Classic Mage Goldmaking Guide: The Best Ways to Make Gold

Earning gold is an incredibly important part of Classic WoW and will be very important for many things. There are large purchases that you will want to make, such as getting your epic mount or getting better gear from the auction house. You will also have lots of reoccurring purchases, such as consumables for raiding and PvP. The bottom line is that gold is important, both for quality of life and for getting important items to help your gameplay. One of the most important things to do once you hit Level 60 for the first time, or even before that, is to work to establish a gold making source.

In Classic, there are no passive combat bonuses for choosing specific professions. This means that you are free to choose whatever you would like. Despite this, professions can be incredibly important for lots of things, and it is important to consider the possible benefits before choosing. Some professions are great for making gold, while some are more suited to helping you in actual gameplay.

Especially at the start, materials will be expensive. This is especially true for minerals, herbs, and skins that come from higher level zones and enemies. Mining, Herbalism, Skinning, and Fishing are all great choices for gold making, and should be learned early during the leveling phase, so that you never have to return to low-level areas to increase your skill. Keep in mind that keeping your Mining and Herbalism skill relevant as you level, will require you to spend more time in an area than what would be ideal for speed leveling. Gathering materials before hitting the level cap will also help you level crafting professions that use those materials.

Tailoring, Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, and Alchemy can all be quite profitable, as long as you level them early and search for rare recipes. Tailoring, Blacksmithing, and Leatherworking can craft good gear, some of it best in slot. Meanwhile, Enchanting and Alchemy can make consumables, which are especially relevant when raiding and in PvP. Due to the short duration nature of Alchemy's potions, this is an especially relevant profession for gold making. Engineering can also make some interesting gear and relevant consumables, but those are generally only usable by engineers, which limits its usefulness in gold making.

One of the best ways to make some gold with little to no effort is by crafting rare items that are bound by cooldowns on how often they can be crafted.

This is the case with Refined Deeprock Salt for Leatherworking, Mooncloth for Tailoring and Arcanite Bar for Alchemy.

While the cooldowns ensure that you cannot get a huge amount of gold this way unless you have multiple characters, it also ensures that the crafted items will sell at a premium relative to their material components.

Certain vendors, such as Ghok'kah, sell very valuable recipes, or even raw materials, on a limited stock, which slowly replenishes over time. Being aware of this and reselling the recipe and materials to other players can generate high profits, although it is difficult to buy these items consistently.

Mages are amazing farmers in WoW Classic, as they can pull a huge amount of enemies and kill them all by themselves, without dying in the process. Spec into the AoE Grinding talent build and learn about the AoE Grinding rotation before you attempt the farming methods suggested below!

While describing every single possible farm spot in the game is out of the scope of this guide, you will generally be searching for spots with many enemies and little to none competition, ensuring that you can gather a lot of enemies without external interference. Also, these enemies should be able to drop valuable items for your time investment in killing them.

Naturally, the requirements of a perfect grinding spot are best met inside dungeons, where no outside interference is possible, and ensuring you get full respawns instantly, each time you reset the dungeon. The only limitation is that you can only run 5 individual dungeon lockouts per hour before the game will not allow you to create new instances of the dungeon anymore, so plan accordingly.

Dire Maul East will generally be the best gold per hour farming spot for herbalists, depending on herb prices on your server. For the non-herbalist Mages out there, Zul'Farrak is an almost pure gold farm (especially if you convert the Mageweave Cloth you get into bandages) and will typically pull ahead in the long run.

Dire Maul East is one of the top places for Mages to farm in WoW Classic, especially if you are a Herbalism, as you will be able to loot multiple Dreamfoil and Gromsblood spawns every run, on top of the loot from kills and the multiple librams (precise locations can be found in this reddit thread) in the area.

While most Mages will focus on farming the lasher area right after falling down, you can actually solo the entire dungeon as shown by Zqi in this detailed video, in which case having Mining is amazing, as you get access to multiple Rich Thorium veins after the final boss, which can contain extremely valuable Arcane Crystals and Blue Sapphires.

Zul'Farrak is relatively easy to farm, and you can even start while leveling, as shown in this video, by Ebbnflow.

At Level 60 you can follow the same logic to do much larger pulls, as shown by Gracious in this video (can also try ScumbagRay's technique, as displayed here), thus netting you even higher Gold Per Hour!

This macro will help you mass delete the trash items you get during your farm:

• /run local items={[1520]=true,[9335]=true,[9333]=true,[9334]=true,[9332]=true,[1645]=true,[4599]=true}for b=0,4,1 do for s =1,32,1 do local id=select(10,GetContainerItemInfo(b,s)) if items[id] then PickupContainerItem(b,s) DeleteCursorItem() end end end

Maraudon is a great place to farm all kinds of valuable materials, but one of the easiest (and most profitable) farms is to enter from the Orange entrance and run all the way to the Purple entrance of Maraudon, picking up a ton of Ghost Mushroom, Blindweed and Mithril Ore along the way!

This method requires no killing of enemies whatsoever, only running / positioning to avoid pulling aggro through the dungeon. You can see it being masterfully done by Timira in this video.

Once you have the Scepter of Celebras, you can teleport directly to Inner Maraudon, past Celebras the Cursed. This is a great area for AoE farming, especially at lower levels where you can also get a lot of experience doing this specific farm.

AoE down the Deep Borer snake enemies in a few pulls and the Stolid Snapjaw turtles afterwards. Since you can use Skinning on the turtles, that is a great way to make gold! There are also several valuable herbs and minerals along the way, making Herbalism and Mining a great profession combo to have for this particular farming.

You can watch an example run here, by Exehn.

Blackrock Depths is a great dungeon to farm, because it drops a lot of the most wanted pre-bis items in the game for most classes, such as Hand of Justice and Ban'thok Sash, making it a very popular dungeon to run on the way to 60.

What is lesser known, is that you can easily solo farm these important items, or sell them to other players at level 60 by soloing the bosses / events involved!

This involves the use of a ledge in the East Garrison area, which will confuse NPC pathing and allow you to slowly take them down without taking damge, as shown / explained here, by Ebbnflow.

The Cathedral wing of Scarlet Monastery has a special characteristic that makes it ideal for quick and efficient Mage AoE Grinding: whenever you aggro the final boss of the dungeon, Scarlet Commander Mograine, every single enemy inside the Cathedral will automatically aggro you.

This will cause 20+ enemies to chase you down from all directions. Activate Ice Block as soon as your initial Ice Barrier is depleted, and wait for all of the enemies to stack up around you. Once Ice Block is over, it is time to begin your AoE Grinding rotation, with Frost Nova and a new Ice Barrier to avoid spell pushback from Mograine. Once all of the regular enemies are down, it is just a matter of finishing off Mograine, Whitemane and looting everything before doing it all over again.

Besides all of the vendor trash you get from each run, worth around 6 gold, you can loot valuable bind on equip items and, if you are an enchanter, disenchant the loot for even more valuable materials to sell.

You can watch an example run here, by solipsist01.

You can boost your dungeon AoE Farming proceeds even further by bringing along up to 4 other players (who will usually be paying you for the boost), who will be there for the free experience boost from your kills. They will also be able to assist you a little bit, making a huge pull, such as this one, by Skeletonboss in Zul'Farrak easier to pull off.

One of the fastest ways to level / boost others as a H Horde player is by picking up the quest Commander Gor'shak. This quest's follow up, What Is Going On?, will instantly spawn 7 elites to attack you inside the dungeon, which you can kill quickly with a good party or high level characters. You can then abandon the quest and start it again at the NPC as many times as you want for an infinite number of elites to kill.

Check out an example of this farm being done in practice here, by Asher.

Farming in the world is usually considerably harder than doing it inside instances due to the possibility of competition, but is still something to consider.

Elemental Fire is a super useful item, used to create Greater Fire Protection Potions. It can also easily be farmed while leveling and at level 60 in Searing Gorge, as shown here by Captain Raav.

Small Flame Sac is also a very useful item, used to create the weaker (and thus cheaper) Fire Protection Potions. It can also easily be farmed while leveling, as many of the dragon enemies that drop them are low level, such as the ones shown in this video, by Captain Raav. Killing Sprite Dragons in Feralas is also a great way to farm these.

While there are some elites in this zone that you should avoid pulling, there are also plenty of non-elite melee humanoid (good for cloth and currency drops) enemies, that you can round up and kill for a quick profit.

You can watch an example run here, by O DB.

In the Northwest and Northeast corners of Silithus, you can find a lot of Dust Stormers, which are easy to kill (use Dampen Magic to nullify most of their damage) and drop valuable Essence of Air, among other less valuable items.

You can watch an example run here, by Speaknspell. Keep in mind there was an elemental invasion active at the time, which increases the number of enemies, but it should still be possible to get good farming done without it.