WoW Gold Making

Deep Dive: How Much GPH are DF World Quests

World quests seem to be mostly overlooked this expansion, but I personally felt they can reward people nicely if you’re just starting out and need some guaranteed gold as capitol. I wanted to find out approximately how much gph the DF world quests rewarded, so this is how I went about it. Ideally, you would have at least 5-8 level 70 characters to do this with (you could do all 4 characters in one day, or spread them out so it was one character each day).

I started with a level 70 retribution paladin, with an ilevel of 445 which is pretty low for this season. I’m using a few addons, including Zygor, which will let you create a list of world quests by queuing them, and then give you directions on how to get to each one quickly and optimally. World Quest Tracker is another nice one. I’m also using LootAppraiser to track the time & any loot I pick up (LA requires TSM to function) and I’m using FasterLoot (does what it says). I’m sure there are other ways to optimize this method of making gold, such as wearing speed gear, using food/potions, etc. I decided to keep it pretty simple. The second character I did this on is my main, a 70 DH with 487 ilevel and all of the travel portals unlocked.

Keep in mind world quests are now on a bi-weekly schedule. For NA they re-set on Tuesday and Friday. This GPH is for the Friday set this week (March 4). I decided to skip the pet stuff and save it for another time even though getting pet charms IS a nice way to make gold. For this experiment I’m focusing on raw gold only. I’m also including the dragon riding races, as they give pouches with gold.

It took me 27m to run through the gold / race quests – but I also realized this character doesn’t have the DF portal system unlocked, so a lot of time was spent traveling. You can absolutely cut down time by unlocking the travel system. In that time, I earned 7,065g (one of the races I did was in the dreamsurge zone, and it didn’t reward coin but instead rewarded currency, so that one was a bit of a time waster). I also ended up looting a shield that sells for a bit of gold, and some vendor trash. The 70 DH managed to complete these in 20 minutes, but for the purpose of this post I’m just rounding it up to 30m.

For a lot of people, 7k in 30 minutes might not be worth it – and that’s OK. If you’re just starting out in your gold making adventures, it might be a nice way to get your nest egg started, especially if you have multiple level 70s to do this on. If you spent one hour a day doing these world quests, that would equate to roughly 98,910g a week – and it could potentially be more if you optimized your routes or got easier quests (I had a lot of annoying quests, like the fishing one where you have to haul fish up on to the land from lava). The more characters you have, the better. It’s absolutely more than enough to afford a token a month – so long as you have multiple level 70 characters (you need at least 5 characters). If you only have one, this is not the method for you, as these quests only reset twice a week.

Dungeon Dive: 100 Runs of Sunwell Plateau (41-50]

Well, this week we’re up to 2.5h spent running Sunwell plateau, and we’re also up to 144,432g in actual sales! That brings our current GPH to 57,772g.

Runs 51-60 were pretty uneventful, as you can tell by the LootAppraiser screenshot above, I looted 3 noteworthy items, and only walked away with an appraisal of 55k gold. That is of course grossly over estimated on my high pop realm. Right now I have around 44,000g worth of items on the AH, most of our recipes sold this week, hence the 57k gph. Let’s look at the numbers:

  • Total approx gold earned (runs1-50): 779,000g
  • Actual amount earned from sales to date: 144,432g
  • Actual amount of GPH: 57,772g
  • Value of items on the AH: 44,000g

Honestly, for 2.5h of work, I’m pretty happy with 144k in gold. That’s not too bad at all. Still, a lot does depend on RNG and your servers market. If you’re on a low population server you may find sales sparse, but when they happen, they’ll be big. If you’re on a high population realm like I am, sales may be pennies, but you make a lot of them, and they add up over time. It’s a fascinating challenge, and I’m always excited to see what loot I may walk away with. We’ll see next week if we can get closer to that 60k gph, although with this weeks abysmal run, I won’t hold my breath.

Dungeon Dive: 100 Runs of Sunwell Plateau [1-10]

This isn’t the first time I’ve done a dungeon dive – but I used to post them over on another blog, and I decided instead of keeping multiple blogs I’d merge them all into this one. It’s been a while, so here’s the next dungeon dive that I’m doing – Sunwell Plateau.

122,091g estimated gold earned

I’m using the TSM region market value avg to price my loot from LootAppraiser, and I’m using a heavily modified profile from BilisOnyxia to post them to the auction house. In the past I was on a low population server, but these days I’m spread between many servers, and for this particular challenge I’m on a medium pop, so we’ll see how things go. If you’re not familiar with how I run these challenges here’s the basics.

LOTS of videos out there boast about making thousands of gold an hour, but they fail to take actual sales earned into consideration. I run 100 runs of a dungeon, adding up the “looted item value” and then compare it to the “actual sales value” each week. Then I create a GPH from the actual gold earned rather than the assumed amount. In the past this worked out pretty neat, it was a more realistic view of how much gold you could potentially earn. RNG of course plays into it, the type of server you’re on, and other factors. I use 1 character to run the dungeons & sell the materials so they’ve never got more gold than what the dungeons provided. If you’re interested in my older runs of Sunwell, you can find those posts here.

These days it takes me roughly 30-35 minutes to run 10 instances of Sunwell Plateau, and that’s the time I’ll use to frame GPH instead of rounding up to 1 full hour. I know you’re locked from doing more instances (10 per hour is the cap, sometimes you can squeeze a few more in) but you could also go and do something else to make gold in that free time that doesn’t involve running a dungeon.

Here are the addons I’m using, too:

  • Auctionator
  • LootAppraiser
  • TradeskillMaster
  • MonkeySpeed
  • Dejunk
  • Faster Loot
  • WoWThing Collector

Next week we’ll see if anything actually sold, and add to that the next 10 runs.

Getting Back to Twitch Streaming

After a three year hiatus, I am finally tentatively getting back to streaming on Twitch! This has been a long time coming. I couldn’t stream at my previous post because our internet was too poor, and before that, I was a new mother trying to find time between two active littles who were up all hours of the night. Now we’ve moved, the littles have an actual ‘bedtime’ and while life is still just as active and busy as always, I’ve managed to carve out a little bit of time. That’s what I keep telling myself, at least.

I’ve done one stream so far – and gained 17 new followers! I was tickled. I ran RFK in World of Warcraft and talked about gold making. It wasn’t the most exciting stream, there were some technical difficulties along the way – but I had a good time, and hopefully people learned a thing or two. I’m hoping to keep this up and even get a schedule going when I get a bit more comfortable. My free time is usually in the evening (EDT) around 9 or slightly after. I know that’s pretty early for those on the West, and pretty late for those in EU, but honestly, I’ve got to stream when it makes sense for me. In the past I would have completely remodeled my schedule around streaming to optimize the viewers, but I just don’t have that in me any more.

I’m beginning with World of Warcraft gold making streams, but I will occasionally stream other games (like RimWorld, one of my favourites) and I’m hoping to also stream some of my favourite crafts, like spinning yarn, using my drum carder, using the sock knitting machine, and that sort of thing. I do have to spend a little more time on set-up for those things, so there is no ETA at this time. I’m thinking that three streams a week (mon/wed/fri) might be a good start, with extra streams tossed in when I feel like it. I haven’t mustered up the courage to turn on my camera as I stream yet, but I do have a mic and I’m pretty talkative. Things are laid back and casual, I also won’t take any shit from people, so if you’re hoping to come to my stream to cause problems you’ll be looking at a ban hammer. Remember I used to be a moderator for NCSoft, so this isn’t my first rodeo.

As always, happy gaming – no matter where you find yourself. If you want to catch my streams, head on over to Twitch and give me a follow. https://www.twitch.tv/stargrace

Choosing to Spend Gold

Choosing to spend gold in World of Warcraft is not such an easy task for me, even though I have millions of gold just sitting there. I have a hard time bringing myself to actually wanting to use it for anything – even with a plan in place. At one time I wanted to reach gold cap on a single server (I play on a handful of servers) but now I just want to enjoy myself – even if that means spending what I have. You can see the significant dip in gold when I moved all of my horde characters over to Hyjal from Argent Dawn – but I still have plenty of gold to make up for it. I’m trying to (slowly) earn it back, and make my way to gold cap again on the alliance side. We’ll see how that goes, especially since I’m not actively playing that faction at all.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!