Today we will take a look at what it takes to play mists for free. To do that we need to make enough profit per 30 days to cover a WoW token, which right now is sitting at 34 600 gold on EU. (Editor’s note I wrote this a week ago and the price has changed significantly since then, this makes all non-crafting methods worse, but the overall points stand)
1 150 gold per day
To get there you need to make a profit of about 1 150 gold per day. This can come from a variety of sources including crafting, gathering and flipping. So let’s take a look at some numbers!
Dailies
Daily quests get you gold every day that you can put straight towards a token. You get 34 gold for most dailies, so even maxing your dailies on a single character won’t cover a token, but it will get you quite a long step towards it. If you do 10 dailies a day that is 340 gold and a little less than one third of the token. If you have alts then doing 34 dailies a day should get you there, but it is going to be quite samey and not the most efficient way.
Farming
Farming for materials can get you there. Looking at some mining guides you can potentially pull inn 500-600 ghost iron ore per hour. At current prices of 1.5 gold that would be about 46 hours of farming to get a token. That would again equal about 1,5 hours of farming per day.
Crafting
This is where the time efficiency concept steps up. So to get an idea of the profit and time scales I’ll do a round of restocking on my main. I’ll simply restock professions and we’ll note down the expected profit and how long the entire session takes me from adding stuff to the restocking groups until I’m done.
So I did a restocking session on my main where I restocked Tinker’s gears and the contender’s Tailoring PvP Pieces. The expected profit from TSM was 3100 gold and it took me 6 minutes to buy all the materials and craft the items and then another 1 minute to do one post scan. If we assume about 10% of your auctions sell I would need 10 scans to sell everything I crafted for a total time of 16 minutes for 3100 gold profit.
This was without high end or expensive crafts
This was done without any high end or expensive crafts or any hard to get recipes. Other professions and recipes will obviously have different numbers and the more of them you can combine the better. More items for sale is more daily sales. If we assume a 10% sale rate in general that would mean you need to post items with a total expected profit of 346 600 gold to get to a token, but 90% of this volume will be reposting items that did not sell on the first go.
Combine them all
If you are starting out you should combine the methods. Do dailies and do some farming to get gold to level your professions or to fund profitable crafts. Then you spend your gold on posting items to the AH that are showing a profit and scaling that up.
30 days to a token
I am currently planning a new 30 days to a token challenge where I’ll be going from a fresh level 90 to a token in 30 days, but I need to get my rogue to level 90 first.