It is no secret that I personally am not much of a gold farmer. I don’t ever refer to what I do as gold farming as I don’t do any type of traditional farming.
Farming is a useful tool…
Farming is a great way to make gold, especially if you don’t have much. If you have 100 gold on classic for instance it would be extremely easy to spend it all on materials you could flip. Then you would be out of things to do, unless you can go farming somewhere.
But it’s not necessary
Farming is never really necessary unless your goals and ambitions are extremely high. Farming can be a nice supplement, especially if you enjoy it. Then it could even be your main gold making method. If you don’t enjoy it then there really is no need. You can start playing the auction house in both classic and retail with the gold you have on you and most likely be successful.
Farming is typically less time efficient than an optimized crafting and flipping operation, but when you are starting out you won’t have the capital to run an optimized crafting and flipping operation.
The best time for farming
The best time for farming is really if you no longer have any gold to spend on profitable items on the AH, whether to flip or to craft with, or if you can’t find any more good deals. In both cases the AH and crafting will not be giving you any rewards, so farming is the only way to progress.
Kickstarting your AH journey
Making gold with just crafting professions and flipping is my preferred method, but getting started is a little slow. If you sprinkle in some dedicated gold farming session you can accelerate your progress and quickly get past the initial slow points to get into where gold starts really flowing in, rather than mostly flowing out as you build up inventory.