WoD Gold Making – Patch 6.1
Recently, I finished leveling another character to 100. That makes lucky number seven (and the third Death Knight). Yay me. I doubt I’m going to use him for anything – he’s got two gathering professions, so maybe he’ll be useful if I need extra herbs or ore or something. For me, it’s more a matter of having a deep roster of characters I can draw from in case I want to move servers, or factions, or just have them ready to roll out once the new expansion comes along.
Until that happens, I have to do something to take the pressure off the broken part of my brain. After leveling seven characters (the eighth – another Death Knight – is already 91), the OCD is clearly strong in this one. What that means is that I’m looking at spending about three to five grand in gold just to get the newest member of the 100 Club a maxed out garrison. Then there’s the matter of filling the plots, and upgrading each of those buildings to a level that makes them somewhat useful. That’s a song sung to the tune of a couple thousand gold.
Leveling a character is easy. Leveling a garrison, now that’s the real grind.
And Blizzard, they sure do love them some gold sinks. I’m not even going to begin to talk about the WoW Token, their latest and greatest gold sink, because I can’t afford to buy one. At this point the entire discussion of financial issues is sounding more like a piss-poor economics class rather than a video game filled with stabbing and orcs. So many damn orcs.
Sigh.
Bottom line is that people generally need more gold than they have. As we get deeper into the Warlords of Draenor expansion, the old methods of making gold have slowly dried up. The demand for gold, however, has stayed as strong as ever. So what’s a guy gotta do to earn some cheese in this Patch 6.1 world?
It turns out the simple answer comes down to a single word – farming. Actually, three types of farming.
#1. Raid Farming.
At some point during a dev’s meeting, someone decided that there was no point in creating new content since there was still so much old content that people hadn’t seen. So as a side-effect of the Great Stat Squish, it became easy (or fairly easy at least) to take down old raid content, solo. To sweeten the deal, they even added battle pets to the raid bosses (and created achievements for the pets as a double-whammy). The beauty of this system is that raid bosses tend to drop more coins and vendor loot than, say, dungeon bosses or whatever random World Boss that might be stumbling around. Hitting 25 man raids (from the Cataclysm expansion and below) on Heroic offers up the biggest loot, and most can be soloed with very little problem. They don’t take long to run, and a single clear can net you a few hundred gold.
Now Oldbess went and took the guesswork out of the equation by offering up this video. It lists a variety of old raids, the time it took to clear them, and roughly how much gold was earned per raid.
#2. Follower Farming.
Remember when Blizzard told us that garrisons were not going to be mandatory for progression? They were right. It’s also not mandatory to cross the Atlantic by plane. It’s just gonna take you a whole lot longer to get to where you want to go.
These buildings give so many passive bonuses just for having a full roster of followers, it’s insane. I have a monk with an iLevel of 655, and he got there with a mix of items he crafted (in the garrison) and gear rewarded from follower missions. Never in the history of ever has it been so easy to get something by doing practically nothing.
Now imagine taking that passive power and using it to make gold. All you have to do is load up followers with the Treasure Hunter trait, and they can make you a few hundred gold per day without you having to do a thing except sending them on their way.
Bellular describes the benefits of the Treasure Hunter trait in his video. You should watch it. Like, now.
#3. Barn Farming
There’s no other way to say it – selling Savage Blood on the AH is an easy way to make gold. Period. People who want to upgrade their crafted gear or weapons need anywhere from fifteen to thirty of these per upgrade rank. After patch 6.2, Felblood will be the reagent used in the upgrade process. Both of these come from the Barn’s epic work orders. As long as you keep the Barn filled with epic beasts, you could potentially be creating very valuable mats every day.
Allow my boy (and your boy too) Asmongold to drop knowledge on the joy of Barn efficiency.
Bitter Much
You see that guy up there? The scary-looking Tauren in the picture? I have discovered that he’s the only reason I’m still playing World of Warcraft.
You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing much lately. Yeah, about that. Honestly I have no excuse except for one. It’s not that I’ve been busy at work (because I have but that’s not the excuse). It’s not that I haven’t had time, because one of the perks of being a shift worker is that you end up getting a fair number of days off. And while I do have plenty going on during that downtime, I like to squeeze in a few hours of WoW time and get my geek on, as they say.
I tweeted this about four days ago, because gaming angst is what Twitter was built for. That, and porn bots.
Staring at the character selection screen and thinking to myself “What the Hell am I supposed to be doing?”
That gem got one Favorite. Thanks @Sophaera!
But that happened. I had just returned from running errands and sat down in front of my computer. I logged into WoW, got to the character selection screen, and stopped. NOTHING was motivating me to take the next step. Not even the things I wrote about in my previous post! Stables, mounts, pet battles, PVP, none of it made me want to click that button.
Obviously this affected the blog. Most of what I post here are things I hope people find helpful, or at least somewhat informative/entertaining. But the main reason I post is because the content I’m discussing is content I’m currently engaged in. When I’m into gold making, I post gold making videos. When I find cool nuggets of info, it goes into a post. The lack of posts is a reflection of my gaming experience. Literally the only reason I have anything at all to post is because my Tauren DK looked cool and I wanted to know how badass a Blood DK would be to level. Turns out, they’re pretty badass.
I was trying to go to sleep this morning (night shift starts tonight), but between the dog barking and a quasi-dream about someone breaking into the house and smashing my head in while I slept, sleep wasn’t gonna happen. I then made the mistake of going on Twitter and read about people bitching about the Timewalker Dungeons on the PTR. Down the rabbit hole I went, reading a few patch 6.2 notes.
That’s when it hit me. Maybe this game wasn’t for me anymore.
FUCKING PEPE DISGUISES! ARE YOU SERIOUS! PATCH 6.2 – LET’S DRESS UP A VANITY BIRD!
Okay, I know that there are things in the game that aren’t for everyone. I know this, and embrace it gladly. World of Warcraft has something for pretty much everyone. Lately I’ve been struggling to find that thing for me.
– Raiding: right now, too much homework involved unless I found a very forgiving team.
– Dungeons: I said this on Twitter, and I’ll say it here – I don’t care how cool you make a dungeon, or what drops in it, or even if it gives you a five dollar coupon for pizza. If I have to sit around with my thumb up my ass for 20-30 minutes before I can even get in to start running the damn thing, I’m not doing it.
– PVP: I’m not pro. I’m whatever very not pro would be. But when I was running BG’s on my Warrior, things were fine if I had a healer nearby. But that doesn’t happen often, which leads to spending fifteen minutes for what, fifty honor points?
– Garrisons: Fuck this. Seriously. If you took the garrison function out of Warlords of Draenor, there’d be a few dailies to do, and raids. Servers would be filled with tumbleweeds. Pepe, that stupid bird that people seem fascinated with, comes from garrisons. Music box, followers, and selfie cams. And more mindless busy work in 6.2 when SHIPS! Followers at Sea!
Right now, leveling is my jam. I try to get as much done in the time that I have. Between a few hours last night and a couple today, my Blood Death Knight is at 99. One more level and then… what?
It’s people, I think. That’s what I need. Somehow I need to find a people that I enjoy engaging with online, in game.
That’s something I think I’ll work on when I get back from my vacation. Two nights of work, and then five days in sunny Florida. When I get back, I’m hoping my head will be in a better place.
Do you play WoW? What is keeping you playing right now?
Rokk Talk 