapping them for expulsom, rather than just vendoring them. You can either process the tidespray Linen into expulsom, enchanting materials or just sell it straight up.
The spot is shown on the map and screenshot below, there are a bunch of mobs around the area including on top of the catwalks, so make sure you run around and pull them all! For a more in-depth guide check out this video.
Vol’dun, cloth and the Vol’dun mount
The Vol’dun farm is very similar to the Boralus spot in terms of the basic idea. You want to kill mobs quickly to generate cloth, vendor thrash and BoEs. The one difference is that Voldun also has a world drop mount that can be traded on the AH. This is an added bonus to this spot and helps make it slightly more profitable.
I found that the Vol’dun spot is slightly slower in terms of volume of mobs, and the mount is quite rare. Ultimately I prefer the Boralus spot just for the sheer ease with which you can get started there.
Leveling with 2×4 farming
Due to the level scaling in BfA 2×4 farming is actually a pretty nice way to get XP and gold at the same time. While I have not tested the leveling speed, you will be able to get into groups and you will get way more gold from leveling this way than you would any other way.
Opportunity cost and processing
You can make more gold from this if you can use the materials to create something useful, but if you consider the opportunity cost value, you should value the farming at the raw market value of the drops you do get. Enchanting can be a nice way to get more value from the uncommon drops, and tailoring is really nice to turn the tidespray into either expulsom or enchanting mats. Either way you can also just sell the materials straight up.