How I made 87 million gold in the last year
Check out my yearly accounting in terms of gold. 87 million gold in profit was made this year. Learn more to see what was the most profitable farms of the year!
GOLDMAKING
I started playing DF at the start of june 2023 and since then, I’ve been tracking all of my sales. Today, I want to show you the details of how I made 87 million gold in profit in the last year. An exercise like the one I’m doing today is vital to understanding what made my journey successful. In addition, it’s good to look at markets where I spent a lot of time but didn’t get that much from.
6 main categories
My yearly goldmaking was split into 6 categories. Transmog, pvp gear, pets, professions, flipping and smaller markets.
Here are the results from each category with some bonus data:
Professions
Professions was by far my biggest earning this year. Here is the breakdown of the gold made from each profession:
Inscription: 17 530 849
Tailoring: 7 696 000
Engineering: 7 395 000
Jewelcrafting: 4 800 000
Enchanting: 3 144 000
Leatherworking: 1 700 000
Blacksmithing: 1 000 000
I doubt that people would have guessed inscription made roughly 20% of my yearly gold but it did. Here is a smaller breakdown:
Ink and pigments: 15 750 000
Cosmetics: 280 000
Glyphs: 1 500 000
Obviously, inks and pigments were astounding. It represented over 20% of my yearly gold! And that’s not the best part. The best part was not being at the computer while making this gold…
How to make gold while being afk would make a great title for an article! That being said, it was not 100% afk. It takes roughly 5 minutes to mill enough herbs to start a crafting batch of 30 minutes. After 30 minutes of crafting ink, your character automatically logs out. If you mill herbs for 20 minutes, you could craft ink for 2 hours without being at the computer! And that’s precisely what I did!
A ton of people slept on the market because both tsm and craftsim would mark it as being unprofitable. The reasoning was that both addons used the auction house pigment price instead of the “homemade” pigment price. Since making your own pigments was extremely profitable, making ink was as well. But exactly how profitable?
If you click the image above, you’ll see my inscription spreadsheet which happens to be a very precise calculator of profit made from either selling pigments or inks in Dragonflight. It pretty much does what craftsim does with manual pricing. The spreadsheet was a patreon/twitch subs perk but I decided to make it public now that it’s less useful. However, if the ink trader uses the DF inks in TWW, we might need to use it again! Still, ink will be useful in the future. Stuff like contracts, glyphs and some various goods still need ink.
Other professions
The category is called “professions” but it might as well be called “crafted unique items”. Items like toys, pets, illusions and other special items like the mecha-bond imprint matrix featured in the blood of sargeras blog post. I estimate the total gold from these types of items is over 21 million gold.
Another big chunk of the gold came from the tailoring bolts and bags. Azureweave was way more profitable than chronocloth but both were spectacular with a cumulated 5 900 000 gold in profit.
PVP gear
It’s crazy how selling pvp gear for a few weeks can give me more gold than selling pets for a full year! Season 3 introduced the “verdant” set. I got myself all of the patterns on the first few days and crafted every single piece on 5 realms. To be clear, I did play for like 8 hours a day on the first week of this patch and then dialed it down to 4 hours a day which is my average number of hours for the full year. I did make a video on the pvp gear if you would like to see it. I hope that it shows you how powerful time sensitive goldmaking opportunities can be!
Transmog
I understand why many people dislike this market—it can be slow. That's why I approach transmog differently. I don't sell anything with a *region sale average price below 1,000 gold. Let me show you why with an image that was showed in my “how to improve your pet sales” blog post.
*Tsm regionsaleavg is the average price an item sold for, according to tsm data.
The term "gold per post" refers to the average amount of gold earned from posting an item on the auction house. As illustrated earlier, the gold per post for low-value items is quite poor, despite their high sale rate. Posting auctions can be very time-consuming, making it crucial not to waste time listing low-value items. Remember, time is money, friend!
Island expeditions, Naxxramas and some classic vanilla items were by far the top transmog sales. Island expeditions are great for the firekin set, the duskhaven set and a few pets that still have value. Naxxramas also brings a lot of sales from lamented pieces to vanilla transmog from the dented tokens. For more information on that, make sure to check out my Naxxramas goldmaking guide.
Flipping
Flipping is not a market that I have that much experience with. Nevertheless, the undermine.exchange website and the saddlebagexchange.com website have been incredible for those tasks. My gold from flipping came from mainly 2 sources.
The first strategy involved flipping transmog items and various goods, particularly when I lacked the time to farm specific items. The second strategy was based on predicting future market trends. Prior to Season 4, I invested roughly 15 million gold, yielding a profit of 1.8 million gold. This outcome was less favorable than expected, primarily due to the close release of Mists of Pandaria remix and Cataclysm Classic. For comparison, my preparations for Season 3, with a similar investment, resulted in a profit of 6 million gold.
Pets
The gold made from pets came from 2 main sources. Drops and leveling pets. I made roughly a million gold from the elemental souls pets like the tide spirit. Here is a list of notable pets: Papi, Writhing spine, Armored vaultbot, Boneweave hatchling, Aqir tunneler, Foulwing buzzer, time rifts pets and the 2 dreamsurge pets. The best pets that I leveled were: Anubisath Idol, Mechanical pandaren dragonling, Ikky, Chrominius and the Zandalari pets.
I used pet charms to level up my pets and have made roughly 1.5 million gold from this market. The process is straightforward: purchase highly sought-after pets or those with high sale rates at level 1, use pet charms to level them up, and then sell them at a significantly higher price. To know how to use the charms to level pets, check out my “polished pet charms blog” article.
Other notable markets
To keep the article short, I decided to combine some minor markets into the last category. Here are some of the small markets that I profited from:
Dragonflight speed gear: 500 000 gold
Shadowlands speed gear: 2 700 000 gold
Druid transformation marks: 500 000 gold
Raw gold from the Shadowlands mission table and world quests: 500 000 gold
Garrison missions and trading resources for mats: 200 000 gold
Prospecting and crushing gems: 1 000 000 gold
Various alchemy crafts: roughly 200 000 gold
When examining the strategies of other goldmakers, you'll notice a completely different approach. My goal has never been to amass the largest amount of gold. My wealth generation is closely tied to content creation, which takes me in various directions. If my primary objective were to maximize gold earnings, I would concentrate on time-sensitive farms at the start of expansions and patches. This method is undoubtedly the most efficient way to make gold.
