With the advent of classic the focus is naturally once again on gold farming. There are tons of things to spend gold on in classic, so gold is definitely something you want, and you want a lot of it. So now is the perfect time to reiterate why I focus on gold making, and hopefully push some of you to join me!
What do I mean by gold making?
Gold making is any method that you can use to make gold. This includes farming of course, but it also includes other methods like crafting professions, carries, flipping and anything else other players are willing to pay for. Personally I make most of my gold through flipping (the art of buying low and selling high) and crafting professions. I expect to do the same thing in classic, so let’s look at why I prefer crafting and flipping over farming.
Farming is linear
For the most part farming scales linearly with your time. There are some ways you can maximize your kill speed, but overall you make a certain amount of gold per hour on average and that’s about it. My time is quite limited, which means that if I just traded my time for gold at the same rate I would never get rich. Crafting and flipping do not scale linearly with your time spent. Flipping is generally limited by the amount of gold you have, as well as your ability to find deals, either through having the right TSM settings or identifying the right markets.
The existence of very expensive and very powerful items means that flipping scales by far the best out of any method. In BfA you can literally make 50 000 gold from buying an item and reposting it 5 times. This is something farming will never compete with.
Crafting: frontloading your effort
Crafting has a payoff where you need to spend a lot of effort and gold for very little reward to get your profession leveld and to get the relevant recipes. Then once you get them you need to craft them and get them to the AH. If you are just starting out you will just be able to afford to craft a small number of recipes. As items sell you can afford to make and post more items to the AH. At this point it starts becoming really efficient as you can buy the materials needed and then sell the crafted item for more than what the materials sold for typically.
Greater diversity of items
The biggest advantage of crafting and flipping as that it gives you a MUCH greater diversity of items than most farming methods. Any one farming method will give you access to the same loot table, whether it is from mining nodes or killing mobs. Then you need to spend an equal amount of time farming another spot to get access to other kinds of items to sell. Crafting and flipping lets you more easily access new items. Crafting will still take some time, as you may have to level another profession, farm a new recipe or even level an alt to get access to new items. With flipping, you just need to have enough gold to buy it.
The AH let’s you scale your Gold per hour
It’s really this simple. Using the Auction house and obtaining items primarily from other players you can scale your gold per hour in ways that farming will never let you. Players always want to save time, and they are usually willing to pay a premium to get their item right now from the AH, no hassle. This has meant that crafting and flipping have been good ways to make gold since the dawn of WoW.