WoW TBC Classic, Powerful Mage Exploit Gold Farming Method For Vanilla Instances (Patreon)

Most youtube videos and discussion of mage gold-farming focus on a strategy based around slowing/freezing multiple mobs with Blizzard.  For expert players this works very in TBC dungeons.

However, a different approach is to focus on lower-level dungeons (eg Stratholme), as these can be farmed much more easily but with comparable gold per hour returns. 

The following exploit method will allow you to kill lower-level mobs quickly and efficiently. 

1. Have a spec with the fire talent tree's "combustion" ability.

2.Get an add-on which allows you to change gear sets instantly, I use "Equipment Sets". 

3. Strip your character naked. 

4. Attack  a large number of mobs* using an aoe ability (ie blast wave or flame strike).*

5. This should gain you multiple stacks of combustion. 

6. Re-equip your gear and kill multiple mobs with your enhanced combustion.

You should now be able to cast flamestrike/blast wave with a guaranteed or close to guaranteed critical strike up to three times consecutively. Combined with other cooldowns this should kill anything except bosses in legacy content, and is a very effective method of farming efficiently.

This does not generally work with tbc dungeon content-mobs have high health pools there. It excels in lower-level content because of the reduced health pools of the mobs and the speed with which this approach can kill them.

This approach can be done with a frost/arcane build for an instant flamestrike. Instant flamestrike plus blast wave is a very effective area of effect combination. 

Alternatively you can use a frost/fire build and use blizzard chilling/freeze effects to keep mobs within the radius of the flamestrike's damage over time effect. This also allows you to fall back to a blizzard-based farming approach, if steps 1-5 do not produce enough stacks of combustion (which will happen occassionally due to rng). 

Finally, it is worth pointing out that you will have a lot of looting to do, it is highly recommended you have some kind of mouseover add-on to target corpses and use the add-on "faster loot" to pick up everything quickly.

* Doing this is somewhat situational. It can be done

a) outside a dungeon against relatively harmless world mobs.

b) against mobs within a dungeon near the entrance using the instant portal to escape.

c) on special mobs such as the rats in Stratholme which appear when you go through a portcullis. (The rats re-spawn after a few minutes)