How To Make Enough Gold to Purchase WoW Tokens

Want to pay for your Warcraft subscription with minimal time and effort? In-game Warcraft gold can now be exchanged for game time in one month increments. When this system was first announced, I was positive I’d be there with my wallet open, ready to shell out twenty bucks for a mountain of gold. When the initial cost of gold was pegged by Blizzard, I thought the price- 30,000 gold for one month of gameplay- was laughably low, and was surprised when it dropped lower still. I hadn’t stockpiled any gold or even been particularly frugal in the weeks leading up to the WoW Token release, assuming that I’d be on the buying end when it came to tokens. With prices hovering between 20,000 to 24,000 gold for a month of game play, though, I quickly changed from a gold buyer to a gold seller. Everyone has their own methods of making gold, but I’m not an Auction House hawk; I prefer to make money solo and at my own pace. I’ve been able to make about 20,000 gold every three or four days, which has bought me a year of Warcraft so far. To make that amount, I rely most heavily on Garrison Treasure Hunters, followed by Salvage Yard sale, and rounded out by the odd Auction House sale. If you’re just trying to get enough cash to pay for your subscription, well- this is how I do it. Bon chance! Programming Note: As of 5/10/2015, you may purchase ten in-game tickets per week on any single account. At any given time, you may have a maximum of ten tokens in your backpack, or you won’t be able to purchase additional tokens. Instead, you’ll get the in-game Warcraft error message ‘You have too many of that item already’.

I was getting the error message when I tried to purchase my eleventh token- I hadn’t ‘used’ any of them so far, as I was trying to hoard my tokens in my backpack for screenshots- and that was the response I got from submitting a ticket.

 

Extremely Thorough Research Mode was activated for this blog post

Activating the Right Garrison Buildings

Your primary goal will be to train followers, recruit followers with the Treasure Hunter trait, and gear all of your followers as quickly as possible. To that end, you’re best served by building and leveling up the Inn, the Bunker, the Salvage Yard, and the Trading Post, all to better serve your Treasure Hunters on their missions. For the Glory of Ah- Treasure Hunters!

Add-on Required: Master Plan

The Inn

In order to recruit new followers, you must have a level 2 Inn. You will always want to choose Traits > Treasure Hunter from the dropdown menu, and of your recruits, always take the Rare (blue) recruit if there is one. When you’re able to expand to a Level 3 Inn, you’ll get much better Treasure Hunter missions in your Garrison with rewards of 250+ gold (which, if you’ve been zealous about recruiting Treasure Hunters, you can easily turn into north of 1,000 gold).

Minimum: Level 2, to recruit followers Optimal: Level 3, to unlock Treasure Hunter missions

The Bunker

The Bunker lets you exchange Garrison Resources for follower upgrade tokens. You need to gear up your level 100 followers as quickly as possible, and upgrade tokens accumulate v.e.r.y s.l.o.w.l.y.

Minimum: Level 2, to turn Garrison Resources into follower upgrade tokens Optimal: Level 3, to get a daily quest for a weapon or armor upgrade token

The Salvage Yard

The Salvage Yard gives you a chance to get a bag of salvage when your followers return from a mission. Generally you get junk which you can sell for a hefty whack of gold, but you also have a chance to get follower upgrade tokens and every now and then, some fantastic transmog or upgrade piece that will sell for thousands on the Auction House. Building the Salvage Yard requires completing a quest series in Spires of Arak.

Minimum: Level 1, which just allows you to get any loot at all Optimal: Level 3, which returns the best loot from the bags

Add-on Required: AuctioneerAdd-on Required: Crap Away!

The Trading Post

Especially if you are just leveling or have leveled recently, you’ll need many more Garrison Resources than you have access to in the world and by waiting for your Garrison Cache to be replenished. Even after you have paid out all the Garrison Resouces you need to build all the buildings, the Bunker will continue to soak up resources at a regular pace. I recommend building the Trading Post as soon as you are able.

Minimum: Level 1, to process Garrison ResourcesOptimal: Does not need to be expanded unless you would like to process more Garrison Resource work orders at once

The Auction House

If you’re like me, you don’t want to juggle hundreds of auctions on the AH; you just want to have a system in place to sell the rares that pop up from your Salvage Yard, or the occasional battle pet you get doubles of. I have a dedicated banker who lives in Stormwind. Especially if you have a lot of alts, it’s easier to mail all high-return Salvage Yard drops to one character to keep up with. To know what’s trash and what isn’t when I open up my salvage bags, I use the Auctioneer add-on. When I hover over the item, I get a suggested Auction House price. If it sells for more than 200 gold, I auction it. If it sells for less, I sell it to a vendor. I also use my banker to keep up with my cash flow. I have eight alts with a level 2 Garrison, and six who are level 100. They generate a lot of cash, so every day or so all of my alts mail all of their cash- minus 200 gold for operating expenses and to keep their spirits up- to my banker character. That also helps me keep up with how much money each alt is making in general, since I know that anything over 200 is their profit over the last day or so. Be sure to buy your tokens when they are at the price minimum. Prices fluctuate about 4,000 gold over the course of the day, so follow WoWTokens on Twitter and wait until you see the price floor before shelling out your hard-earned gold.

Add-on Required: Auctioneer Add-on required: Postal

Additional Ways to Get Cheap Gold

If you want to get still more cash and you have a little time on your hands, run old raids for a chance at pet drops. They have the benefit of selling for a good price on the Auction House and simultaneously of costing very little to post (the exact reason why selling weapons on the Auction House is a fool’s game!). Another great way of making more money is to have more alts. It may seem obvious, but for every level 2+ Garrison owner you have, you’re going to be able to crank out double the Treasure Hunters, double the Salvage trash, and double the cash. Some alts, too, just seem to get lucky; my monk always gets the best Treasure Hunter missions and rare drops, even though I loathe him with a passion. Stupid gnome!

Have a Lot of Alts

The more alts you have with a Garrison, the more Treasure Hunters you can have, the more likely you are to get lucrative missions, and the more missions you’re able to complete in total. If you can stomach it, get all the alts you can into a Level 2 Garrison at the least. The most effective alts have a Level 2 Inn to recruit new Treasure Hunter followers. For each level 100 alt I have, I make about 1,500 gold a day.

And So:

You can rake in a lot of cash with your alt Garrison farming army, without logging in for very much game time at all. The more alts you have, the better off you are. The more Treasure Hunters you can recruit, train, and gear, the more money you’ll rake in at the end of the day. Good luck in funding your own Warcraft token adventure!