Tiger
Legend
About the Author:
I have been twinking in the 20-29 bracket (previously the 20-24 bracket) since the beginning of Cataclysm. Playing mainly a f2p holy paladin (Freetopali) for most Cata and MoP, I made the decision to go "vet" during the beginning of the summer of 2015. Although I had subbed before this point briefly, it is safe to say that I had not paid for the game for over 90% of the time I had played. One of the main reasons I went vet was to gain access to GF'd items, expensive mounts and enchants. It was never my intention to play the market or make an X amount of gold, I just had a lot of things I wanted and they all cost a lot of gold.
I started with about 5,000 gold and was able to work my way up to being worth more than 8,000,000 gold in just 90 days. I have enough gold now to buy literally anything in the game. If I spent all of the gold I have now on WoW tokens, I could play for free for over 20 years. I can now fund any twink without having to worry about how much it will cost. The purpose of this guide will be to share how I managed to do this so that all of you can hopefully also have similar success, or at least enough success to comfortably finance your twinks without having to worry about funds .
http://imgur.com/8uW2Pnf
http://imgur.com/gDNpIXy
Getting started (Your first 100k):
In order to get started, you are going to need some capital to start investing. In this phase, look for anything and everything you can sell. If you have some valuable pets, items, toys, just sell them. In order to make gold, you are going to need gold. Here are the things I personally did to get over the 100k mark:
1. Old raids
One of the many advantages of having a lv.100s is that you are able to solo old raids fairly quick. Each raid will give you 1-2k gold and take about 10mins to complete. Since I had multiple 100s, this was an easy way to make quick gold weekly. I was getting 5-10k every week with very little effort. Sometimes you will also get rare pet drops in these raids which can be sold for additional gold and most also have a chance at rare mounts (that can't be sold obviously, but are an added incentive).
2. Garrison
Garrisons are by far the easiest way to make gold at this stage of the game. What you want to do is have a lv.3 Garrison, Inn and most followers with the Treasure Hunter trait. This will net you around 1k gold daily for about 5 minutes worth of clicking. If you have multiple 100s, this is even more lucrative. With 5 lv.100s I was making 5k a day just by spending time queuing up missions.
3. Farming pets
Pet farming can also be an extremely good way of making gold at this stage of the game. Although personally I didn't think the time required to do this method is worth it, I have friends who still do this and make quite a bit of gold doing it. Since pet prices vary from realm to realm, the best way to determine what pets to farm would be to analyze the prices on your realm's AH and see which ones are worthwhile.
4. Farming Shadowfang Keep
Farming SFK is one of the best ways to get established on a realm (especially if you don't have a lv.100). This is because you don't need a high level toon to do this. Although the efficiency varies by class, in general it is a very decent way of making gold. One thing to note here: DO NOT use any of the items you farm if you are in the "Getting started" phase. Although it might be tempting to use that shadow fang or gloom shroud armor on your twink, it is infinitely better just to SELL it. You need gold to make gold. If you use your own merchandise at this stage you are just stunting your own growth. The most important thing to do at this stage is to spend nothing and sell everything.
100,000 - 500,000:
This is where it gets interesting. You can spend a week in this stage or 8 weeks. I was pretty lucky and was out of it in a mere 2 weeks. There are two main things you are going to be doing in this stage: flipping pets and sniping twink items.
1. Flipping pets
The first of the two things you will be doing with your 100,000 gold pieces will be buying a lot of pets. I would stick to pets that are in the 2,000-5,000 range to start. You will be flipping these for 15-20% profit. When you accumulate more and more gold, you will be moving up to the higher end pets. These will include things like lanticores, TCG pets, etc. Within a week or two, at least be looking to double that 100k. In just a couple days, you will become very familiar with the prices of pets on your realm. It is important to have the AH price high for your pets. Try to control a certain niche of pets in such a way that only you and a couple others are selling it. This works especially well for TCG pets.
2. Sniping twink items
The other hidden benefit of flipping pets is that you have something to sell on ANY realm. What this allows you to do is be able to snipe twink items on any realm. You are going to be going on this website:
https://theunderminejournal.com/#us
What you are going to be doing is regularly searching for twink items and specifically look for items that are heavily underpriced. When you find such an item, you are going to go on that realm, sell one of your pets at a discounted price on the realm's trade chat and buy the discounted twink item. When pets are added to your journal, you can cage them on any toon, allowing you to essentially transfer funds across realms.
I have previously gotten several exceptional deals that have made me quite a bit of gold in this stage of the game. For example, I was able to snipe Hotshot Pilot's Gloves for a mere 5g, I later resold those gloves for over 300,000g. I have also sniped 2 Blackvenom Blades for 500-1000g and resold those for 150,000g. You will regularly find items like defias belts, defias boots, woodworking gloves, etc which resell for quite a bit of gold.
There are a couple ways you can cash in on the items when you snipe them. Firstly, if you have quite a few items amassed on a perticular realm, you can pay for a character transfer to a realm like Bleeding Hollow or Aerie Peak and sell on the AH for a premium price. Secondly, you can sell the items on that realms and use the gold to buy more pets. Finally you can use Twinkinfo's auction house and make deals with other twins that way.
Here is an example of a thread you can make advertising all the items you snipe:
http://www.twinkinfo.com/forums/f19/wts-several-high-end-rare-gfd-items-68816/
Notice that I have organized the list very neatly and by realm. At this point you are essentially running a small business, it is important to have a good reputation within the twink community. DO NOT scam, lie, cheat or be disingenuous about the deals you make. It will only hurt future business.
500,000 - 2,000,000:
Once you are about 500,000 gold you can start making some serious gold. The only thing you want to be doing in this phase is flipping high end items. This includes rare twink items as well as TCG mounts. What you are going to be looking for is underpriced mounts and items that you can resell. You want to make sure that almost all of your gold is invested at all times. Since the items are worth so much more gold, they will naturally take much longer to sell. It is thus important to find prices that balance both time taken to sell as well as return on investment. At this stage of the game, you can move the mark up from 15-20% to 10-15%. Since you are dealing with such big ticket items, 10% actually translates to a lot of gold. A 10% commission on a 300k deal is about 30k. That's a month's worth of game time.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. Lets say you find a swift spectral tiger being sold for 330k. What a great deal! You go ahead and snipe it off the AH. You can now choose to resell the mount for 375k and have it sell in a couple days or sell it for the realm average 400k and have it sell in a couple weeks. In this stage of the game, it is much more worth it to cash in on the 45k in a couple days as opposed to making an additional 25k in a couple weeks. You want to be constantly buying and selling.
The second hidden benefit of selling merchandise at a slightly discounted price is that you will very quickly become known for having better prices, and you will often be able to get the full price for an item or mount because of this reputation. You will also have people sending you in game mail as well as sending you whispers about deals. Make sure that you are always courteous and be sure to not disrespect any client. You never know who your next buyer will be. A lot of my buyers become repeat buyers, and it gives your AH game a lot more stability when this happens.
2,000,000+:
When you have above 2,000,000 gold, you will have been in the market dealing high end mounts and items for at least a month. This is when the sellers will start coming to you instead of you having to snipe the deals on the AH. I am at the stage now where I log onto my bank alt for about 30 minutes each day. During this time I make 300-400k worth of transactions, repost everything on the AH and go back to playing my twinks. I basically control the mount market and am arguably one of the richest merchants on Aerie Peak. I have been the top seller on Undermine Journal for the past three weeks on my realm. Once you build up that kind of a reputation, it becomes extremely easy to keep making more and more gold. You have to think of your toon or bank alt as a type of brand. What you are seen as by your realm's community is extremely important. It is important to always be respectful and kind even when you make more gold than most average wow players. A lot of what goes into the 2,000,000+ gold bracket is brand management and keeping good relationships with other merchants, buyers and sellers. When you have this kind of money, opportunities will naturally present themselves. When people know you will always have gold on hand, they are more likely to come to you to cash out on an item and give you big discounts.
Here is what my mailbox looks like every morning:
http://imgur.com/pQ7Tlvz
EDIT:
So there was a bling in front of the mailbox after I collected my mail and took the SS:
http://imgur.com/7e3WG94
The income pretty much stabilizes when you get to this point. The biggest reason for this is that there is a gold cap. If Blizzard decides to increase gold cap, growth potential would also increase drastically. At this stage of the game funding really shouldn't be an issue for you anyway.
Things to keep in mind:
There are several things that you should keep in mind, especially when you first start out the gold game. Firstly, it is important spend NOTHING. I cannot stress how important this is. I have over 8,000,000 in assets and I have yet to use a single TCG mounts on my own account. Gold saved is gold earned. You may use an item or mount and find a buyer for it the day after (this is why I found the 100-500k stretch very enjoyable because I could use and enjoy the pets I bought as well as be able to sell them).
The second biggest thing you must realize is that gold is relative. How much gold you have should not dictate how much fun you have at the game. Gold is just a facet to do things you already enjoy in a better way.Obviously there are some clear benefits to having tons of gold, it should not become your sole purpose in playing the game. You will lose interest very quickly.
The third is that you must be mentally prepared to take losses. There were plenty of times where i realized that I had made a bad buy. Instead of holding out for a month or two just to make my money back, I was prepared to take that 10k loss and reinvest. Learn from your mistakes, don't be stubborn on making a profit on everything you buy and play smart.
Realizing and capitalizing on trends is also important. When the void satchels first came out, I was buying them for 5k and reselling them for 20k regularly. They decreased in price as the market got saturated. They sell for 1-2k now. Similarly, enchants sell for ridiculous prices at the beginning of each pvp season, you can capitalize on this when that happens. Staying on top of market trends will make you a lot more money that anything else.
Helpful tools:
1. Wow Mobile Armory
What this app lets you do is re-list auctions and collect mail. This is extremely time-efficient especially in the 100-500k bracket when you will have potentially dozens of pets and twink items across several realms. The app also lets you talk in guild chat and whispers as well which can be important in making deals. The other important thing this app lets you do is snipe twink items on the go. If you are sitting in a subway, or at work, etc, you can check Undermine Journal and snipe items through the app. The only catch with this is that you must have gold on the realm.
2. Undermine Journal
UMJ is your best friend. It tells you realm averages, sorts deals by category, shows cross realm prices and in general is a must if you want to be successful in gold making. I would also highly recommend getting the in-game add-on for UMJ as it lets you know the prices of all of your items when you hover over them in game. This can be especially beneficial if you are in the farming/raids phase as it gives you exact prices of mog items, etc. This reduces your chance of accidentally vendoring something of value.
Edits:
I have been twinking in the 20-29 bracket (previously the 20-24 bracket) since the beginning of Cataclysm. Playing mainly a f2p holy paladin (Freetopali) for most Cata and MoP, I made the decision to go "vet" during the beginning of the summer of 2015. Although I had subbed before this point briefly, it is safe to say that I had not paid for the game for over 90% of the time I had played. One of the main reasons I went vet was to gain access to GF'd items, expensive mounts and enchants. It was never my intention to play the market or make an X amount of gold, I just had a lot of things I wanted and they all cost a lot of gold.
I started with about 5,000 gold and was able to work my way up to being worth more than 8,000,000 gold in just 90 days. I have enough gold now to buy literally anything in the game. If I spent all of the gold I have now on WoW tokens, I could play for free for over 20 years. I can now fund any twink without having to worry about how much it will cost. The purpose of this guide will be to share how I managed to do this so that all of you can hopefully also have similar success, or at least enough success to comfortably finance your twinks without having to worry about funds .
http://imgur.com/8uW2Pnf
http://imgur.com/gDNpIXy
Getting started (Your first 100k):
In order to get started, you are going to need some capital to start investing. In this phase, look for anything and everything you can sell. If you have some valuable pets, items, toys, just sell them. In order to make gold, you are going to need gold. Here are the things I personally did to get over the 100k mark:
1. Old raids
One of the many advantages of having a lv.100s is that you are able to solo old raids fairly quick. Each raid will give you 1-2k gold and take about 10mins to complete. Since I had multiple 100s, this was an easy way to make quick gold weekly. I was getting 5-10k every week with very little effort. Sometimes you will also get rare pet drops in these raids which can be sold for additional gold and most also have a chance at rare mounts (that can't be sold obviously, but are an added incentive).
2. Garrison
Garrisons are by far the easiest way to make gold at this stage of the game. What you want to do is have a lv.3 Garrison, Inn and most followers with the Treasure Hunter trait. This will net you around 1k gold daily for about 5 minutes worth of clicking. If you have multiple 100s, this is even more lucrative. With 5 lv.100s I was making 5k a day just by spending time queuing up missions.
3. Farming pets
Pet farming can also be an extremely good way of making gold at this stage of the game. Although personally I didn't think the time required to do this method is worth it, I have friends who still do this and make quite a bit of gold doing it. Since pet prices vary from realm to realm, the best way to determine what pets to farm would be to analyze the prices on your realm's AH and see which ones are worthwhile.
4. Farming Shadowfang Keep
Farming SFK is one of the best ways to get established on a realm (especially if you don't have a lv.100). This is because you don't need a high level toon to do this. Although the efficiency varies by class, in general it is a very decent way of making gold. One thing to note here: DO NOT use any of the items you farm if you are in the "Getting started" phase. Although it might be tempting to use that shadow fang or gloom shroud armor on your twink, it is infinitely better just to SELL it. You need gold to make gold. If you use your own merchandise at this stage you are just stunting your own growth. The most important thing to do at this stage is to spend nothing and sell everything.
100,000 - 500,000:
This is where it gets interesting. You can spend a week in this stage or 8 weeks. I was pretty lucky and was out of it in a mere 2 weeks. There are two main things you are going to be doing in this stage: flipping pets and sniping twink items.
1. Flipping pets
The first of the two things you will be doing with your 100,000 gold pieces will be buying a lot of pets. I would stick to pets that are in the 2,000-5,000 range to start. You will be flipping these for 15-20% profit. When you accumulate more and more gold, you will be moving up to the higher end pets. These will include things like lanticores, TCG pets, etc. Within a week or two, at least be looking to double that 100k. In just a couple days, you will become very familiar with the prices of pets on your realm. It is important to have the AH price high for your pets. Try to control a certain niche of pets in such a way that only you and a couple others are selling it. This works especially well for TCG pets.
2. Sniping twink items
The other hidden benefit of flipping pets is that you have something to sell on ANY realm. What this allows you to do is be able to snipe twink items on any realm. You are going to be going on this website:
https://theunderminejournal.com/#us
What you are going to be doing is regularly searching for twink items and specifically look for items that are heavily underpriced. When you find such an item, you are going to go on that realm, sell one of your pets at a discounted price on the realm's trade chat and buy the discounted twink item. When pets are added to your journal, you can cage them on any toon, allowing you to essentially transfer funds across realms.
I have previously gotten several exceptional deals that have made me quite a bit of gold in this stage of the game. For example, I was able to snipe Hotshot Pilot's Gloves for a mere 5g, I later resold those gloves for over 300,000g. I have also sniped 2 Blackvenom Blades for 500-1000g and resold those for 150,000g. You will regularly find items like defias belts, defias boots, woodworking gloves, etc which resell for quite a bit of gold.
There are a couple ways you can cash in on the items when you snipe them. Firstly, if you have quite a few items amassed on a perticular realm, you can pay for a character transfer to a realm like Bleeding Hollow or Aerie Peak and sell on the AH for a premium price. Secondly, you can sell the items on that realms and use the gold to buy more pets. Finally you can use Twinkinfo's auction house and make deals with other twins that way.
Here is an example of a thread you can make advertising all the items you snipe:
http://www.twinkinfo.com/forums/f19/wts-several-high-end-rare-gfd-items-68816/
Notice that I have organized the list very neatly and by realm. At this point you are essentially running a small business, it is important to have a good reputation within the twink community. DO NOT scam, lie, cheat or be disingenuous about the deals you make. It will only hurt future business.
500,000 - 2,000,000:
Once you are about 500,000 gold you can start making some serious gold. The only thing you want to be doing in this phase is flipping high end items. This includes rare twink items as well as TCG mounts. What you are going to be looking for is underpriced mounts and items that you can resell. You want to make sure that almost all of your gold is invested at all times. Since the items are worth so much more gold, they will naturally take much longer to sell. It is thus important to find prices that balance both time taken to sell as well as return on investment. At this stage of the game, you can move the mark up from 15-20% to 10-15%. Since you are dealing with such big ticket items, 10% actually translates to a lot of gold. A 10% commission on a 300k deal is about 30k. That's a month's worth of game time.
Here is an example of what I am talking about. Lets say you find a swift spectral tiger being sold for 330k. What a great deal! You go ahead and snipe it off the AH. You can now choose to resell the mount for 375k and have it sell in a couple days or sell it for the realm average 400k and have it sell in a couple weeks. In this stage of the game, it is much more worth it to cash in on the 45k in a couple days as opposed to making an additional 25k in a couple weeks. You want to be constantly buying and selling.
The second hidden benefit of selling merchandise at a slightly discounted price is that you will very quickly become known for having better prices, and you will often be able to get the full price for an item or mount because of this reputation. You will also have people sending you in game mail as well as sending you whispers about deals. Make sure that you are always courteous and be sure to not disrespect any client. You never know who your next buyer will be. A lot of my buyers become repeat buyers, and it gives your AH game a lot more stability when this happens.
2,000,000+:
When you have above 2,000,000 gold, you will have been in the market dealing high end mounts and items for at least a month. This is when the sellers will start coming to you instead of you having to snipe the deals on the AH. I am at the stage now where I log onto my bank alt for about 30 minutes each day. During this time I make 300-400k worth of transactions, repost everything on the AH and go back to playing my twinks. I basically control the mount market and am arguably one of the richest merchants on Aerie Peak. I have been the top seller on Undermine Journal for the past three weeks on my realm. Once you build up that kind of a reputation, it becomes extremely easy to keep making more and more gold. You have to think of your toon or bank alt as a type of brand. What you are seen as by your realm's community is extremely important. It is important to always be respectful and kind even when you make more gold than most average wow players. A lot of what goes into the 2,000,000+ gold bracket is brand management and keeping good relationships with other merchants, buyers and sellers. When you have this kind of money, opportunities will naturally present themselves. When people know you will always have gold on hand, they are more likely to come to you to cash out on an item and give you big discounts.
Here is what my mailbox looks like every morning:
http://imgur.com/pQ7Tlvz
EDIT:
So there was a bling in front of the mailbox after I collected my mail and took the SS:
http://imgur.com/7e3WG94
The income pretty much stabilizes when you get to this point. The biggest reason for this is that there is a gold cap. If Blizzard decides to increase gold cap, growth potential would also increase drastically. At this stage of the game funding really shouldn't be an issue for you anyway.
Things to keep in mind:
There are several things that you should keep in mind, especially when you first start out the gold game. Firstly, it is important spend NOTHING. I cannot stress how important this is. I have over 8,000,000 in assets and I have yet to use a single TCG mounts on my own account. Gold saved is gold earned. You may use an item or mount and find a buyer for it the day after (this is why I found the 100-500k stretch very enjoyable because I could use and enjoy the pets I bought as well as be able to sell them).
The second biggest thing you must realize is that gold is relative. How much gold you have should not dictate how much fun you have at the game. Gold is just a facet to do things you already enjoy in a better way.Obviously there are some clear benefits to having tons of gold, it should not become your sole purpose in playing the game. You will lose interest very quickly.
The third is that you must be mentally prepared to take losses. There were plenty of times where i realized that I had made a bad buy. Instead of holding out for a month or two just to make my money back, I was prepared to take that 10k loss and reinvest. Learn from your mistakes, don't be stubborn on making a profit on everything you buy and play smart.
Realizing and capitalizing on trends is also important. When the void satchels first came out, I was buying them for 5k and reselling them for 20k regularly. They decreased in price as the market got saturated. They sell for 1-2k now. Similarly, enchants sell for ridiculous prices at the beginning of each pvp season, you can capitalize on this when that happens. Staying on top of market trends will make you a lot more money that anything else.
Helpful tools:
1. Wow Mobile Armory
What this app lets you do is re-list auctions and collect mail. This is extremely time-efficient especially in the 100-500k bracket when you will have potentially dozens of pets and twink items across several realms. The app also lets you talk in guild chat and whispers as well which can be important in making deals. The other important thing this app lets you do is snipe twink items on the go. If you are sitting in a subway, or at work, etc, you can check Undermine Journal and snipe items through the app. The only catch with this is that you must have gold on the realm.
2. Undermine Journal
UMJ is your best friend. It tells you realm averages, sorts deals by category, shows cross realm prices and in general is a must if you want to be successful in gold making. I would also highly recommend getting the in-game add-on for UMJ as it lets you know the prices of all of your items when you hover over them in game. This can be especially beneficial if you are in the farming/raids phase as it gives you exact prices of mog items, etc. This reduces your chance of accidentally vendoring something of value.
Edits:
Last edited by a moderator:
