Find it, kill it, loot it, sell it

I've always attested that if farming is 99% of of your income (including daily quests) you either aren't exactly the brightest crayon in the box or plain lazy. However there's a number of people that farm (a couple have even commented on this blog) that make a killing farming with little effort. So long as you're using your head and aren't spending hours farming for 300g you can do well and still have a full day of play time. If you farm intelligently you can still make a lot of money with small amounts of effort. So when is it acceptable (and highly profitable) to farm? Basically compare your normal AH playing G/hour to that of your farming run.

The idea behind farming and using your head is identifying what you should be farming and of course the best place to do so. First it has to be something that you can't buy, weather that's because there's no supply of the mark ups are so high that nobody in their right mind would buy the raw materials. Like if you wanted saronite but it was on the AH for 100g/stack it's sort of silly to farm it to sell because nobody pays more than 20g/stack for saronite. So in this case the farming would mostly be a waste of time that could have been better spent elsewhere.

Next is obviously the time you'll spend farming and what else you could be doing. This is the tricky part as people are quite adept at lying to themselves in this matter. You know what I mean, "oh it's only a few minutes" that always turns into an hour or four. So it has to be something with a reasonable (40% +) drop rate from things that spawn regularly. If you want to get a rare pet from X Mob you aren't going to farm it, you're going to be waiting on respawns. Big difference. Also it's best of the X Mob drops other things of worth like grey armor pieces as they can vendor for over a gold and sometimes more. This helps bring up the farming G/hour considerably and makes it potentially much more worthwhile.

So we know that the time spent must be efficient and that it cannot be something that is easily purchased. A few quick examples are old world boa enchanting mats. Righteous orbs, essences, shards. These aren't always on the AH and because of that you can't stokpile them effectively at times, especially when you hit a selling spree. Granted you can flip the raw mats for a good profit, but a much much bigger profit comes form the enchanting scrolls more often than not. But for the sake of education we'll pretend that the scrolls are far more valuable than raw mats with a mark up. That isn't too hard to believe at all in my experience.

Also during this time, make sure that none of it is wasted, always always be doing something towards your goal of making money or otherwise occupy yourself. If you clear out a section of mobs you're farming take the respawn time to study up on something, go read some wow gold blogs (o hai dere!) or get something to eat. Something! Don't just sit around and wait while you stare, that is an epic waste of time. And time is the only thing that you can never get back once it's gone.

One such example of a worthwhile farm I've already mentioned before; old world enchant recipes like crusader or fiery. In fact some of the TBC recipes might be worthwhile to grab and sell at an absurd mark up to completionists. These are things like the resistance enchants for cloak. I've seen them sell for as much as 500g for only a few minutes of work.

However there is one little "gotcha!" to keep in mind when farming like this. You can't do it perpetually and be rich in a few days of non stop farming. The things you're farming aren't being sold to a vendor for a few hundred gold, they're being sold to people. So if there aren't any people that want these things you just wasted your time. It's also important ot keep in mind that they get such a high mark up because they're "rare" and are therefore worth the high price because you can't just go out and get them. Keeping only 1 on the AH at a time (under the same name at least) keeps this myth alive and well along with the potential profits you can get from farming obscure items.


Here's a recent example of my own from my 'From the ground up' project.

I found that there were no agility scrolls on the AH after me and another had sold all of ours for over 200g per scroll. There also weren't any EoA's on the AH either besides the pair that wre marked at 50g a piece. Knowing the people that frequent this market, they'll either say that's too high a price or go farm the mats them selves. The price of the materials is different than the cost of the scroll though because if you buy the mats you still need to find an enchanter with the recipe and get them to do it and of course that requires a nice service charge.

That means that either the mats won't sell raw either. So I took the portal to CoT from dala and hit the 3 minute flight from tanaris to silithus. I ran over to the spot where the dust devil things spawn and spent about 30 minutes farming there and walked away with enough essences to craft a full set of agility scrolls.

The following morning the pair I had on AH had sold for 250g each thus making that farming run VERY profitable, especially considering the small amount of time I spent there. But if I did this for say 3 hours my profits wouldn't stay so amazing. A higher supply won't make a higher demand and I can't just make 500 scrolls and sell them to a vendor for that price.


I hope that made sense and you get the basic idea of what I'm saying. Farming sarontie for hours isn't the smartest thing to do in the world, even if you have a monopoly because people won't pay 100g/stack for it. But people will pay top gold for an enchanted scroll or rare-ish recipe. So being the wise goblin that you are, when you see a niche for one open up find it, kill it, loot it, sell it.


Thanks for stopping by!