How to Make a Consistent Income in the World of Warcraft

Since BC, the once tried and true money-making professions, such as herbing and mining, are no longer guarantees. This is mostly due to the fact there are simply TOO many miners these days, coupled with the significant difference in mount speed between the non-epic flying mount and the epic. Flying at higher speed means more quickly discovering the location of newly spawned nodes and/or herbs.

There are other ways for getting money consistently, though. Remember Tyr's Hand? It's located in the Eastern Plague Lands in the lower easterly section. At level 70, mostly any character should have no problem ripping through those mobs. They drop anywhere from 5 to 70s (roughly) and a LOT of runecloth. Runecloth sells for a couple of gold per stack of 20. So much runecloth that after about 20 minutes of hardcore focusing you'll have to go mail the cloth to your alt. The elites there also drop items that vendors pay a lot for. Gray items usually are at least 90s if not as much as close to 2g.

As a combat swords rogue at level 70, and somewhat mediocre gear, I can get a consistent 55-60g per hour EXCLUDING items that drop that I eventually sell on the Auction House. The mobs are ridiculously easy to tear through, and I require bandaging maybe once every 8th or 9th elite. Moreover, there are never many people there, so you always have something to loot. As a bonus, if you ARE a miner, there are several thorium ores around that area that you can easily mine while farming the elites. (Tip: for the fastest killing rate, try out the barracks. It seems to sport the highest population (mob) density.)

Another strategy involves farming SM. At level 70 as a protection specialized paladin you can easily pull most if not the entire instance (any of the 4 wings) and slaughter all the mobs within minutes. Assuming you bring along enough in the way of backpack space, you'll make a killing doing this over and over again and mailing all your items to alts from Southshore. Vendor or DE (if you can) the bind on pick-up items. I've heard reports of people maintaining an easy 60-100g using this method.

Another strategy is to buy out all items in a given market. For instance, you could buy out all listed copper bars. Then, you slowly reintroduce those items at a slightly higher price. Simple math indicates how profitable this can be. Consider the following: you buy 100 bars of copper with each bar costing an average of 12 silver. You resell each individual bar over the course of a few days at the raised price of about 17 silver--a 5 silver per bar difference---and very quickly you will have profited 500g (-1200 + 1700). You should think of this sort of activity as akin to pass income sources and/or investments. You sit there and let your investments passively generate more cash. The obvious flaw is that it requires that you have some money to start off with.

The last profit-generating activity I will discuss is farming instances. Now, instances can be very detrimental to your gold supply in WoW, especially when and if you PUG an instance. What you need is a good group that knows one another and is focused on going through the instance as fast as possible. As a level 67 paladin I went 3 other friends--who were all level 70--through Auchenai Crypts (regular mode). We farmed it three times in just an an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes and each made an easy 200g after AH sales.

And hey, if you're really bored and don't feel like manipulating the economy or farming anything, you can dance in front of IF and ask for tips! I wouldn't count on getting too many, unless its a holiday!

Good luck in your gold-earning adventures!