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World of Warcraft Guide: Herbs to Gold? Don't Mind if I Do.
MMORPG.com World of Warcraft Correspondent Anna Dietz writes this look at how a few simple herb gathering tricks can earn you big gold in-game.
By Anna Dietz on October 14, 2009
I am by no means a gold farmer, nor do I endorse them in any way. Personally, I hate gold farmers in every way possible. However, when it comes to making gold for what I want or what I need, I can easily make 600-1,800 gold in an hour. I have frequently made as much as 2,400 gold in one hour. A few factors come into play that I will discuss later on. I decided to write this article after getting tired of the constant gold spammers and friends hitting me up for loans. After a good laugh, I decided to be part of the solution instead of just ignoring the problem. I talked to a few friends and decided to let others in on how easily they too can gather gold instead of buying it or some half-truth e-guide to making gold. Even though this article relates to gathering herbs for profit, anyone can take their profession and make gold with it. In addition, you may ask why herbs and not potions? This is and has always been a WoW phenomenon. Herbs have always sold for more gold than potions.
First off, not every character makes a great herb picker. The single best herb picker is the Druid. Why, you may ask? Because Druids have the ability to pick herbs while still in flight form. They do not need to dismount before they pick an herb, and sometimes this can mean the difference between getting that herb picked or someone else getting it.
Second, one must be prepared. To prepare for maximum herb picking capacity, I suggest getting a minimum of five 20-slot herb satchels. Three of these bags should be in your bank while the other two are equipped while gathering. The amount of herbs gathered within an hour can vary from one full bag to two. The reason I suggest the three bags for your bank is that if you keep a stock of herbs, you do not have to herb on days that you just do not feel like it. I keep one bag for personal usage for making raid potions, one bag for quick sell, and one bag of BC herbs. Yes, most BC herbs still sell at very high prices. Finally, I suggest a mod called, "Gatherer." While the mod is not necessary, it can make gathering for any profession a whole lot easier and less time consuming.
While picking herbs is by no means difficult, creating a habit or system can lower your frustrations. Over my many years with WoW, I have formed my own system for gathering. The best times for picking the herbs may vary slightly from realm to realm, but for the most part, follow the same settings. During the school year, the best times for gathering the herbs are before school lets out for the day. In addition, because most guilds raid after dinner, you can easily pick back up after 6 PM. I try to avoid gathering on the weekend or at least try to get going before 10 AM, or after 10 PM. I found that almost every herb picker tries to gather their haul on the weekends. I have also noticed a pattern in the secondary drop off herbs in relation to WotLK. Your secondary drop is going to be either the crystal life or the frost lotus. I found that if the life drops in the morning, the lotus tend to drop in the evening, and vice versa. This is of great importance due to the value of the lotus. The frost lotus can sell for 40 to 80 gold each, not per stack. And, in one hour, you can gather six to twenty making you 240 to 1,800 gold (at 40 gold each) per hour just on lotus. The rest of the herbs sell in general 20-35 gold per stack. (19 slots x 20 gold = 380 gold. (Making 380 + 240 = 620 gold minimum, per hour.)
How you choose to work a zone can be as equally important as choosing your time to herb. Out of habit, most people tend to work a zone in a clockwise fashion. Most do not even realize that they do it. I choose to work in a counter-clockwise fashion. This seems to work to my advantage. While several people working in one direction tend to fight for the same herb spawn, I rarely have any competition at all. Moreover, by the time I reach their work point, those herbs are starting to respawn. Each realm within WoW has its own format for gathering. The original WoW world realm is linear. You start at one end of a zone and go to the end. BC is more circular. You not only circle the zone, but the entire realm is circular in nature except two that have their own placing. WotLK is triangular in gathering respects. Top center, far left and far right of the realm is where you are going to make your money. Go ahead and pick anything you come across along the line to the next spot, but the money is at the points of the triangle. Make sure to have your mod, "gatherer' running. A wonderful tool that allows you to see the shortest route between each herb and tracks the route you just came from. You will have to touch each herb you come across at least once for it to populate, but in the end, it is worth it. In addition, if you have friends and guild mates that use that same mod, each time they touch a spawn, your generator report is updated and vice versa. Take the time to learn its use to increase your productivity and to shorten the time it takes to gather.
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Probably the single most important aspect to making your money is going to be the Auction House. The first thing you need to do is learn how to check current prices before setting your own. You do not want to over or under price you herbs. I have found that by lowering the price of a single stack of herbs by only a factor of 10%, I will still sell 98% of my herbs listed within thirty minutes. The second thing you need to learn is how NOT to flood the market. I have found that three stacks of each herb I wish to sell is sufficient at any given time. Furthermore, since most of my herbs sell within thirty minutes, I can easily place more on the AH as needed. The days that you place your herbs on the market can greatly affect not only how many you sell but the pricing as well. I have found that Friday afternoon, Monday morning, and Wednesday afternoon tend to be my best days to sell every type of herb. Rarely, you will find someone trying to cut your prices by 10 gold or more per stack...let them. While it can be quite irritating, you will find the market self corrects quickly.
Like I stated before, I am not a gold farmer; but you can see by the math, a minimum of 600 per hour gathering herbs is very feasible. That is even with all of my real life interferences and distractions. Now, go out and make as much gold as you want as often as you want so that when you get the gold spams and whispers starting you can make sure to laugh and ignore them. I have tried to make this gold guide as simple as possible and I truly hope it helps you make as much gold as you wish. Keep in mind that Cataclysm due out; so, I also suggest hording at least one full bag of WotLK herbs. The rush for leveling professions that utilize herbs will make them even more valuable. Remember, do not sweat the small stuff like missing an herb to someone else, and enjoy the days that yield you 2,400 gold. Keep smiling, keep picking, and enjoy those golden herbs.
Nothing starts your day like a little hypocrisy before lunch.
Everybody hates gold farmers with furious, over-the-top anger... until THEY need gold. Then it's time to compare notes on how many thousands an hour you can make!
Not only do i hate gold farmers but i hate the chat spam from them even worse! I see in many games where they are selling items on the market to get thier gold (individual items too).
(AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH Declares plunger war against gold sellers....goes berserk)
When I think of a "Gold Farmer" I think of bots or people making gold for the gold selling companies. Gathering stuff and selling for your own personal gain is part of what MMO's are all about. Even though regular players are farming stuff and selling for gold, I don't consider them "Gold Farmers".
I agree, I get sick and tired of these "you to can make 500 gold in an hour" post. What it is, someone that has gotten pissed off about competition tampering with their gold farming business so what do they do?
Decide to get revenge by making a post like this so the market becomes flooded with flowers on the auctioneer until they are at 5 silver a pop, like last time.
I don't know, WOW is one of the games I actually have grown to like out of all the MMOs on the market currently but it is these types of posts that irritate the hell out of me (is this what this game has become?).
I suggest, instead of putting these type of posts up for all the kiddies to read and the 18-22 year old pimple faces still going through puberty . Make a post that teaches them about game conduct, and good behaviour within the game world (so many ass holes in WOW not funny, young and old).
Not on my server.
Lotus sells for 15-25 gold each and stacks of herbs for 10-20 gold and the market is cut throat.
As with any MMO with a player run economy the AH or whatever it is called in any MMO is the place to make any serious money.
Researching what is selling and what isn't is not that hard to find out. Made a few hundred gold with some rare potions and herbs and leather armor.
Truly a write-up not based in fact that can be applied across all (or even close to all) servers. The market is everchanging with supply and demand and is different on all servers. The write-up fails to address a plethora of questions concerning making gold in WoW and is self-serving to the OP. Perhaps the only partial truth to the write-up is gathering times which is common sense and if someone lacks such simple deductive reasoning then they will do poorly in WoW no matter how many poor tutorials they read. Anna Dietz, this is unquestionably something you consider removing from this site. A ridiculous gold making scheme that helps your server only, if at all.
On the server I play on it is cut throat, rarely do you see Lotus selling for those kind of prices and on top of that farming for herbs is a pain because everyone and their mother it seems is an herbalist. That is one aspect of WoW I wish they'd change is the spawn times and the amount of spawns for herbs. It should scale according to how much farming is going on for that type of herb, and it should never be so hard to find what you're looking for that it takes up hours and hours of game play. Locating some herbs is a real chore and nightmare on the server I play on simple because there are so many people who are herbalist.
The one thing I do make money on however is transmuting. That can make me upwards of a 1,000+ gold a day and has in the past. My problem is though that I spend more time doing dailies and going to BG's. ^_^
I HATE the in game auction houses because they are so narrow and flawed and easily manipulated. and its really hard to figure out what price to place on your items (are the items allready posted fair? or are they there because they are too expensive?) and if you post stuff for a low fair price some farmer can just buy them up and repost them at their higher monopoly price
one world auction houses are a crippling curse to MMOs and I really hate COMBAT based economies (those that are based on weapons and armor instead of food and drink)
and the games themselves promote the use of gold farmers with their game code such things as limited bad size or quest construction and especially the construction of the auction house all contribute to mega inflation.
...and yet you still get all the money that you offered for your product...
wait...did you hear that....oh...it's the sound of herb prices crashing from overstock now....
Truth is if you want to know how to make the most gold watch the gold farmers. There is a reason they farm a ton of saronite. Even though its only going for 16-19g on my server there is always a ton of it and its always being sold. I was recently hacked (2days ago) and they where stupid enough to leave my main in there hackers guild AND he had access to there guild bank. All tabs full with saronite except a half a tab of titanium. After completely clearning that bank and vendoring the saronite I went to the AH and bought nearly 60 stacks of saronite they had on auction and a couple stacks of titanium. They had NOTHING else on the AH.
So yea, herbs might make you some gold but I think its safe to say, at least on my server Saronite ore/bars is the way to go. Gold sellers are out to make the most possible gold in the fastest amount of time before they get caught on the current account(s) they are using. All of these "get rich quick" posts are fine and dandy but if you really wanna know the truth on how to make money fast do what the gold sellers are doing. They have it down to an art.
Yes, I agree.
I don't know where the first two posters get off freaking out about gold farming. The OP's post has nothing to DO with gold farming. He's using professions that HE took the time to level and pay for skill upgrades in and using those professions to make gold in game. That's the very OPPOSITE of buying gold from a gold farmer. He's doing what gold farmers HATE....he's doing the "work" himself instead of buying gold.
I don't understand the confusion on this. Gold farmers SELL gold, they don't use it to improve their own characters, help guildmates, buy rep mounts, etc., etc. Must be a n00b gamer to old-timer gamer language barrier or something. idk....weird.
When I use the AH for any extensive purpose, I see myself as a wholesaler. Most of the time, I am not trying to make a solid stream of money, and there are many times when the items I am trying to sell are overpriced. I will intentionally price mine for significantly lower than the competition so that I am not one of those pricks that comes by and prices their good for one silver less, and so that my items will sell swiftly.
But this point of view comes from one that does not use the AH to make most of his money. Since BC, I have never really had problems with money, and things have just become easier with WotLK, so I am not worried about squeezing money out of AH goods. The funny thing is, when I place something for 1/4 of the cost of everyone else, there seems to be about a 10% chance that someone will still come by and price the same good for 1 silver less than mine...makes me sad.
Yes, I agree.
I don't know where the first two posters get off freaking out about gold farming. The OP's post has nothing to DO with gold farming. He's using professions that HE took the time to level and pay for skill upgrades in and using those professions to make gold in game. That's the very OPPOSITE of buying gold from a gold farmer. He's doing what gold farmers HATE....he's doing the "work" himself instead of buying gold.
I don't understand the confusion on this. Gold farmers SELL gold, they don't use it to improve their own characters, help guildmates, buy rep mounts, etc., etc. Must be a n00b gamer to old-timer gamer language barrier or something. idk....weird.
I wholeheartedly agree. While many experienced gamers are slagging this article they are missing the point. it is friendly advice to the newer player and not them. The author isn't a farmer and those that are slagging accordingly rily should take a chill pill. if the advice is simplistic for you please feel happy that there are no new lessons for you. but this is a site for all MMO players. There's loads of stuff I wished people spelt out when I started SWG. I might not have thought a combat medic/carbineer was the most exciting way to go if there was simple sensible suggestions such as this and saved myself many hour of character reinvention. So please, read mark and comment but there's no drama here. Either its helpful for you or time to move along.
In a well-designed and well-run MMORPG, you should be able to create a character, enter the world, play the game, and advance your character pretty much all the way to endgame, without ever having to take time out to farm or grind for gold. Any game for which a "Newbie Guide To Making Thousands In Gold" is a useful or needed article, is at least somewhat broken.
Gold grinding, whether done by supposedly "virtuous" players or by scorned and exploited sweatshop workers, contributes to a ridiculously inflationary game economy where wealth is its own reward. Blizzard shares complicity in this with WoW.
What you describe is the penalty for death or failure. It is also a minigame for some people, but not so grueling that any casual player cannot earn their keep with a minimum amount of effort.
The economy and the "gold grind" fill a well balanced need in the game if you ask me. I'm sure there are other avenues to travel. Perhaps you have a solution to add?
instead of using gatherer I would suggest to use
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/gathermate.aspx
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/gathermate_data.aspx
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/routes.aspx
while gathermate does the same as gatherer, gathermate_data provides all known gather locations from wowhead so you dont need to find it on your own
finally the best: routes, it will create an optimal route for you to reach all gathernodes and draws it on your minimap and worldmap.