Daily Quests
If you're at level 70, daily
quests are one of the fastest
and most reliable ways to fill
your coffers. At the moment,
there are a number of daily
quests which can be completed in
minutes and reward over 10 gold.
They're not all that quick, but
you can do up to 25 daily quests
each day, and most can be done
solo. Even if you do only half
your daily allotment, the gold
will add up quickly after
selling the loot you don't want.
Shattered Sun Offensive quests
tend to pay particularly well
right now, although they will
likely be surpassed by future
content.
Motes and Primals
Currently, another good way to
make gold at the level cap is to
farm Motes and Primals, which
are used in various kinds of
high-level crafting. 10 Motes
can be combined to make a
Primal, making Primals roughly
10 times as valuable as Motes.
There are 7 types of Motes:
Shadow, Earth, Water, Life, Mana,
Air and Fire.
Motes are only found in the Outland, but there are several ways to procure them. Some, like Motes of Shadow, drop from particular types of creatures, in this case Demons. As well as dropping from mobs, Motes of Earth and Life can be collected using the mining and herbalism skills respectively. Air and Fire are the rarest, and hence, most valuable Motes. All Air Elementals in Outland have a chance of dropping Motes of Air. Similarly, Motes of Fire come from Fire Elementals, but they can also be mined by players with sufficient mining skills.
Although there are quite a few places to find Motes in Outland, you might come across a lot of competition in some of the places with good drop rates, including "professional" gold farmers.
Gathering
Gathering skills are one of the
best ways for characters of any
level to make money. Mining,
skinning, and herbalism will
allow you to collect crafting
materials which can be sold on
the Auction House. Taking 2
gathering skills is probably
more profitable than having a
collecting and a crafting skill
at the lower levels. In many
cases, raw materials sell for
more than the items crafted from
them. The Gatherer add-on will
track resources on the mini-map
and the world map, allowing you
to revisit nodes you've
harvested before.
Disenchanting
The enchanting skill can also be
profitable, not so much because
you can enchant things, but
because you can disenchant them.
The materials that come from
disenchanting an item are
frequently more valuable than
the item itself. Another
approach is to buy cheap green
items on the Auction House,
disenchant them, and then
auction the resulting materials.
Crafting
While crafting skills generally
don't pay as well as gathering
skills, they all eventually
allow you to make blue or better
bind-on-equip items or powerful
consumables that are worth
considerable sums. The materials
to make them will also be quite
expensive, but you can offset
some of that cost by collecting
the materials yourself rather
than buying them. Do your
research before you craft the
item to ensure the item is worth
more than the materials.
Playing the Auction
House
Essentially, this amounts to the
age old practice of buying low
and selling high. The standard
interface doesn't give you much
information to determine what is
low and what is high. For this
purpose the Auctioneer UI add-on
is extremely helpful, as it
saves data on average starting
bid and buyout prices. It also
now includes Enchantrix, which
tells you what materials an item
is likely to yeild when
disenchanted, and roughly what
those materials are worth on the
Auction House. You'll need some
gold to get started, and of
course, the more people playing
the AH on your server, the more
difficult it will be to find
bargains.
