For those of you venturing into the Season of Mastery classic realms I will share my tips, based on my experience with goldmaking in classic WoW!
What’s different
Season of Mastery will have several significant differences to classic wow. The most notable one for goldmaking purposes is the nerf to AoE farming by mages, where you can no longer kite mobs forever. The main effect this will have is reduced raw gold generation, and reduced access to some materials. They will also increase the number of herb spawns. This will drive herb prices down, in relative terms, but with the removal of world buffs, alchemy consumables will be even more in demand, so overall alchemy should still be very good.
Early days = raw gold
In the very early days a lot of raw gold and vendor shuffles will be worth it. There will be very little gold going around, which will heavily limit the prices of goods on the AH. There are several vendor shuffles that I used in classic, For instance the Greater magic wand, which vendors for 15s and requires a Greater magic essence and turning cloth into bandages (mageweave bandages vendor for 4s, and I could find it for 3s very often. . These won’t work on day one, but in the first weeks they will work well.
Consumables, consumables, consumables
Consumables will probably be the best goldmaker overall. This was the case for me in classic. Cooking, alchemy and sapper charges are the most relevant ones, and they all sold incredibly well. With how strong Engineering is, you should absolutely go goblin as the sapper charges will be a huge money maker as long as they don’t get nerfed. Alchemy is also fantastic with the incredible number of consumables, with extremely powerful effects.
Bloodvine rogue farming
When Zul’Gurub opens every caster will want the bloodvine set. Rogues with herbalism can solo farm a lot of the potential spawns in ZG, and this was extremely lucrative in classic. If you like farming, this is one to prepare for.
Investment opportunities
Ahn’Qiraj
The logistics badge quests will be very in demand. I sold a good chunk of items needed for these quests around the launch of AQ. Get a good spread of items and post them to the AH, or just get a couple of the recipes, like the moonsteel broadsword and keep those on the AH.
Lowbie materials
There are a lot of materials that get generated at lower levels you can buy up early. This includes Small Flame Sacs for fire protection potions, Firefin Snappers for fire oil, Oily Blackmouth for Free Action potions and probably others. These can likely be found very cheaply early on as players haven’t hit max, and you should stay on the lookout for them.
Consumables for specific phases
P1 and P2 mostly uses fire protection potions, but once we head into AQ Nature resistance potions and nature resist gear will be the name of the game. You can actually kill huhuran without NR gear and no world buffs (my guild did this in classic when we did a no world buff speedrun), but if they buff the encounter you may have to go full NR to stand a chance.
Shadow protection potions exploded for Naxxramas, as they are absolutely required for Loatheb.