Getting started as a goldmaker in BfA

This is always a hot topic and as gold making always changes the best approach for players who are on the first step of their gold making journey will change. Today I’ll tell you what my best advice for players just starting out is.

Start with whatever you have

Don’t focus on choosing a realm, or maximizing your professions yet. Just start with what you have. Start on your current realm, and use the professions you already have.

Market progression – The generals

In general you want to start with markets that have items that sell quickly. This will help you generate profits fast so you can spend your gold on new deals. At the beginning the amount of gold you have will be the biggest limiting factor to how quickly you can scale.

As you start generating profits you want to add more markets that have slower sale rates or better profit margins.

I added some tentative gold amounts in parenthesizes after the titles below to give you an idea of what level the tips are relevant.

The best starting market

Material flipping is hands down the best market to get started in gold making, for several reasons.

It can be done even with quite little capital available. It has a very high sale rate. It will teach you flipping and the Auction House quickly.

There are some disadvantages with the main one of course being that it’s a flipping market, which increases the chance that you make mistakes compared to crafting markets or farming. Those mistakes are also opportunities for learning however, so in the long term you will be coming out ahead.

My favorite materials to flip are: Meaty Haunches, Stringy Loins, All the ores, Deep Sea Satin, Riverbud and Siren’s Pollen, but all BfA materials can be flipped profitably.

At this point you should focus on one or two materials first, as you will likely not have gold to flip more than that.

Diversification stage 1 (0-30k gold)

In addition to materials you want to start with whatever crafting professions you have available. At this point you should only focus on BfA crafting as old world crafts take much too long to sell.

You only want to craft a few items at the time. In general you will want to buy materials for crafting and then flip the materials you can’t craft with.

Focus on the items that are most useful from your profession. For Blacksmithing that is the sinister combatant gear, for jewelcrafting it’s the haste gems and the epic gems, for enchanting it’s haste enchants.

At this point a good split is to spend half of your gold on flipping and half your gold on materials for crafting.

Longer term goals (30-200k gold)

Currently the armor crafting professions are the best ones in my opinion. The only issue is the expulsom crafting, which is boring and time consuming. Getting these professions if you do not have them should be your next goal.

As you get these on your alts you should also start doing larger crafting batches. If you used to just do 1 of each enchant you can now go to 5 of each, assuming you have the gold for it. You should also now be flipping most of the BfA crafting materials.

Look for deals whenever you can. You make your gold when you can buy items for less than they’re worth. You do NOT want to try to sell your items far above market value when starting out as that will just bog down your sale rates.

Realistic progression

As my gold cap challenge showed a 25% profit margin is very realistic. For every gold you spend you should be making 1.25 back.

As you start out you will likely be plateauing or even going down in liquid gold compared to before. This is due to the fact that it takes time and gold to build up your AH value. You won’t sell all your auctions in one repost cycle, so you want more auctions so you can get more sales.

You should be able to generate enough gold for a token a month with just one character with two professions at max level and some flipping, but it will take anywhere from a week to several months before you are generating that amount of gold regularly.

To get to several tokens a month you will probably have to add more professions and even some old world markets or flipping.

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2 thoughts on “Getting started as a goldmaker in BfA

  1. Is this going to be an ongoing series? I hope so. I’m at about 300k and I’m trying to figure out what my next phase should be. Right now my focus is getting an alt with each profession and picking up a few profitable old recipies like the jade panther, but I’m not sure where to go next. Thanks for your help.

    1. I haven’t really though that far. I may, but once you get past the initial phase there is way more variety in what markets are optimal. General guidelines would be to add higher profit slow moving markets gradually.

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