After failing since BFA, mission is finally accomplished: Brutosaur.
I had some regrets about not being able to manage in BFA, so I came back to DF intent on getting it. Cut it pretty close since bruto started dropping again a month ago, and I made my first 9m in May. DF crafting is pretty busted (in a good way) for gold making.
Most used websites:
Most used addons:
Not saying these add-ons will make you tons of gold, just saying these are the things I spent the most time using.
Lessons learned:
Long term plans - start now, not later- Patience - just because it doesn't work the first time doesn't mean it doesn't work.
- Pets - easy source of gold that a lot of people have.
- Transmog - not as complicated as people think for the most basic stuff
- Multiple characters - more characters = more chances at gold.
- All professions - instead of trying to pick and choose best one, just pick all.
- Multiple accounts - every big time goblin seems to have multiple accounts. I understand why now.
- Gambles - probably have to take educated ones to start making decent amounts of gold
Below is the explanation, not an expert or anything, but my thought process is below.
I started playing NA servers in Legion after my IRL friend convinced me to play again. Previously I had rolled on EU to play with him S4 TBC through some of WOTLK.
What I liked about TBC/WOTLK was how easy it was to make gold just AFK'ing on IF Bridge/Org AH crafting for people.
At the time people would trade mats to the crafter, then the crafter would make the item and trade it back. This is relevant later, but "experienced" crafters would usually have the item crafted ready to trade over on the first trade. This way customers understood there was really no chance the crafter would keep their mats and scam them. However, these crafters leaned on the more expensive side (15g), while cheaper crafters (5-10g) wouldn't be doing this.
Unfortunately that style of gold making wasn't around when I came back for Legion/BFA. I did make 2.3m (well closer to 3m) between Legion and BFA, but I realized I wasn't going to reach 5m for Bruto since I don't like playing AH and didn't want to try do M+ carries again (finding customers sucks).
I got the 2.3m selling pets and with crafting professions. I made sure to get all professions. I see a lot of people only focusing on one to two professions (if any), which there's plenty of people doing fine with 0 professions, but I'd rather have access to all. Originally I used WoWhead to find raid consumables and sold those around raid times, and for pets I did all the non-PVP pet achieves to find which pets I should be leveling/selling.
I'd see a lot of tips about long term gold making around this subreddit. Unfortunately these tips are rarely upvoted, which is pretty much the trend when it comes to actual good gold making advice around here. Not sure if it's due to the perceived lack of detail, but the information is definitely there, the lightbulb just has to come on for people like me.
A lot of people don't seem to understand today's BOE greens are the transmogs of two expansions from now. I didn't know which BFA greens would be worth saving, so I just saved all. Just in general I saved everything, a lot of people have TSM and never bothered using the TSM Ledger feature. I skipped SL and came back before DF, the BFA greens ended up making me 1m in one month. As a result I was able to go into DF with around 3.3m.
When I saw the DF crafting change announcement it piqued my interested, and the news coming out of PTR solidified my decision. I knew all I had to do was outlast the initial honeymoon wave of gold makers who quit after gold income slows down after release. There would also be a set of players who just give up on professions too fast/early, just had to make sure I wasn't one of those players.
Professions were already easy enough and a good portion of players weren't doing professions, adding complexity to it would remove even more players. Even now, people still haven't figured out the basics of crafting so there isn't anywhere close to as much competition as there should be.
Crafted gear is the main DF profession feature. I had guildy craft for me, ended up learning I really like when a crafter recrafts till proc with their mats and I just reimburse them. Basically this is the type of service I offered to make gold after I figured out the price point where I could make gold. Nothing big brain, most crafters in the 5-10K range are doing some variation of it. I know the demand exists because I'm one of those people who wants it, and I couldn't find other crafters on my server doing it.
Some people don't want to take gambles, but I realized between BFA->DF I needed to take gambles to start making gold. Today I see a lot of people refusing to gamble for whatever reason and it severely hinders their gold making potential. So for example back to TBC where people wouldn't buy mats and have things pre-crafted, in DF that's repeating itself all over again.
There's a lot of talk about what is worth? Things are worth whatever they sell for, so that means whatever the seller wants to sell it for as long as there is someone willing to pay that price. I learned not to listen to what people say the price of something is, and definitely not to sell some items for what the current listed price is. Basically there's a lot of items I held on to because I wanted to sell them for the price I wanted, didn't matter to me whether or not the demand existed.
E.G. Radinax Gems from Legion. The first time they dropped for me, when I checked AH they were selling for 800g, the price dropped to 400g eventually and they didn't really sell anyway. People said they were almost worthless and not worth. I kept a bunch of mine (could only hold 1-2 per character) from Legion through SL. I sold them for 20K each when I came back right before DF.
Same thing is currently happening with DF recipes. People don't understand how these are sourced and mistakenly predict what the price trends will be. People also don't understand how big or low demand is for certain items. E.G Lariat. I entered the Lariat market late when people were saying the recipe isn't worth buying. This was the biggest gamble I took. I had 5m gold, I spent 3m of it to buy 3 Lariat recipes at 1m even though the most common advice was saying I wouldn't make the money back crafting Lariat. I resold two of those Lariat recipe at 1.5m despite a lot of people saying they weren't worth more than 500-800k.
I always wondered how people cornered markets or found something to do that no one else was doing. I talked to some goblins, and it was always the most obvious stuff they were doing that other people didn't want to do for reasons. Even saw a new gold maker come through and make millions in 2 months doing something I refused to do myself since it felt like a hassle. The weirdest thing at first was the fact these goblins were so willing to share their spot with me, and they all said there's no competition + they aren't worried about getting competition.
At some point I turned on a second account. Something I've been wanting to do since BFA, just felt like I wasn't making enough gold to justify it. Realized why people had multiple accounts within a few minutes, and turned on 2 more accounts a couple days later.
Eventually I found something to do that other people aren't doing, people aren't doing it because it runs counter to what people assume works. People constantly complain about this issue on dead servers, whenever I was on low pop servers I think about how much it sucks. Then realized it sucks cause no one wants to do it, and if I do it (I'm already doing it anyway) then I can get customers. However, this required literally everything I listed before and it's stuff most people aren't really keen on doing.
All in all the journey has mostly taught me pretty much the majority of the WoW player base refuses to get out of their own way (me included) and people don't do things the simplest/most efficient way. For example, I thought I could monetize cross realm trading but it turns out almost no one knows (or remembers) what trading actually is. I'm still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact people refuse to switch servers to get something for 200k gold cheaper.
It's also 10 months in to the expansion and people are still doing the profession equivalent of rogues wearing intellect daggers instead of agility daggers while complaining DF professions don't make gold.
Or take a recent thread where people were discussing how to get level 1-10 alts to Valdrakken. I think the first few comments were about using a warlock portal, and for hours this was the only suggestion--it's not optimal since you need three people to do it when you can just use one person (a mage). Or take people with one character who don't understand how to get the DF profession weekly done that requires doing 2-3 work orders.
If these are things you figure out short fixes for then you're really far ahead of a good part of the WoW population. If you're doubting or wondering how long it takes, all I can say is keep at it, and eventually you'll get your niche.
There's also the matter of doing things too late. E.G. me jumping on Lariat too late, granted I still made gold, but I could've made a lot more gold. Pretty much every time I've given advice on incoming gold trains to people I get shot down since they're too scared to take the risk/gamble. Or they just don't understand basic gold making (not saying i do).
I started trying to find Lariat/Hourglass recipe around the same time as 3 other people on my server. I've made probably 3-10x the amount of gold as them since then because they refused to take the gamble I took even when I offered it to them. I even followed up with one of them a month ago and they still don't understand they keep trying to do things 3 months late. However, they're the person talking about gold making the most in trade chat like they know what they're doing, and whenever I sell recipes from an alt (they don't know it's me) they constantly tell me how wrong I am about my prices/timing.
I didn't jump on draco late as I pretty much had 5 Alchemy characters since first week of BFA, I just had to level the other nine alchemists 60-70, alts I had prepped 50-60 during DF XP event at end of SL. Meanwhile there's people who have been playing longer than me who still haven't bothered to make their army, and I saw a lot of people making Alchemy alts right as draco price started going down.
