How Do I Make Gold With Exploits? (Patreon)

So we've had a rush of new patreons recently (Welcome to all)! Normally I try to answer every question I get which is becoming very difficult. There is one recurring question I get which is something like this:

There are lots of gold-making methods in your patreon. Where do I start? Can you give me some guidance? 

Answering this question is not as simple as it might seem because in practice most people don't want to or can't do certain things regardless of how profitable they are. 

For example the single most profitable thing you can do normally is master Trade Skill Manager and use flipping/cross realm arbitrage to make millions of gold daily with multiple accounts. But less than 1% of the wow population has the time, inclination, equipment and money to invest to do that. Boosting other players is also one of the best options in terms of gold per hour but is a highly skilled and stressful activity most would prefer to avoid. 

Let's look at some of the options before we get into using exploits:

1. Raw Gold Farms. This is one of the worst ways to make gold in terms of time invested but extremely popular because of its ease and simplicity. Most gold farms generally tap out below 10K. For this reason I do not consider it Patreon-level content, so most of the best ways to do this I've come up with are public on youtube. Occasionally some trick appears which exceeds this but not often-the last major exploit was the rogue class trial pickpocket quest which was about 50K an hour, but that was back in Legion. 

2. Profession Farming. Generally the basic strategy (ie the most effective simple strategy) is to go out into whatever is current content, mine ore and gather herbs. Generally speaking this is slightly more profitable than raw gold farming. In BFA at this time this is less true than normally due to unprecedented deflation.

3. Transmog Farming. This is a very controversial strategy because in theory you can go into legacy dungeons you can acquire old weapons/armor that cumulatively sell on average for over a hundred thousand gold per hour. In practice however these items can take months to sell. 

4. Production Professions. This is considered to be one of the best all-round ways to make gold because it is accessible with few barriers to entry and generally more profitable than 1. and 2. 

5. Boosting. Very profitable. Generally speaking at least ten times more profitable than most standard forms of gold-farming. Not that popular a method because it requires a lot of preparation, and can be quite stressful involving quite a lot of social interaction.

6. Playing The Auction House. This is a very profitable way to make gold. In fact with multiple characters/accountants over multiple realms, it beats everything. There are people making millions of gold daily using advanced trading methods. 

Bearing in mind most players will want to do all, none or a little of these things I'd recommend the following very rough guide to exploiting these areas:

1. "Cloning"

 Many things which are very profitable in wow are time-gated per character. So the first thing to do is use class trials and/or other exploit method (such as creating multiple demon hunters on the same realm) to create many characters who can use time-gated methods. For want of a better expression I'm going to call this "cloning".

The following link is to the best method to do this at this time:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/33595884 

(This is still very profitable for me, though on realms where anchor weed is of lesser value it may not be). 

Note that there are many other ways to use cloning strategies. By far the easiest and straightforward is to use  transmutes from the alchemy profession. Rather than list all the transmutes are and whether it is worthwhile to use them it is better to simply check the price of the item relative to what it would be transmuted into and do it if there is a reasonably large positive difference. (You may also want to take sales volume into consideration. )

For example take the Burning Crusade transmute: Primal Earth To Water. Primal earth is worth about 120 Gold right now, primal water sells for 480 Gold. So a transmute which can be performed in seconds nets a profit of 360 gold. If you have 5 class trial character which can perform this transmute that's potentially 1800 gold for just over a minute's work each day after set-up. 

Cloning is not limited to alchemy, for example one of the strongest strategies historically was for engineers making Jard's Peculiar Energy Source. Note that cloning is a little harder to pull of nowadays since class trials are only allowed 3 hours of game time before being locked.

2. Phase Exploits

The basic method of exploit gold-farming is to use phase exploits while gathering. Phase exploits are techniques which manipulate a zone in order to make it easier to farm. Here are some examples of phase exploits:

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/19760421  

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/23909327 

 https://www.patreon.com/posts/14112132  

These tricks allow you avoid interactions with players/npc's in a variety of ways. This reduces the process of gathering to simply flying around picking herbs and mining nodes. This is a VERY powerful technique early in an expansion/patch, especially for under-geared players, when npc mobs tend to significantly slow players at the time when basic materials are in high demand before and during the period when raiding takes place in earnest. This is less valuable towards the end of an expansion but always a significant source of extra income. 

3. Transmog Farming

This is an area where those who exploits have a massive advantage over those who don't. For example with phasing exploits you can gather materials 20-100% more efficiently than a regular player on average. For many legacy farming exploits it could easily be over 500%! For example take this exploit:  https://www.patreon.com/posts/26164770 . There is just no real non-exploit method to farm the Butcher, you have to simply kill all the mobs around the Scarlet Monstery and wait for them to re-spawn, it takes an eternity. With the exploit it becomes much more attainable with instant multiple re-spawn. 

Now a lot of players were put off the concept of transmog farming by absurd and inflated clickbait titles of videos on youtube , to the extent that it is virtually impossible to discuss the subject rationally nowadays. That said the concept does have significant value. You do not have to sell that many high-priced item within a reasonable timeframe for 5-6 figures before this begins to dwarf the earnings of other types of farming. 

Problems are caused mainly by keeping too many items causing inventory issues-in truth relatively few items are interesting and you should restrict your farms to big ticket items. 

Players should pick an exploit farm at random from the archives for this type of farming: this is important. 

If you try and use your own judgement then it is likely you will be influenced by groupthink and farm items that everyone else is farming which then become worth less. For some time players focused on vanilla and bc items to the exclusion of later expansions. This led to a massive drop in the average value of those items and a rise in the value of post-wotlk transmog. (This is why I haven't linked to the relevant articles in this section, that could cause people to focus on the same farms)

Note it is essential to have a max-level hunter to do transmog farms since feign death is such an integral part of exploiting transmog farms. Start with this article here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/16010161 

Finally, remember that posting multiple big ticket items reduces the value of each. Only ever put one valuable item up at a time and preferably with no other competition. 

4.  Scrying. Scrying is a technique used to remotely ascertain the location of valuable resources in wow eg https://www.patreon.com/posts/22617986 . Scrying is unusual in that it can be simply a clever use of game mechanics (when used with a class ability such as far sight) or something Blizzard would take potentially very seriously when used with a hacking program such as Easy WoW toolbox. 

Scrying is almost by definition more profitable than most other strategies since it allows players to farm resources faster than doing so purely through character movement. 

This article contains a scrying method to farm the most valuable ore in the game  https://www.patreon.com/posts/19354807 , it is one of the most important things I've written on this patreon. This specific technique is somewhat counter-intuitive-mainly players struggle with the notion of hitting instance lockout before finding a valuable node-in fact that is precisely why it is so profitable.

5. Boosting For various reasons few patreons will want to do this-it is a high pressure, high skill level technique that requires a lot of micro-management. That said you can charge significantly more than you could for any raw gold farm, by an order of magnitude. Note that there are methods here which can level up players very quickly and are perfect for boosting, such as  https://www.patreon.com/posts/33133831 .

6. Speculation. This covers pure Auction House trading strategies such as flipping. Because this involves high-level automation and generally multiple characters and accounts, it is not something I generally cover specifically, since less than 1% of the wow population has the cash and time to do it on a grand scale. That said, there are trading strategies such as this one which are more accessible: https://www.patreon.com/posts/24175026 .

These suggestions are not even close to being a comprehensive guide, there is a lot more valuable content associated with gold-making in the archive. I'm in the process of creating a definitive guide, where I'm literally working out exactly how much gold per minute I'm making and ranking everything in precise order-but that is incredibly ambitious a project and will take months. Hopefully this article will suffice for the time being and give newer patreons something to work from.