Many players wonder how best to make gold in WoW, and particularly right before an expansion launches, this can be a hard question. The simplest answer, using your professions, doesn’t usually work especially well this far out from previous content releases. So, if you’re looking to start Shadowlands with a nice pad of gold to fall back on, what can you do?
The most consistent answers are going to involve something you might not expect; leveling. Many of the best sources of gold are on some variety of a lockout and make the best way to make lots of gold having lots of alts. There are some things you can do even now that only rely on one character, but they are usually either less lucrative, more volatile, or slower. You’ll need to weigh these options if you choose to pursue this style, some of the methods available can be quite solid, but the downsides make them inconsistent.
The Most Valuable Gold Making
Tool: Alts
When people hear that they should probably be leveling if they want to make more gold, they usually initially scoff. It’s true that the gold you get from the actual leveling process is not good for the time spent, but having several characters opens the door to repeating lucrative gold opportunities. Many of the best direct sources of the gold both currently and historically have been once-only or have a daily/weekly lockout. With more characters, you can run these more and over a long enough time frame, the effort put into leveling a stable of characters will pay off by giving you multiple lockouts. This is particularly helpful when legacy instances are a viable gold farm.
Keep in mind that the leveling won’t immediately pay off, though. It’s very much an investment and you won’t get rich quick by having lots of characters; you usually end up losing a bit of money initially. This is because of things like bag purchases, mount speed levels and other one-off purchases you need to make to get a new character off the ground. Like many things you need to spend money to make money with extra characters. I generally set aside around 10,000 gold for a new character between bank tabs, bags, mountspeed and other sundries. A good half of that is entirely in the final level of flying speed and could be left aside if you mean to use this alt primarily in the new expansion where you won’t initially be able to fly, anyway. After this initial payment, though, alts tend not to use much gold at all, certainly not as much as a primary character who is regularly facing repair fees at least.
The (Current) Best Use of Alts: World Quests
If you’re looking to make gold quickly, this is the best bang for your buck. Emissaries can be completed very quickly especially if you have flying and generate 2,000g for each character you have. This can quickly become a source of tens of thousands of gold on its own in the space of an hour or so. This is in addition to fact that some of the quests themselves are worth additional gold. On a good emissary day it isn’t uncommon for the real number to be around 2,500g per character, and they then feed into reputation for paragon chests. These contain even more gold and functionally give you a long-term spike for several very short bursts of activity.
The best thing about it, though, is that there’s very little random chance involved. Other than needing to wait for gold emissaries to come up, you never get a lesser reward for your time. The only real variation is in how tightly you can cluster several quickly-completed quests, and whether there is a particularly desirable quest that requires more travel to get to. Some activities certainly have a chance to be more lucrative, but there are few that are both so quick and so consistent. It does remain to be seen whether garrision farming is still worthwhile now and going forward, though, and the garrison has a very high upfront cost.
Viability of Legacy Content
You may have heard that the value of farming legacy content has gone down since prepatched launched. In terms of raw gold, this is true, and the outlook can get particularly bad for some old goldfarm standbys. Legion still has decent gold values but the raids are pretty hairy to solo now and will likely need to wait for Shadowlands to be consistent. However, they aren’t quite dead for the time being. Bind on Equip transmog items can make a decent amount of money when they sell. This was actually made slightly more lucrative as the listing fee on items is associated with their sale price. Lower sale prices means you spend less money keeping your transmog listed on the Auction House.
This is huge because of the biggest downside to transmog farming; it sells extremely slowly. You will spend a lot of time sitting on these items and reposting them and only sell once in a while. You should be aware of this before you branch out towards it, and for someone without a little money already banked, I would completely shelve transmog sales in favor of professions once the expansion starts.