by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Thinking about buying yourself some subscription time by purchasing a WoW token with gold but don’t have the funds? Or maybe want to save yourself the $20 USD it would cost to buy some legit gold without becoming an AH goblin? Here are some suggestions on how you can make your garrison work for you.

While it’ll definitely take a bit of time to go from zero to “I log in for ten minutes a day and my sub pays for itself” you’ll definitely be able to make a bunch of gold while you wait for token prices to stop fluctuating.

The short, short version of this strategy? Use follower missions to generate gold passively. There are a couple other passive tricks that go along with that, but we’ll get there in a moment.

To get started, you want at least one max-level character with a level 3 garrison. It also helps if you’ve got an addon that helps speed up follower management; Master Plan is a great option for this, since it lets you skip the mission success/failure and chest-opening animations.

Best Small Buildings

• Gem Boutique: With a follower assigned, the daily quest you get consumes some of your ore and gives you ~250g per day for nothing. Remember: you don’t need to have Jewelcrafting as a profession to have this building.
• Salvage Yard: While most of what you get out of salvage will be vendor trash, you’re getting a LOT of vendor trash, especially if you’re not DEing greens/blues for Draenic Dust. If you luck out and get a BoE piece that sells for good money to an xmog enthusiast, then that’s just found money.

Best Medium Building

• Inn/Tavern: There are two reasons why you want an Inn if you’re looking to make gold.
  • With a level 2 building, you can hire followers with the Treasure Hunter trait, since that amps up gold returns on follower missions.
  • With a level 3 building, you unlock Treasure Hunter missions, which exclusively reward gold amounts ranging from 30g-150g. Combine these two factors together and you could easily hit 500-1000g per day just from follower missions.
  • Protip: upgrading an inn to level 3 for the first time on a character will reset the cooldown on hiring a follower, so you can get two in your first week.

Best Large Buildings

• Barracks: More followers means more follower missions completed more quickly.
• Bunker/War Mill: Dumping your Garrison Resources into follower upgrades (and consequently your Iron Horde Scraps into upgrade tokens) will help with leveling up all those new Treasure Hunter followers from your Inn. Once you don’t have any more followers left to level, the upgrade tokens sell for decent gold (which also helps with the Salvage Yard producing token as well).

Best Mine/Herb Garden Practices

• If you’ve got to choose between whether to clear your mine or your herb garden, choose the mine. Ore is more easily turned directly into gold thanks to the Gem Boutique daily. However, if you want to clear the Herb Garden (you will occasionally need Fireweed after all) then you’ll want Gorepetal’s Gentle Grasp.*
• Best way to clear a level 3 mine in under 2 minutes:
  • Have a Peon’s Mining Pick in your bag.*
  • Drink 2-3 Miner’s Coffee (which you’ll recoup from mining carts).
  • Use a Preserved Mining Pick.
  • If you’ve got a movement speed increase, whether as a racial or a spell, use it when you’ve cleared a wing of the mine to increase your speed in getting to the next wing or the exit.
  • (*) If you destroyed, sold, or DE’d either of these unique items, try using the Item Restoration Service or submitting a ticket.
• Always, ALWAYS have a follower with the Mining trait assigned to your mine to increase work order returns. Lantresor of the Blade is guaranteed to have it if none of your other followers rolled it. Also, he starts at level 99 and will level as you complete mine work orders, so he’ll hit 100 in no time at all.

It’s notable that these strategies work well across multiple characters, especially when it comes to ore generation so that you’re always able to keep up with the Jewelcrafting daily. With an addon like Master Plan to help you speed things up, you can be in and out of managing your followers in under a minute. While you could choose to log in multiple times per day to keep your followers running, you don’t need to do that in order to get a decent return.

What’s your favorite method for making gold now that it’s got a (somewhat shaky) real-world value to it? Let us know in the comments.