With the expansion having been around for a few resets now, and people beginning to settle into their long term play patterns, it’s a good time to start looking at the best ways to make gold in Shadowlands itself. Earlier recommendations would’ve been doomed to change with the early expansion market being unstable, and only with the release of the raid did prepatch recommendations really expire.
The current environment has, like most expansions, heavily curbed goldmaking opportunities in outdated content. Shadowlands is a little unusual in that it has knocked down most traditional raw gold farms in addition to the standard pass on randomized gold opportunities. The old standby of spamming old raid content has proven to be pretty impossible to make good margins on, with most players reporting the decent payout raids are actually harder than in prepatch. Currently engaging with new content is going to be your chief moneymaker, and in some different ways than our prepatch guidelines.
What has changed?
Perhaps the most important change to note is one that is the opposite of what was expected prior. During prepatch goldmaking, there was a nod to raid farming returning to viability with Shadowlands levels and gear. While Blizzard gave some assurances that farming legacy content should remain the same, in practice most players are reporting a harder time rather than the same or easier. With existing raid farming already being lackluster for gold in prepatch, a return to viability would’ve required easier raid farming not the same or harder. Don’t waste your time farming legacy content if your goal is gold rather than transmog appearances.
The other biggest change is that emissaries have been replaced by Callings. This shifts a lot of your gold farming into other content. Some callings do still require world quests, but they can also bring you to Torghast, Dungeons, or treasure hunting. Doing them is however, even more frequent as every Calling gives gold, unlike emissaries which had to cycle to offering gold. They’re worth a ton, with every daily cache awarding 1500+ gold compared to BFA giving 2000 every few. Keep in mind that as a flavor change the caches give you grey items you need to vendor as opposed to direct gold. There’s an innkeeper in every covenant sanctum who will give you cash for your assorted trinkets to make that transition.
What stayed the same?
The single best piece of advice is still to have and level as many characters as possible, and there are even more upsides to doing so from a gold perspective. Not only do you get more callings that way, which feeds into the same loop as emissaries before, but they help you with the current largest cash flow as well. That being Legendary production. It’s not feasible for a single character to completely capitalize on Legendaries by themself. A Tailor/Enchanter is the closest you can get. Making more characters and leveling their professions allows you greater access to providing base legendary items for other players on the auction house. Which is extremely lucrative.
Legendaries and You
The single best market if you can afford the initial investment is Legendary crafting. Getting in costs a lot up front, and you won’t make money on your low rank crafts. Having to level up the recipes creates a loop where there will be much higher supply of the lower ranks by default. This means that low levels will generally lose money. In the leather example above, Umbrahide Gauntlets are a desirable base because of their use in several desirable Leather-class legendaries. They sell for around 20k at rank 1 or 250k at rank 4 on my server, with the crafting materials increasing by a factor of ~4 rather than 10.
For many servers, the low ranks of all but the most desirable bases will lose you money, but you need to make 15 to make the next level up. If you can afford to eat this cost, selling even one or two rank 4s can put you back into the black. To get the best profits, though, you need to have access to doing all of the crafting yourself. To put things into perspective, each Lightless Silk you enchant yourself for cloth saves on average across US servers 150g. With a Rank 4 robe costing 80 of those silk, you save yourself 12k gold by being able to enchant your own mats. This a huge difference. The total crafting price goes from 45k, down to around 33k. Given they sell for about 45k on my server, this becomes necessary to make a profit at all. Keep in mind that Cloth Legendaries are among the cheaper options owing to their cheap raw materials. Ideally, you want to be working in leather, but an established legendary crafting loop can make respectable profits anywhere. Just don’t expect quick gold, you’ll need to spend a lot upfront and your first few sales at the high end will go to covering those early losses. If you’re looking for less hustle, just keep your callings cleared out.