I get asked quite often where I would suggest players go farm. I always answer the same “I don’t farm for gold, so I wouldn’t know”. So let’s take a look at why I don’t farm for gold.
What do I do then?
I play the auction house, and I do it in two ways. I use crafting professions to turn materials into useful items. Usually in large quantities. I also buy items to resell for a higher price, both for high volume items and very high end one-off items.
Generally none of these activities require that I leave the main city of my faction.
How a method scales is important
The ideal gold making method is one that gets better as you do more of it. That’s not usually the case though. Farming has linear or even slightly diminishing return. In most cases you get the same amount of materials per hour, every hour. You can get more gold by farming more hours, and that’s it.
Crafting scales both with the time you spend crafting and with the amount of gold you have. It also scales with the recipes you have available. In the beginning the gold per hour will be capped. If you only have 10 000 gold in retail, that’s not a lot of crafted gear. After you’ve crafted something with it, your gold per hour is zero until you can get materials again. If you have 1 million and can craft for the full duration of a silas Proc however, then your gold per hour will be MUCH higher.
Scaling with capital is the way to get rich without farming forever
Flipping and crafting both scale with the gold you have. The graph below shows my sales per week and the total AH value I had for my gold cap challenge. As you can easily see the sales increased quite a bit when my AH value started climbing quickly. I did not really change or increase my activity level, I just managed to keep increasing my stock of BoE items for sale. This then translated into more sales, and thus more gold for me.
Most of the uber rich are still farmers
Most of the richest players in WoW are still going to be farmers though. That’s because you can farm for a lot of hours if that’s all you do. If you have 10 hours to play every day, then you can cap your Auction house activities and still have tons of time left over to farm. There’s also multiboxing to consider which makes farming outrageously good. Ultimately there is no beating a no lifer, but focusing on crafting and flipping means you can still get very rich without spending an unreasonable amount of time.