Last night I joined an Elite Club...
Always believe in your soul You've got the power to know You're indestructible Always believe in, because you are Gold
This has been something on my WoW wish-list for nigh on 10 years since I began playing in vanilla, quit, then finally picked up again in Wrath. I've played continuously since March 2009, without a break, even all through the long tiers of ICC, DS, Siege and HFC thus far, and until Warlords, it never looked as though it would ever be an attainable goal.
I hit the gold cap
I came into Warlords with a then-massive (to me at least) 50,000 gold. Little did I, or anyone else playing at the time, realise just how integral our garrisons would become in increasing that total over time...
The elephant in the room.
Did I buy tokens?
Sure, I bought 4 when they first came out, and that got me 240,000g, but I spent that and more before I bought any further tokens. In fact I bought another 2, one of which bought my Hunter her stage 6 crafted gun with her perfect stats (plus a little extra was needed - 60k token vs 84k gun cost), and the final one was mainly swallowed by buying crafted gear for my Priest. Both characters still use all that crafted gear to this day, and in the case of the Hunter's Rifle, bought nearly a year ago, I'd say I got value for money :D
So, whilst I did buy 6 tokens over the past year, in actual fact they had very little to do with me hitting the gold cap.
In fact all they actually did was allow me to splurge on gear & pets somewhat without hurting my ongoing total gold level. I have an Ethereal Soul Trader, a Crawling Claw and a Spectral Tiger Cub I wouldn't otherwise have had :D
So what did get me gold capped?
Well, in December, I bought 3 cheap Minions of Grumpus, for less than 60k each, and that brought me down to about 500,000g. I've held onto them for the past 5 months, and over the past 10 days I've sold them all for a healthy 20-25k profit per mount.
I've also flipped some other mounts, such as the Reins of the Crimson Deathcharger, for another 20k or so profit, spare Coalfist Gronnlings for 1k a piece etc. But the majority of what's got me to the gold cap came from my Garrisons.
This came mainly through passive income, boosted by having 25 followers, most of which have the Treasure Hunter trait. This means my 3 garrisons at this stage are generating somewhere around 20k per week passively for me overall.
Throw in on top of that the ability to sell the things you get from Garrison missions, such as:
- Champion's Honor (1,000 Honor & Conquest Points when you use it) for 12k gold a throw
- 1k rep-boosting Medallions of the Legion for 4k gold a pop
- Huge Ogre Caches of garrison resources for 1.5k gold
Not to forget of course having 3 level 3 salvage yards, generating BoEs and resources like herbs & ore, most of which just gets straight vendored.
I'd much rather sell them on the AH, but Kilrogg isn't much of a server for sales of green items for transmog unfortunately.
Tips to get gold-capped
So what tips would I give to anyone getting close to the gold cap, or those starting out to try to maximise their gold income before Legion raises the gold cap to 10 million gold?
- Level 3 Garrisons - The most important part of all!
- Level 3 Salvage Yard for the Large Salvage Crates*
- Level 3 Shipyard for gold missions
- Level 3 Inn for more Treasure Missions
- Level 3 Barracks for 25 followers
- Make most of them if not all, Treasure Hunters
- Run Kazzak every lockout on any char you can for the Felblight. Then AH it.
- Run 25m Heroic Cataclysm raids for a 2,000-2,500 gold bump per raid per char. Got 3 chars like me? 22.5k easy gold per week right there.
- Keep an eagle eye out for cheaply sold mounts & pets, then flip them for free gold.
- Crafted gear, but only stages 5 or 6 sell for decent gold atm
- Sell all the Medallions of the Legion and Champion's Honor you can get through the garrison missions. Or pick em up cheap and flip em - I made a 5k profit in 1 hour doing exactly this when someone AH'd one for 5k under the average price.
*By all means test out your server AH for reception to auctioning the BoEs, but be prepared to be disappointed to find a lot of expired sales. And depending on how much the AH cost is, it may not be economical to put it up there more than once.
And the last sale I made that put me over the gold cap? My final Minion of Grumpus, which put me 58k over the gold cap account wide. I couldn't accept the gold on my priest until I mailed some to my Hunter, because the game wouldn't let me pick it up from my mailbox
So I celebrated by making myself the Depleted Kyparium Rocket in the article header, a mount I've wanted for ages. Even had to switch from Gnome to Goblin Engineering in order to do so. It cost me 66k to make, which brought me 8k gold back down below the gold cap account wide, but I'll make that back before tomorrow's out
Bring on that new 10m gold cap Legion!
https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/status/724773899385208832
Watch the price of a heroic raid clear in Legion suddenly sky-rocket above 1 million gold...
I'm really happy to count myself among the small percentage in WoW who are able to call themselves a WoW Millionaire. I never thought I'd get here, but if Warlords has been good for only one thing?
Gold.