Burst or consistency? Did Dragonflight change the optimal approach to gold making?

There have been to major stylistic approaches to goldmaking that have warred on goldmaking forums for a long time. The hardcore patch/expansion launch gold makers and more steady state, works anytime methods.

Shadowlands: the extreme patch cycle

Shadowlands was probably the most extreme expansion in the history of WoW when it comes peakedness of gold making. Legendaries dominated gold making to an incredible degree. Everyone needed them, and the barrier to entry was high. With every new patch a new item level tier was made available, which meant every player in the game ran to the AH to upgrade their legendaries all at once. Combine expensive materials, huge demand and limited number of crafters, all tradeable on your region AH and you got an explosive mix.

I made 30 million gold profit within the first 8 weeks of patch 9.3 alone, when I had calibrated to the Shadowlands boom and bust style.

Dragonflight changes

The sum total of Dragonflight changes has to a very significant degree dragged us away from this boom and bust style. Most craftable items that can be sold on the AH are now stackable, which means they are traded on the region wide AH. This leads to very high competition, low profit margins and requires you to sit on the AH to generate sales. Gear crafting has mostly been relegated to crafting orders, which once again requires you to sit in town and spam macros to get customers.

The race to the bottom is faster than ever

This has lead to a situation where the race to the bottom in a new patch is faster than ever. If you can’t spend 10+ hours a day focusing on taking advantage of any new high level recipes then you in most cases should stay away from them. The prices rapidly fall as you are competing with the entire region. Personally I ended up making a ton of losses at the launch of 9.1, as my intuitions from Shadowlands have been completely wrong in Dragonflight.

Back to the long term

This means I am back to what used to be my bread and butter before Shadowlands. Steady long term goldmaking. Interestingly a lot of stackable items are profitable right now, and profits seems to even have gone up slightly recently. Gems, enchants and other Dragonflight Items are now selling at steady OK profit margins. It still requires you to sit on the AH to repost, but prices are stable, making it a lot safer.

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