World of Warcraft Money Making with Mining
Mining is one of the most profitable professions in World of Warcraft. It makes the majority of gold for a lot of WoW players out there and helps fuel the war machine for Jewelcrafters, Engineers, and Blacksmiths. You can turn Mining from a simple profession into a gold farming powerhouse with just a few WoW tips and a good solid MP3 player.
So let’s get started on how to turn Mining from nothing to awesome in just a few easy steps.
Efficient Mining and Research
Out in the real world you’ll need to pay people to go survey mines to find out where the money is at. Luckily, in World of Warcraft, the minerals just jut out of the ground and anyone with special training from a NPC and a pickaxe can salvage them to sale. It’s also magically identified and shines brightly on your mini-map saving you the effort of hunting too far for it.
Mining is a bit more than right clicking on the resource node and profiting though. There are a few steps you’ll want to take between heading out to your preferred farming zone and raking in the cash. The first step you’ll want to take is finding out what is the most profitable thing to farm and where you’re going to be heading to in order to farm it.
For the first part you can solve that riddle by heading to the Auction House and skimming over the pricing for metal. Be sure to look at older metal like Cobalt and Fel Iron because even with their age they can often sale for near or even more than current metals. Not only that, but sometimes older metals require less raw ore to refine meaning that while the bars may sale for half of what a primetime bar sales for, you can make twice as many with the same amount of ore.
Speaking of ore, you’ll also want to figure out if it’s better to take the ore and sale it raw, to prospect it (if the same level gems sale for way more than the metal), to turn it into bars, or to just take the raw materials and have it crafted into something. You’ll need to do some digging around on the AH in order to figure all of this info out, but it shouldn’t be too difficult and prices rarely fluxuate so once you find your niche you’re pretty much in the good for a while.
One more tip, be wary of rare materials. You can hunt down say Titanium but if it rarely spawns and there is competition then you’ll be in deep trouble for efficiency. The same is true with some minerals like Pyrite. If you’re fighting people over the spawns then you might not be making as much money as you could on farming say Obsidium.
After you decide on what you’ll be farming (either the latest metals or something a bit more vintage), hop on your mount and head out to start farming. You can find where each resource is located back at our Mining Guide.
Turning Minerals into Gold
It’s true that you can farm Gold, as in the mineral, but it’s a pretty rare resource and you’ll waste your time hunting it down. Once you have found your mineral then set sights on the zone and start farming. Remember that minerals spawn in fixed locations usually on rocky terrain (although not exclusively) and that some zones are better (usually the rocky zones) than others. Any zone in that specific level range will probably work though.
There isn’t much to technique. Get on your mount (hopefully flying, if you’re trying to farm without a flying mount then you’ll feel the pain pretty fast and get discouraged, get back to leveling and worry about money a bit later!) and start looking for resource nodes. As I mentioned earlier, they spawn in fixed locations so certain gatherer styled addons can help pinpoint where the metals often spawn. Not only that, but once you use a resource node it instantly repops somewhere else in the zone. You can’t overfarm a zone, but other players can create competition and make life hard for you.
Keep an eye out on your inventory space and find something distracting like some music or an audiobook or maybe, if possible, a t.v. nearby. Whatever takes your mind off of the dull and repetitive process that is farming for materials.
Making Bank
After your adventures out in the world you’ll find it necessary to trade in your minerals for some hard earned cash. There is a few routes here. You can sell the ores or bars on the Auction House which takes a cut of your profit. You can sell your wares on the Auction House, although that requires time and effort. Then you can get a Blacksmith to turn your metal into might by crafting up a recipe (or two, or tree, or several) and then selling the resulting product. You’ll need to do your research, as in step one, to determine what’ll make the most profit.
Then you’ll want to repeat the entire process all over again, this time learning from this experience and using that knowledge on your future endeavors.
Got some hot Mining tips? Leave them in the comments section below. I’ll be expecting some interesting, unique, or zany Mining stories so don’t disappoint!
