With the release of TBC most of us have predictably set our eyes on Outland and all the new items, zones and things to do there. Players still need those materials however, so prices have skyrocketed for many items lately!
Demand is still strong
Demand for a large variety of vanilla materials is still strong, and will remain strong. Since you need 300 profession skill to get access to TBC professions you will always need the old expansion materials. Since professions in TBC give significant PvE and PvP bonuses every max level character will generally want to have maxed professions, ensuring that old material demand never really falls off.
No one is farming
Right now there’s so few players farming in classic zones. This is extremely obvious if you just check the AH. I checked the market for mithril ore on my realm and it had almost ran out. Up from a price of about 30s back in pre-patch mithril ore was priced at 3 gold a pop. Since then someone has undercut down to a more reasonable price, but still far above what it was. If you had predicted this you would have made out like a bandit.
Farming old zones still works
Due to this you can still make good gold farming old zones. Doing gathering while leveling through classic zones if you are late to the game will be a nice boon to your economy and you can expect prices to rise before stabilizing at a significantly higher level than they had during Classic.
Resets and flips galore
Markets like this with thin supply and large surges in demand (when someone is leveling they need a lot of materials) are perfect for flipping and resets. Pick a couple of materials and check them whenever you are at the auction house and you will likely quickly be able to find periods where the price is low and you can take advantage. As always you will want to sell in large stack sizes so players can save time when buying from you. This will ensure you can get an even better price for your items.
Vanilla enchanting shuffles also work
Enchanting materials have the same dynamic, and you can shuffle materials quite effectively. Turning mageweave cloth into Vision dust through the White Bandit mask is an old classic (actually the first goldmaking method I ever learned back in actual TBC). There might be other shuffles I’m unaware of, so doing your own research with wowhead and enchanting yields can give you some nice profits.
What will the future bring?
We don’t know how the price will move in the future, but we can be certain that vanilla era materials will keep selling as players will always need to level 1-300. As such these items have a clear usefulness to them which guarantees that there will be demand.