BilisOnyxia recently posted some results from the Classic beta where he has tried out some goldmaking. His mailbox had a whoopping 2.5 gold in it. Pretty good for just selling some low level leather and bags. With classic launch about a month and a half away now is a great time to take a look at some potential low level goldmaking methods.
Gold is king
Early one there will be very little gold in circulation. This has a double set of ramifications. Prices will be low, but profits can still be made. Any profit you make early will be EXTREMELY valuable as you can reinvest in relatively cheap materials before inflation kicks in. The other side is of course that any method that generates gold directly from the game world will be much better than they are on the live game.
What methods make sense early?
If we look at broad goldmaking methods some that make sense early include farming, vendor flips and low level shuffles and flips. All of these will focus on items that are useful for new and beginning characters. Items like low level crafting materials, bags, low level gear and other items like these should be the focus.
Low level vendor flips
Vendor flipping is always an interesting method when you are starting out. The idea is to buy an item from a vendor and post it for a highe rprice on the AH. You can either take advantage of limited stock items that vendors sell out of, items that players don’t know are sold by vendors or just items that are sold by vendors that are out of the way. In all these cases they will be happy to buy it on the AH for a higher price.
Items to look for specifically include low level bags, recipes and other limited stock items.
Farming
Farming is the most time tested method for getting gold when just starting out. It always works, even if it is not the most interesting or sexy method. Low level crafting materials will have heavy demand early on. You can also focus on generating raw gold just to inject gold into the economy.
Shuffles
Enchanting shuffles are one of the oldest crafting based goldmaking methods in the game. You can of course do shuffles for all the enchanting materials in vanilla, but when starting out shuffling linen and wool into strange dust will be your best bet. Strange dust is a major bottleneck when starting out to level enchanting. Candidate recipes to craft with tailoring to disenchant include: brown linen robes and pants.
You can also do the mining shuffle where you buy ore and melt it into bars. Blacksmiths will need the ore melted, but there will likely be players that post unrefined ore rather than melting it down themselves. Copper ore into copper bars being the most obvious ones, but all of the low level bars that are used by blacksmiths are good candidates.
You wrote about vendor flips but I think of them in reverse. There is a vendor search in TSM and Auctioneer that will find auctions below vendor price. On new realms prices are very low and it should turn up something.
On a high pop server in EU with my low level character I went from below 1 gold to 60-100g in just one session. I had to run back and forth between a vendor and AH since I could not afford to outright purchase everything for auction.
It’s low profit but its completely mindless as long as you vendor everything you buy.