Should you put in the same effort all the time? With Shadowlands this question has become more relevant than ever.
Patch 9.2 and the results of preparation
I started preparing for 9.2 about 3 months out, buying up materials and crafting the needed intermediate materials. I then went deep into the gold pile buying essentia early in the patch, going down from 30 million to about 10 million. Then as Rank 7 legendaries came online I made it all back, and another 26 million profit on top in a month.
My first prep
This was the first time I really planned a bit for a patch, mostly making sure I had all the intermediate materials so I wouldnt need to spend precious time making ingots when 9.2 was out. It paid off to an incredible degree. To put this in perspective: I’ve made 10 million gold profit in the last 4 months, compared to 26 million profit in a single month.
Is steady state worth it?
To me it might actually not be worth it soon. I expect I won’t be doing too much steady state goldmaking once I finish the 100 million gold. It can be extremely profitable of course, but most of the available markets don’t interest me too much. I’m a crafter at heart, and crafting is usually front loaded in every patch cycle, as that’s when players are all gearing up at the same time.
Sprints are extremely valuable
More than anything we see that going hard in periods where markets are hot is extremely good for efficiency. If you want to maximize your gold per hour, then going hard in a hot market and then taking time off will be quite a bit better than plodding on every day.
Get good at long term markets
Getting good at long term markets is also important. I spend more time on crafting, versus someone like Kaychak who is much richer than me, and a lot better at identifiying and utilizing long term markets. He has spent the time to get extremely good at that, and it means he can reap some extremely high profits on any given week (he’s not a stranger to going hard either as he was first to market with 262 gear on draenor).
Utilize hot markets to accelerate
If you are still early in your goldmaking journey, the main thing you should do is seek to utilize hot periods to accelerate your overall gold. If you can be an early mover in the next 262 gear market and sell items for 200% profit for a day or two you can unlock a lot more capital to reinvest in steady state markets. Even if you can only craft a small number of items at the time the profit and sale rate will help you out.