I’ve recently started leveling a character for TBC as I have not played on the anniversary realms outside of my flipping challenge. And since all my friends are going horde I am starting completely from scratch, so let’s outline a plan.
The goal
My goal is to hit level 60, get my epic mount, two max level crafting professions and a healthy gold stockpile (3000+). This is quite a tall order, and I haven’t played much yet, so we’ll see how it goes.
Earning gold is the bottleneck
Now immediately my thougt is that earning enough gold to level professions and have gold left over is the most time consuming part. Leveling will get faster with the pre-patch, but with limited time making a lot of gold is harder. Obviously I won’t really be able to farm too effectively in low level zone s or without a mount, so farming is not too great.
I need to accelerate my gold
All this to say that I really need to accelerate my gold so I can make gold from having gold. Material flipping and crafting can both work well depending on my setup. I will also need to focus a bit on leveling early as it is the most effective way to get my first couple of gold to invest.
Starting plan
I need to set up a bank alt that I can keep parked at the AH for flipping and selling. Then on the character I’m leveling I’ll pick up either mining and skinning or mining and enchanting for the first part of leveling. I’ll ditch both eventually, but getting some extra gold from the world early on is very high value. I’ll then focus primarily on leveling and farming what I can find until I hit level 20. At this point I should have enough gold to where I can start investing in some material flipping. Depending on material prices I may do some farming at this point to speed it up (I’m leveling a shaman so I’ll get ghost wolf at 20 to help me be efficient).
Scaling
I’ll then keep leveling while scaling my material flipping. I’ll try to start and end every play session with checking my banker. As I start stacking gold I should be able to divert resources into leveling my professions. There are a LOT of leveling items that often sell well in classic and with a lot of people leveling new characters for TBC this is the perfect time to take advantage of that. I haven’t decided yet if I want to go directly for my TBC professions or if I want to pick some specifically for making gold before TBC, but I’m leaning towards the former.