My last post got an absolute ton of feedback, so let’s go a bit deeper on how you would start off to get into a double crafting setup.

Material flipping is dead

What I realized after posting the video is that my traditional go to for early gold is dead. I always used material flipping on classic to generate consistent profit as soon as I had at least one gold to my name. Sadly with the new AH I don’t expect this to work at all. That means I need to find another method to generate the starter gold, preferably without farming.

So what can we do?

Gathering pivot or farming

One option is to simply start out with double gathering while leveling. The goal is simply to generate extra gold while leveling so you can get online faster. For leveling specifically combining skinning with herbalism or mining is actually a lot better than for end-game farming as you will spend a lot of time killing mobs while leveling. I think especially very early on this is always the best approach, even for just generating a bit of whatever materials to vendor. Another factor is that you get to learn a gathering skill as a quest reward in your starting zone, so getting online with gathering is very fast. As such you should obviously use that profession very early on, but personally I will look to transition out as soon as possible.

Enchanting shuffles

An enchanting shuffle is where you buy materials, usually cloth, craft an item and then disenchant it. If the value of the materials you get from disenchanting is higher than the cost of crafting it you can do this at scale to generate a profit. Strange dust and magic essences are both used in some of the BoP recipes that people may want to craft early on, which will give you a nice market. You also have the entry level wands from enchanting.

Vendor shuffles

Vendor shuffles are shuffles where you craft something that can be vendored for more than it costs to craft. We used to be able to do this with wands in classic, but their vendor prices have been nerfed. Other options that are available early on is crafting linen bags, if you can get linen below 25c it will generate a small profit. You can also a little later craft silk bandages and mageweave bandages, both of which sell for more than the cloth to vendors, so if the price is low enough on the AH this can work. I did quite a bit of mageweave bandage crafting in classic for instance.

Crafting entry level recipes

I briefly mentioned the wands earlier as one example. The idea here is to craft items that are available at low skill level. Other options are bags, other gear pieces and some consumables. Many items will be crafted en masse as part of leveling people professions, so those will usually sell at a loss, but throughout my years of making gold in WoW there have been profitable low level recipes surprisingly often.

Crafting “shovels”

Lastly we have a completely new group of items in Forever. One of the material types needed for the new BoP profession leveling gear is a group of intermediate materials crafted by alchemists. These are a potential gold mine. Based on comments on my last video there are a lot of people looking to craft the leveling gear, so I am particularly excited about this market.

My plan?

I will probably pick up skinning early on alongside enchanting. That way I can disenchant quest rewards and get some easy materials by just killing mobs I would kill anyway. I am also planning to level an alt to level 10 ASAP to access skill 150 professions. This will be my enchanter/tailor so I can shuffle enchanting materials early on for a profit. In hardcore WoW I was able to use this combination to generate a profit even starting at level 5 without having done any gathering of note. I’ll also be leveling up cooking and trying to take advantage of cheap, low level experience recipes. On my main my focus will be alchemy early on. The reason I’m picking skinning over herbalism is just for the ease of gathering and not needing detours. I then plan to level alchemy aggressively to 150 so I can craft the intermediate materials needed for BoP gear, and scale from there. If necessary I’ll do some mob farming on the side, I prefer that over keeping a gathering profession up to date longer term and there are many good mob farms at multiple levels throughout the game.

Longer term

Longer term I plan to have engineering/alchemy on my main. This may change depending on what character specific benefits you get from professions as I may prioritize a profession for the raiding benefit. There are a lot changes already, so the final choice will depend on what we see at max level.