Shadowlands goldmaking: Entry level markets

One of the timeless questions of goldmaking is “how do I get started?”. The general approach doesnt change much, but the specifics do. So let’s take a look at what Shadowlands has to offer!

Principles when starting outer

When you are starting out the amount of gold or capital you have will be the biggest limitation for growth. This means that getting your gold back quickly aft investing in any market is important. All else being equal you will want to focus on large short term wins, which means items with a high sale rate.

Usually this means items like current content materials, vendor shuffles, volume consumables etc.

The role of farming

Personally I don’t like farming much so I do not focus on it. That being said it is invaluable when starting out. If you want to move into flipping or crafting you will have to invest gold. Eventually you run out of it and you will either be stuck not making progress or you will have to go farm.

If you want to optimize you should invest what gold you can in the markets you find, and then spend any excess time you have available farming in some fashion.

Vendor shuffles

Vendor shuffles are almost a subset of farming. It involves buying materials of some kind, crafting an item and then vendoring that item. The Composite Bow from leatherworking is the main candidate. It takes 5 Desolate Leather, 6 Pallid bones and 8 Penumbra Threads and vendors for 89 gold. If you have the rep discount for penumbra thread you will be making a profit as long as your average price for bones and leather is below 3 gold.

Enchanting 

Enchanting is a good option for entry level gold makers. The main focus should be on the enchanting shuffles to generate materials. Players need a lot of enchanting materials for both enchants and the base legendary materials. You will either be disenchanting Shrouded Cloth Bracers or the Shadowlace cuffs for Sacred Shards. Both can work well, but prices will vary from realm to realm.

Inscription 

Inscription has a couple of good easy to obtain recipes. The main ones for players on the lower end of the capital scale will be the tomes of the still mind to reset talents as well as missives for BoEs. Both can sell quite well, and none of them are expensive to obtain or craft.

Alchemy 

Alchemy can both be extremely expensive and quite cheap. For newer goldmakers I would stick to the weapon oils and health and mana potions. These recipes all have very high sale rates, even if the profit will not be amazing.

Cooking 

Cooking is another profession with very high sale rate items. On higher population realms this may be way too crowded and competitive, but on many realms you will be able to generate very tidy profits with cooking. I would focus on the +30 secondary stat foods, as they are by far the best when it comes to the balance of sale rate and prices.

Which should I pick?

With one character you can test out at least 3 of the professions I listed. I’d suggest taking a quick look at some of the prices. Compare the price of cloth to enchanting materials, and look at the price of weapon oils compared to death blossom. Then you can make an informed decision about what looks like it can generate a profit.

Start investing and start posting

To get started you will want to buy materials and craft some items. You can use my TSM settings for many of these, but generally you will just want to undercut whatever the current price is. The base UI will work well for that, so don’t get fancy with TSM unless you want to. Hopefully you see some quick sales at which point you should reinvest in the same market. If you run out of gold just make sure your stuff is on the AH, then go farm or play other parts of the game as you wait for the sale.

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One thought on “Shadowlands goldmaking: Entry level markets

  1. The Compound Bow vendor shuffle has been nerfed by Blizzard by upping the price of the thread.
    Leather + bone + thread = 105 g

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