Getting started with goldmaking in the Shadowlands

Today I’m going to outline the first steps you should take if you are coming into goldmaking as a complete newbie. This world can seem difficult and impenetrable, but I believe anyone can succeed at this.

How do you make gold?

Generally you make gold in WoW by selling valuable items to other players. This might seem incredibly obvious, but the basis is still incredibly important. The entire trick to finding new markets is in understanding what other players value.

What has value?

WoW players generally care about two things: being strong and looking cool. So anything that increases the power of their character or makes them look cooler is in gneral something players are willing to spend gold on. This is an incredibly wide array of items and you can make gold with almost anything, which makes it quite overwhelming. You can start by just focusing on yourself, which items do you typically buy on the AH, there’s most likely someone profiting from farming, crafting or flipping them.

Tools

Goldmaking without tools in the form of addons is incredibly difficult. Tradeskillmaster is by far the most powerful one, but it can seem very intimidating. You do not need to use it for everything when you are starting out, as the base UI is now quite good, but you do need TSM or another addon that can provide pricing data to help you identify valuable items and the general price level of items. Long term you should aim to learn Tradeskillmaster. You can start with my written guide, there are also tons of video guides if you prefer that format, just search on youtube.

Gold making methods

There are three main ways of getting items you can sell, farming them, crafting them or buying them to resell, and this corresponds to the three main ways you can make gold.

Farming

Farming is the easiest way to make gold. You go out with a gathering profession or just killing mobs and then you turn around and sell the stuff you farmed on the AH. The only thing you are risking is your time. It does not scale too well though as an hour of farming is always worth the same amount of gold.

Crafting

Crafting means utilizing a crafting profession to turn raw materials into a finished item. The finished item can be a piece of gear, consumables or something else. Generally most crafted items that are useful sell for 15-50% more than the materials are selling for. In some markets you can make larger profits. My personal long term average is about 30%.

Flipping

Flipping means buying and selling the same item. You want to buy low and sell high. Check out this post for a more in-depth explanation of why and how flipping works. Flipping is the most risky, but also the most efficient method of goldmaking.

Getting started

When you are starting out you want items that sell quickly. This usually means items that are useful in terms of increasing player power. Materials for the current expansion also sells really well as they are used in recipes that give player power. Cosmetic items can be incredibly profitable, but they take significantly longer to sell.

Farming

There’s no great secret to farm. I would suggest either going with skinning or herbalism and mining. Callous Hides still sells for a lot of gold and is quite profitable. Outside of that herbalism and mining is always needed both for base legendaries and for alchemy consumables. Just pick a spot and test it out, there are hundreds of guides on youtube. I do not personally farm so I don’t know what the best ones currently are. You can also join 2×4 farming groups which is 2 groups of 4 players killing mobs. These generally target rarer world drops like Epic BoEs, and can also be quite profitable.

Crafting

Start with the professions you have. If you have TSM installed it will give you a quick rundown of the expected profit right in the crafting UI. Craft one each of anything that shows up as green and post them on the AH for sale. Then when something sells you can craft more of it. If you have not picked professions yet I would suggest checking out my post on entry level markets for my current SL recommendations.

Flipping

Flipping is by far the hardest goldmaking method to get into. I would suggest starting with material flipping, find one or two and just check the price every day and on theunderminejournal.com. Then buy when it is relatively cheap and try to resell it at a higher price point. I find that just buying at 70% dbmarket and selling for a minimum of 115% avgbuy with TSM can work pretty well. There’s a sample group you can add items to below to get started.

Learn by doing

You can’t learn this by reading, you have to test stuff out, make mistakes and get a feel for your realm. No one can do it for you. Go test it out, the only important rule is to sell your items for more than you bought them for (or the materials if you are crafting). Then once something works, just repeat it!

If you want to level up your gold making come join me on Patreon and get access to awesome rewards like my full TSM setups.