The Fastest Way to 10,000 Gold: The Fox Van Allen counterpoint
by Fox Van Allen 
Jan 9th 2012 at 7:00PM
Basil, you ignor... Kidding.
Last week, I found out that my Auction House teammate Basil Berntsen was writing an article for WoW Insider titled "The fastest way to make 10,000 gold." Before I even read the first word of the column, my first instinct was that it was a great idea for a column. My second instinct: I'll bet my idea of the fastest way to getting 10,000 gold is different than Basil's idea of what's fastest.
To be sure, Basil has some good ideas. Ore shuffling. Converting herbs to ink. But I've got my own ideas as to the fastest way to earn money.
The wrong answers
Basil's article takes pains to single out running dailies as a terrible way to make money. But I wanted to see just how bad they were. In an unscientific experiment, I subjected myself to the awful Tol Barad Peninsula dailies one last time.
It took me exactly 19 minutes 58 seconds to run the gauntlet and complete the initial set of dailies. After turning in all the quests, vendoring all the grays, and adding up the market value of all the Embersilk Cloth, I made just 233 gold. That averages to a measly 11.6 gold per minute. Basil's right, that's terrible.
But what's notable here is that running dailies isn't far worse than perhaps the most popular way of grinding for gold: farming. Hopping on my herbalist, I was able to grab 46 Whiptail and 12 Volatile Life doing a full circle around my most profitable route in Uldum. At the current market prices for each, that works out to just 19 gold per minute.
So, if the answers everyone thinks are right are actually wrong, what are the actual right answers? Let's take a look.
Laziness: It pays off
Laziness may never pay off for the lazy, but for those of us willing to put in the work, we can make some serious money off the lazy. And the best -- and quickest -- way to do this is to buy vendor items and resell them on the Auction House. Last week, commenter tyler (no relation to sycophantic boomkin blogger Caraway) said he made 900 gold selling items players needed for their Darkmoon profession quests. Selling Ice Cold Milk during the Winter Veil holiday is another time-honored tradition of profiting off the lazy.
Thankfully, though, you don't need to wait for special occasions such as those to cash in. Dust of Disappearance, for example, has proven itself as a terrific seller on the Auction House time and time again. It's required to swap out glyphs at level 85, and there are always players looking to swap glyphs. (This is especially true when raid lockouts expire on Tuesday and immediately after new patches.) Sales volume is usually pretty strong; you can sell several stacks a day on a server with a large playerbase.
Any person can go to an inscription vendor, buy Dust of Disappearance for 8g 75s, and then resell them on the Auction House for a severe markup. Admittedly, though, that's not the best way to play the market. If you've got a scribe who's leveled up through 475, you should make them yourself to maximize your profit. One Blackfallow Ink creates three Dust of Disappearance, which can easily put profit margins at 500% to 1,000%.
And while we're on the subject of inscription vendors, you can still make some pretty solid bank ferrying goods from Twilight Highlands back to Orgrimmar and Stormwind -- specifically Deathwing Scale Fragment, Scavenged Dragon Horn, Preserved Ogre Eye, Bleached Jawbone, and the Silver Charm Bracelet. There's no reason why you can't slap a 100% or 200% markup on all of these.
Doing this caters to two audiences. One is the lazy, of course. Secondly, though, you're helping out those who are trying to max out inscription but haven't yet done the series of quests required to open up the vendors in Twilight Highlands.
If your character is a scribe, pick up a few extra so you can make the three i377 PvP relics. The Vicious Charm of Triumph, Vicious Eyeball of Dominance, and Vicious Jawbone of Conquest can all be made for a few hundred gold each. I've sold them for as high as 1,500 gold, though they sell far more reliably down around their average market price of 750 g.
Quick, easy, and high-profit -- my favorite combination. Of course, we won't call any of this a tax on the lazy; that kind of language doesn't poll well with the general populace. Let's just call this ... a convenience fee.
Buy, flip
Buy low, sell high! It's that simple, stupid advice that leads everyone to think they're kings of Wall Street even when they're just some schmuck with an Etrade account loaded up with internet stock. But buy low is so simple, so dumb ... that it actually works like a charm.
You want a simple, foolproof way to search the Auction House for bargains? Just click on the Current Bid tab in the Auction House to reorganize auctions based on the bid price. Sometimes people list auctions for an unintentionally low price. Sometimes they do it on purpose. Someone's going to win that tragically underpriced auction; it might as well be you.
It doesn't take a lot of time to do, and the right score -- often a sexy piece of transmogrification gear priced at the low, default level -- can make you hundreds of gold.
Run heroics -- no, seriously
OK, so you're scratching your head to find out how this Auction House nonsense works. That's OK, because one of the best, most guaranteed ways to make money is to just run heroics. Yes, heroics.
It's not the act of running the heroic itself that makes you all the money. I only got about 120 gold from my random heroic over the course of 24 minutes -- 180 gold if you count that I won the roll for the Chaos Orb. Where you really start seeing the money is when you monetize your justice points and your valor points. One heroic puts you 12% of the way toward an 8,000 gold pair of valor bracers like the Bracers of the Black Dream. It also put me 18% of the way toward a pair of 1,000 gold i378 justice bracers.
Doing the math, for 24 minutes worth of work, I will have made 1,314 gold once I buy and sell my bracers. That's 55 gold per minute. You can definitely do better, but there are far less profitable ways you can spend your time. Like farming.
And the right answer is ...
When the question was first posed to me, I knew the right answer immediately. It's how I made my initial fortune. And now that I'm leveling a shadow priest on Horde side without the aid of my Alliance-side bankroll, it's how I'm making my second fortune: inscription.
I won't go into the nuts and bolts of inscription here, because I've done that already. But hands down, on a gold-per-second basis, nothing I've ever done in WoW has been as profitable. If you want to read about making money with inscription, here are the relevant links:
- How I, Fox Van Allen, got to the gold cap via inscription
- Making ridiculous amounts of money by selling Mysterious Fortune Cards
- Selling glyphs for fun* and profit (*note, selling glyphs is never fun)
Inscription almost single-handedly made me 1 million gold over the course of three months. I can't say exactly what my gold per minute averaged out to there, but let's just say it was a lot higher than the 55 I'd have made running heroics.
Maximize your profits with more advice from Gold Capped. Do you have questions about selling, reselling, and building your financial empire on the auction house? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Gold Capped
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
chinese.fish Jan 9th 2012 7:12PM
Just join an RP realm and you can AH gray items for massive profit. :P
My Moonguard characters make 2k gold before even hitting 20, just by leveling and not vendoring junk.
Sharky-Sharky Jan 9th 2012 7:12PM
I've been selling Dust of Disappearence and other vender bought items for awhile now. When telling one of my friends about this I just told him "Hey, I'm a goblin" and everything was OK.
Noyou Jan 9th 2012 9:11PM
I sold the virtuoso inscription ink kit once for 20g. Perhaps the dude that bought it makes more gold than the time it takes to track down the inscription vendor. I was thankful to say the least. People love buying patters too that you can purchase at a vendor for 50s or so.
Drakkenfyre Jan 9th 2012 11:00PM
I used to make some money selling Manuals of Heavy Silk Bandage.
Only one vendor for the Alliance sold it. He was hidden in Stromgarde Keep. Most people didn't even know he existed. You entered, turned right, turned right again, and turned right again, there he was.
As the pattern was not taught at a trainer, it was a required item to level First Aid. I would buy them for 55s, and sell them for 4-5g. This was back before gold was extremely easy to make, and if I remember correctly, Quel'Danas hadn't even been implemented yet, so the idea of hitting a daily area and making money didn't exist. Some people eventually noticed, and started copying me. Ending up in a selling war. The idiots eventually started selling them for 55s, the same price to buy them. After a couple times of this, I just stopped. It's pointless to sell an item for the same price you buy them, THEN have to pay AH fees and cuts.
Jerry Jan 9th 2012 7:16PM
I've sold 8 valor boots at 10,000g a piece on the Auction House. Boots 9-12 are up right now. I think that is where I'm going to stop, but wow the money came in fast!
Sure it was a lot of dungeon running with alts the past month, but I'm happy to have over 100k now.
ladeezluvlarry71 Jan 9th 2012 7:29PM
I only have two 85 alts, but I figure that I've made 140g a day when you average out the valor bracers I've sold. The easiest way to make money in my opinion is to just level alts. You'll make several thousand just getting to 85 (like was mentioned in the last column) and then getting valor capped every week nets you 6k-8k every 1.25 weeks per alt! Of course prices are dropping fast, but the first few weeks of a tier can be really profitable! I know a guy who made almost 100k across his five 85 alts during firelands.
Unless of course, you're on Ragnaros, then you can't do this. :(
mitch_b_666 Jan 10th 2012 10:22AM
Man, you're lucky. Boots were going on my server for 17k on the first day, but by the end of the first week had dropped to 4.2 prices of 5k each, and 3.5k for bracers. Some people just can't bare to see profiteering :(
David Jan 9th 2012 7:20PM
I have about 900 gold on a level 10 character without any twinking at all. I started with herb and ore farming, I sold everything. I bought a batch of volatiles and sold them. I bought ores and herbs with the profits. The rest is history. I have no sympathy for people who beg for gold.
Noyou Jan 9th 2012 9:16PM
Nor should you, but those people who beg for gold, are probably half way to being gold capped on another toon. People actually get in fights on trade over calling them out. If you get 1-2 people feeling sorry for you or whatever, and they give you 1-2k because they are just so cool like that, you would probably hit 10-15k in one day of begging. If you are like many people nowdays, you might have 2 accounts one to beg on and one to run dungeons or whatever. So no, I don't feel sorry for anyone who can afford a PC, internet connection, and $15 a month to play a game. The people begging is a bigger scam than gold selling.
Pyromelter Jan 9th 2012 7:38PM
Inscription is definitely the way to go, pretty much everyone I know with a huge bank roll got there in large part because of inscription. The JC/alchemy and pants enchants markets are nice side-diversions that are great if you have a main or an alt without inscription and you are waiting for a raid invite or an LFR queue or a LFD queue, but to really blast your way to the top, inscription is the way to go.
I remember, I leveled my druid as herb/alch, and the day I let go of herbalism, it was a really tough thing... being able to farm my own mats in flight form, herbing super fast, even the little profession boost was fun. But then I started making some money from inscription, and I was like.. what the heck was I afraid of. This is like printing money. Plus when patches and expansions roll around, you get things like Glyphmas and darkmoon decks to completely just become filthy stinking rich overnight if you do it right.
emberdione Jan 9th 2012 7:40PM
Tl:dr:
Inscription: It's like printing money.
(I am so gonna be saying that now.)
Nivella Jan 9th 2012 8:32PM
It was the opposite for me, my scribe was on a lowish pop server, and the demand for any scribe items was super low, so I dropped herbalism for alch and earned more coin selling pots.
My other scribe on my home server has little trouble selling fortune cards.
emberdione Jan 9th 2012 7:38PM
Mysterious.Fortune.Cards.
300k, just from selling them and the trinkets.
It's crazy.
As an added comment to the "run heroics" this is especially true if you are the CTA at the moment. Getting one of the rare BOE pets in your bag is a really nice bonus (3k for the tournament pets? yes please!). Plus usually I get a flask or two that always sell for a 100+ gold.
Talia Jan 9th 2012 7:40PM
It seems for every piece of advice that filters through this column with a "your market may vary" disclaimer (direct or implied), my server's market doesn't just vary, it's the exact opposite. Dusts of Disappearance only go for about 5-7g apiece (and slowly at that) - still a 300% profit from the herbs that I make it from, but you obviously can't go the vendor route there. Mysterious Fortune Cards sell faster, but at only 5-8g - 1/3 the value per ink as the dust! Glyphs are so hit and miss that I've stopped bothering.
Schadenfreude Jan 10th 2012 11:00AM
This is my server as well. I really want them to implement cross-server AHs. I would jump for joy.
noel mcleod Jan 10th 2012 1:55PM
I have max Inscription on both Horde and Alliance realms, and I find the same thing ... it's profitable, but not nearly as profitable as listed here. (Although it HAS been on occasion, I stumbled into the AH once when someone vendored 100 stacks of Cinderbloom at 15G per stack ... and bought them all).
clundgren Jan 9th 2012 7:45PM
You just have to do the RIGHT dailies. And they aren't in TB.
I do the non-jousting, non Storm Peaks Argent Tournament dailies everyday. My circuit goes from the tournament grounds, to the cultist encampment, to the elite undead drake. It takes me about ten minutes, and earns me on average about 150 gold in rewards and whatever drops I get.
But it also earns me 8-10 Argent Tournament marks. Let's call it 8, to make the math easier. That means every 5 days, minimum, I can buy a BoE pet from the various faction vendors. I can sell those pets for 3k all day long.
So, over 5 days the AT dailies net me roughly 3750 gold for 50 minutes work, or 75 gold/minute. That ain't chump change.
clundgren Jan 9th 2012 7:51PM
Whoops, my circuit first goes out to the vykrul island.
Basil Berntsen Jan 9th 2012 7:47PM
We should talk about this next podcast. Speaking of which...
Spiritfox Jan 9th 2012 8:09PM
... ant slut