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.