Increasing Total Raw Gold From Legacy Raids, Classes That Can Drop Combat Preferred (Patreon)

Summary

Some trash packs of npc's in legacy dungeons may be forcibly respawned by resetting combat. This is particulary the case in Wrath-era Raid Instances. This can increase the total amount of gold farmed per dungeon. Methods for the optimization of this strategy are explained. Examples of trash packs that can be reset are given in Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. 

Why do we do this? To increase the total amount of raw gold obtainable from farming a raid before we get locked out. We can also potentially farm materials such as frostweave cloth  or farm rare drops from these mobs, faster than using other methods. 

During the recent exploit with the bugged trees in Ulduar I discovered some weird properties of this strange raid instance which turned out to be useable also in other raids from that era. 

Regular viewers may recall a method I published publicly in my "top 5 gold exploits" (https://youtu.be/6TMPxXHx9T4?t=273) a while back where two mobs in the deadmines could be farmed endlessly for rare Defias gear which sold for an average price of around 20,000 gold. (This farm has now been nerfed).

I thought at the time this was a relatively situational method applicable only to that or a small number of situations. 

It turns out that the same method can be used in many situations in Warcraft, especially in legacy content, and that it can be used to significantly total gold obtainable from running wotlk and to some extent other legacy content. The condition you need for this play is:

 There must be a group of mobs where if one or more is killed, but others are alive when combat is reset, the dead mobs respawn. 

It turns out that most of the trash mobs actually meet this condition in Wrath-era raids. In Ulduar for example, the golems and iron dwarves in the antechamber of Ulduar all have this feature, as do many of the chamber overseers scattered throughout the complex. The patrolling flowers and other mobs in the Conservatory Of Life as well as the mechanical mobs in the Corridor Of Ingenuity. 

Probably the best trash packs in the raid are in the chamber with General Vezax. This has three packs in front of the boss.

How to best exploit the trash:

1. Kill all but one mob in the group.

2. Drop Combat. Wait for respawn.

3. Repeat.

In Ulduar and most other raids/dungeons where reset packs like this exist there is a countermeasure Blizzard seem to have put in place. After 6-10 resets some kind of lockout mechanism prevents the mobs from dropping further trash. So in Ulduar (though not necessarily other raids, see below) you cannot farm the same trash pack infinitely.  What you can do however is increase the returns from farming each pack by kill/reset until they drop no more loot-effectively increasing the total amount of gold before lockout from these packs by a factor of around 6x to 10x. 

How To Efficiently Reset 

By far the most efficient class to reset trash is the hunter with its feign death ability. Less well known is the hunter's pet has its own version of feign death, "play dead" which can be purchased from the class order hall (the item is the pet training manual). This means the player can attack  and use feign death to reset, then order his pet to attack while in feign death state and reset again. Packs can be reset in as little as 15 seconds, just using these two abilities.

Other classes with "drop combat" abilities such as vanish and invisibility can make use of trash resets but generally speaking because of the cooldowns cannot do this as efficiently.

An advanced method available to all classes is to use an evasion reset. A player who can access a normally inaccessible area near to a pack will cause the pack to evade which in turn causes them to reset. (A good example of this is the beam in the goblin foundry in the Deadmines-when you run onto it you can reset the two mobs which drop the Defias gear).

There are a number of additional ways to drop combat of course, the night elf racial shadowmeld is highly desirable, also items such as invisibility potions. Finally, in some situations it is desirable to kill the character through the use of pinchwhistle nitro fuel + cooking fire, death being probably the most hardcore method to reset trash. You will need a situation where you resurrect near the pack and will have to remove all durable gear from your character and bags. 

The item, Precious Bloodthorn Loop:

https://www.wowhead.com/item=113082/precious-bloodthorn-loop

 also has a drop combat on-use function which can be activated every ten minutes.

Soft Resets Of Reset Farms

After 30 minutes any trash you may have killed respawns, which means that if you have killed mobs in a trash pack so many times that they no longer yield loot, waiting 30 minutes will cause them to respawn and do so again. With a lot of alts you can actually this as a viable farming strategy in Ulduar. For example the trash outside Vezax can be farmed for a total of 280 golds worth of raw/vendorable items before they stop being lootable-if you can rotate this with other characters that is competitive with some of the best raw gold farms. 

Icecrown Citadel And The Infinite Reset Farm

Since mob mechanics tend to share commonalities throughout an expansion I checked the other major raid of the WOTLK expansion and it turns out that many trash packs here can be reset also. Particulary interesting is the fact that unlike Ulduar, packs here do not seem to have a reset limit. 

The best area I could was the two trash packs in front of Lady Deathwhisper - there did not seem to be any practical limit to the number of resets here, though it seems to be the case that the frequency of green drops decreases over time. This is probably the best method of farming frostweave cloth in the game. If you vendor all the items it is likely the best raw gold/vendor gold farm in the whole game that can be done on a continuous basis without lockout, maxing out at around a theoretical 8K an hour (this may not sound like much in absolute terms but it is exceptional for pure gold). This farm can be easily automated with nothing more complicated than one of the many free mouse recorders you can download for free through the internet.

There are other areas where packs can be reset such as the horde or alliance mobs fighting the frost wyrm on the second level of ICC or the mobs in front of the Blood Prince Council. 

Transmog Farming Potential

As experienced patreons know I have always been sceptical about the value of transmog farming since it can be difficult or impossible for players on small realms without using some form of automation such as the add-on trade skill manager to sell enough items. That said many do this profitably, and I think it is reasonable to discuss this provided everyone understands that large volumes of gear have to be posted regularly for this inventory to move. 

The basic trick here is to look at the drop tables on wowhead of a random mob you wish to reset farm and focus specifically on boe blue items which often sell for multiple thousands of gold, and with many mobs there will be at least one item which will sell for an average of 10,000 gold or more on the ah. Then focus on item which appears unusual or distinctive in some way, or could plausibly be used as part of a set with a theme. These items, when they sell, will usually do so for some sort of additional value.