World of Warcraft players call me the Gold King. I have accumulated 250,000 in World of Warcraft gold, and have bought every in-game item I ever wanted. These are the methods I use. They are all legal and ethical.
Part 1: The Beginning Player.
As a beginning player in World of Warcraft, you have almost nothing. You get dropped into the starting area with the clothes on your back, a pitiful weapon, and a handful of low level food. Gold? You don’t have any gold. You don’t even have one lousy copper.
You know you’re going to need gold to advance your character, but how are you going to get it? Don’t worry. I’ve got two bits of good news for you. First, the low levels of World of Warcraft don’t require a lot of gold, and second, WoW gold is easier to earn than ever before.
The first thing you need to do is take your crummy weapon, bash a few monsters, and complete a couple of quests. This leads us to rule number one of accumulating Wow gold – loot everything off the monsters you kill. Weapons. Food. Bits of fur. Broken teeth. Smelly underwear (OK, I’ve yet to find this). Everything has some sort of value. Loot it all.
Once your backpack is full of odd looking junk, it’s time to turn it into money. You can tell a bit about the value of items if you mouse over them. The color of the item’s name will tell you the relative desirability of the item.
What Those Colors Mean
Gray – The game refers to gray items as poor quality items. Players call them “vendor trash.” You can freely sell them to vendors, and not worry about giving away something valuable. I don’t know what the vendors do with all of those broken animal teeth, but take their money and be glad.
White – The game refers to white items as common. This usually means that someone, somewhere has a use for the item. In this very early stage of the game you can sell white items to the vendor. When you start mining copper and skinning leather, those items will be white too, but you never want to sell them to a vendor. They will make you much more gold at the auction house.
Green – The game refers to green items as uncommon. Some can be quite valuable. Before you sell your green item, do some research on the auction house, so you can list it at appropriate price. If there are none on the auction house, try to find a price at an internet site like wowhead.com or allakhazam.com. Don’t be the guy that sells a valuable item ridiculously cheap.
Blue – These are rare items. Treat them the same as greens, but you’re more likely to find one that makes you a nice little stack of gold.
Once you’ve sold the junk in your backpack, it’s time to make your first purchases. I always recommend mining and skinning as the best starting professions. Later in your Warcraft career you might want to switch to other professions, but if you want to get yourself in good shape goldwise, mining and skinning are a good way to go. Find those two trainers in your starting area, buy the beginning skills, and pick up a mining pick and a skinning knife.
With the skinning knife in your pack, you can now skin many of the monsters you kill for their leather. You can also skin animals that other players have killed. It’s OK to skin another player’s kill, but make sure he wasn’t planning to skin it first. That’s bad mojo, and it’s likely to get you called some bad names too.
With your mining pick in your pack, you can now mine copper, the easiest of the ores available. Make sure you set your mini map to show ore nodes when you are nearby.
As you accumulate leather and copper ore, sell it in stacks of 20 at the auction house in the nearby major city. I recommend undercutting the cheapest price by a small amount, because the cheapest item appears at the top of the screen, and is the most likely to sell first. You can auction your copper ore, or you can smelt it and sell it as copper bars. A simple auction house search will let you know which is better at any given time.
Those two skills will provide the bulk of your earning for these first 30 levels. There’s no need to go out of the way to find ore or skins. As you quest and level, enough of these resources will present themselves.
That all sounds great. You’re earning good gold for a low level character, but the goal of my guides is not to earn gold, it is to accumulate it. That means spending wisely. Here is the very short list of what I consider to be “must buy” items for the new character.
Stuff You’ve Gotta Have
Bags – Next to your backpack you have four slots for additional bags. Buy four bags early, and upgrade them when you can afford it. The more bag space you have, the more loot you can carry, and the fewer trips you’ll have to make back to the vendors or the auction house.
Spells and Abilities – Every two levels you can (and should) visit your class trainer to learn the latest and greatest spells and abilities for your class. Don’t fall behind on this. You need up to date skills to face the challenges ahead. Money might be tight at the early levels, but with the gold you’re making, the training costs will soon seem trivial.
A Decent Set of Equipment – Leveling your character is fast and easy at these early levels. Just about any gear will do. At around level 15 I like to do a gear check and make sure I’m not wearing any of that gray vendor trash armor. Go to the auction house and pick up low priced greens to replace any gray pieces you still have. Don’t go crazy! Constantly buying and upgrading armor is the number one way people end up gold-poor in this game.
That’s it. Everything else is unnecessary. Yeah, I understand that this is a game, and it’s fun to buy things with your gold. That’s fine. Have fun. But make sure to save 45 gold for…
That Other Thing You’ve Gotta Have
Your Mount! – At level 30 you can buy your first mount. The price is 10 gold for the mount and 35 gold for the riding skill, and that seems like a ton of gold to a lot of level 30s who don’t know how to handle their money. If you follow this guide and control your spending, that coveted horse… or cat… or kodo will be yours.
