When you first hit the road to adventure in WoW, no one tells you how much gold that adventure is going to cost you. It’s definitely not cheap to be a hero (or a villain)! The higher the level, the more gold you will need. You need to buy your mounts, better equipment, ingredients for recipes to level up your professions, and sometimes even for quests or quest items. And once you start raiding regularly, your biggest expenses are likely to be repair costs and consumables like potions. You may find yourself with barely enough money to repair your equipment. So what’s the best way to make gold in WOTLK without ending up farming for hours a day?
The key is to always be thinking about possible income. Always make sure to save items that have some value to other players and sell the ones that don’t to a vendor. In fact, one of the best golden tips I learned was from my husband. He would always have more gold than me and I couldn’t figure out why, until I realized that he never destroyed gray items and never left them on corpses. Gray items are those whose name appears in gray in the tooltip. This means they are vendor junk and cannot be used on professions or quests.
He always made sure he had the biggest bags he could find and always went to sell when his inventory was full. I was too lazy and just destroyed things. Over a character’s lifetime, that’s a lot of wasted gold. And if you get stuck with full bags, the GarbageFu plugin for Fubar will automatically destroy the least valuable item for you. And while we are talking about plugins, SellJunk is a great little plugin that allows you to sell all the gray items in your bags with one click.
Remember, any item with its name blank is useful to players in some way. Most of these are worth keeping and selling at the auction house. Of course, some are worth more than others. It will take a bit of experimentation to find out which one will sell for the most money. The Auctioneer plugin can help with that by recording the market prices of different items over time. The auction house is by far the best way to make gold in WOTLK once you’ve discovered its secrets.
Another important way to plan your WOTLK income is to make sure you have at least a gathering profession at skill 350 when you reach 70. Before starting a quest in Northrend, make sure you train your gathering skill(s) to Grandmaster so that you can continue to increase your skill as you level up. Trainers are located at the Boreal Tundra and Howling Fjord starting areas. Make sure to collect and sell that Frostweave cloth too!
