thelazygoldmaker
patreon
A basic overview of goldmaking methods in 2025
🕑 Added 2025-02-19 21:38:18 +0000 UTCI have been making gold in WoW since The original Wrath of the Lich King, so today I’m sharing some basics for anyone who wants to get away from being perpetually poor.
My chops
I’m not the best goldmaker around, mostly because I’m lazy. Once I have enough gold to not really need more I often lose motivation unless the method is fun. I do have around 90 million gold on retail, and 120 000 gold on cataclysm classic, as well as 500 ish gold on a level 5 character on the anniversary realms, so I do know how to get from scratch to reasonably rich!
Farming
Farming is what most non-goldmakers think off when they need gold. It works, and if you enjoy it I think it’s a great method. Personally I really dislike it, so I try to avoid it as much as humanly possible, even to the point of foregoing great markets if they require farming.
Crafting
This is my bread and butter. You buy materials and you craft finished items to sell. Within this area there are an absolute ton of nuance. The main niches of items to sell are gear, consumables and enchants (which includes gems, glyphs etc.). Gear is lower volume, but often less competition, and gear is very different between retail and classic.
Gear
There are three genres of gear that typically sell well, high-end best in slot or close to best in slot gear, catch up gear for alts and transmog. High-end gear has by far the most potential, but is often harder to unlock the ability to craft, in particular in Retail where you need a lot of profession knowledge to guarantee max quality. Catch up gear is usually a lot cheaper, but also has very high volume. I absolutely love the PvP entry level sets in Cataclysm for instance. Transmog is less sale rate, but potentially very high profits. You do need thousands of items though.
For all three variants you want to find potential recipes by reading BiS lists, looking at guides for alt gearing and looking at transmog prices. Then you want to use tradeskillmaster or a spreadsheet to figure out what the material cost is an whether or not it’s profitable. Then you simply craft anything that’s profitable enough for your taste (20-30% is usually fine for gear for performance, for transmog I would want 100%+) and throw it up on the AH. Once you get some sales you craft more of whatever sold.
Consumables
Consumables is anything players use in dungeons or raids to get a bonus that is temporary. There are a ton of consumables in all versions of the game, and since they run out players will always have to buy more. This means the overall sale rates are aboslutely massive. Often profit margins are on the low end, particularly on retail where the AH is shared between all realms, but the volume can make up for it. You need to be very careful with crafting costs. For retail you can either do a concentration build or the more profitable variant is a fully integrated supply chain with max quality crafting. I’ve done videos on both, so check them out in the video description for a closer look. For Classic the margin is usually a little higher, but you do still need to watch your material costs.
Enchants
Enchants mostly follow the same logic as consumables, except they are used at a slower rate as players only buy them when they upgrade their gear. This means you should post fewer at a time and you will generally see slower sales than with consumables, but faster than gear. There’s little practical difference between enchanting, gems and armor patches from leatherworking in general, although cataclysm has a LOT more sockets than retail so jewelcrafting is relatively speaking better in Cataclysm, whereas enchanting is the main one in retail.
Flipping
The king of goldmaking methods, buy low sell high. You can flip anything that varies in price, which is most items in the game. The best items to flip in retail at the moment are various old cosmetics, but it is very inventory intensive as you need hundreds or thousands of items to see consistent sales. On Classic you can also do materials and stackables, although the new AH coming to cataclysm might make it impossible there.
This is high risk and potentially high reward as most of the richest players that dont farm will have been active in this market. There’s a guide to my material flipping video which is relevant for classic anniversary as well as my battle pet video which outlines an approach for retail in the description.
Those are the main methods, now try them out
That was a quick outline of the ways you can make gold. The best method is the one you enjoy. Why? Because if you enjoy it, you will stick to it and even improve at it. I have zero interest in farming, so I won’t optimize farming at all. So I stay away from it completely and stick to things I enjoy. Playtime, time of day you play and server will also affect what the single best method is. Try stuff out, make sure your losses are limited and learn from your mistakes. You can only ever truly learn from trying things out yourself!
