Can You Make Gold At Low Levels? My Results From Level 1-49

In preparation for the launch of Legion I've been working on a project to build the character I'm planning to give my free level 100 boost to.

I already have 14 level 100s so it wasn't necessarily an easy choice as to who to give the boost to. I already have a level 100 of every class and an extra 100 Hunter, Paladin, and Warlock (invasion XP was too much to resist leveling a few extra 90s I had laying around).

I settled on making a human female Warrior and leveling her to 60 and giving her professions so that when she was boosted to level 100 her professions would be leveled up automatically as well.

Sometimes I like to give my characters unique constraints (remember my "One Month, One Toon" Challenge?). For this Warrior I decided to level her "old school"-style. No Heirlooms, no mount until level 40, and no addons. As a fun side-project I wanted to know how much gold could a character like this make. Read on for more.

Running. So. Much. Running.

First off I have to say that not getting a mount until level 40 (like it was back in Vanilla) was painful. Most of the pain came from having to run everywhere on foot. I felt like the time was just dragging by as I ran and ran and ran.

On a positive side note all that running gave me time to look at all the scenery as well as time for me to daydream and ponder the meaning of life.

But it wasn't fun and as soon as I hit level 40 I note only got riding but I got epic riding (which I guess if I was being truly "old school" I wouldn't have gotten until 60). Boy did that make things start to speed up. I felt like the wind was shipping through my hair and the world seemed to go by in a blur.

Make That Money

One of the old habits that I had when leveling in the old days was to have a bank toon that I would send all of my items to that I got as drops for them to sell on the auction house. This habit was my first real way of making gold.

While leveling sending these items to a bank toon was also necessary because bag space was so limited. Every so often your bags would be full and sending items to bank toons was a way to clear space.

I decided that while my Warrior wasn't going to use any addons I could sell the items that I got while leveling on an alt since that was definitely something that I did back in the day.

So I had one of my alts act as her bank toon and worked on selling all the item that she was sent on the auction house. When items would sell she would then send the gold back to my Warrior.

Bringing A Cannon To a Knife Fight

One of the big differences that between me doing this send, sell routine back in the day and now is that the tools available to make gold selling items on the auction house are far far more advanced and powerful then they were back in the day.

Back then all I had was Auctioneer. I'd have my bag of items that I wanted to sell and I'd have Auctioneer scan the auction house for those items and I'd base my prices on what ever everyone else was selling them for.

That is if there was another item being sold. If there wasn't another similar item being sold I would just have to guess on what I wanted to sell the item for.

The tools were fairly crude and Auctioneer works virtually the same today as when I was using it back in 2006.

In fact looking for a better way to sell glyphs than what Auctioneer offered in Wrath of the Lich King was what got me to find out about Quick Auctions 3 (which has a bit of shared lineage with what would eventually become TradeSkillMaster) and gold-making blogs in general.

Today we have TradeSkillMaster that, with just a fairly basic setup, provides a much more powerful set of tools. It isn't even close. If you asked me to go back to using Auctioneer I'm sure I could make it work but there is so much that addons like TradeSkillMaster and The Undermine Journal Addon offer especially in the way of pricing history and pricing sources available from outside your realm and/or historical data about your realm.

The Method

For this experiment in addition to selling all the item drops I got while leveling I was also mining and doing a bit of leveling of Blacksmithing (before I ran out of mats and stopped leveling Blacksmithing altogether).

(I don't think that you have to have your professions leveled to any particular level, only be level 60 and have professions. I hope that's the way it works at least.)

In addition to selling the green (and a few blue) drops I got I also ended up selling some white items I created with my early Blacksmithing patterns as well as some grey items that looked cool (hats, chests, bloody cleavers, etc), and various profession patterns and recipes I would find being sold by various NPCs.

I'll be going into a bit more detail but the short version of what I think brought in the most money were transmog items and ore, stone and cloth I collected while leveling and mining (there are tons of nodes in Stanglethorn Vale. Tons.).

The Results

So, how much gold can you make if you're leveling (slowly) from level 1 to 49? (Yes, I still have 11 more levels to go but I'm feeling a bit burnt out on her just getting to 49 and Legion comes out tomorrow.) The answer is just over 5,601g. Not too shabby.




Now I did spend a bit of the gold she got on 4 Netherweave Bags which were about 20g each (those small starter bags were killing me). I also transmogged her a couple of times which was somewhere around 9g for a full transmog but other than that she didn't really spend any gold.

If you would have asked me how much gold I would make by selling greens and ore collected on a level 1-49 I would have guessed maybe 1000g. But over 5000 gold? That was a surprise.

The power and ease of TradeSkillMaster made selling the items brain-dead simple.

GPH?

So just for fun I decided to see how long it took this character to get to level 49 doing it "old school"-style. Answer?


Almost 28 hours. So if we do the math and she's made 5601 and been leveling for 28 hours that would make her sweet sweet GPH (gold-per-hour) at a whopping 200g/hour.

That may seem like peanuts if you're a high-powered gold-maker but if you'd have told me that I'll be making 200g every hour I was leveling my girl from 1-49 I'd have thought you were crazy.

But there it is. And while your results very much will vary it is still cool to think about a low level making that kind of money by simply leveling and mining and selling all the drops on the AH.

What Sold?

Here is one of my latest mailbox pulls (her items are still selling as we speak):



Here you can see a good mix of ore, cloth, and a couple of transmog items selling. Bringing in 2200 gold in one AH pull doesn't even happen sometimes on my normal transmog seller.

Here is a bit more detailed history of items that my bank toon has sold on behalf of my Warrior in the last 7 days sorted by highest selling price first:


In the above image we can see that ore, especially Silver Ore which I believe has a chance to spawn in place of Tin Ore nodes was selling often above 22g per ore. You can also see Silk Cloth selling for almost 3g a piece and many of the top selling transmog items were selling upwards of 500g at the top end with many going above 100g.

A Note On Mining

I think I vaguely remember reading something about them changing the node system so that the same node could be mined/herbed by up to 5 players (which would avoid players "stealing" other player's nodes) but I can't remember where I read it and if that is how the system works but at least a couple of times I was able to mine a node I had just seen someone else mine and vice-versa.

This new system was all that I could think of when I was seeing so many mining nodes in Stranglethorn Vale. I was stopping so to mine nodes that I eventually had to stop tracking minerals so it would stop slowing my leveling by spending so much time mining.

I saw many many more nodes than I would have ever seen back in the old days and I wonder if some new system change that Blizzard did was to blame for all those nodes.

I'm not complaining as I just got done explaining that Silver Ore was selling for 22g for one ore but it was something that stuck out in my mind.

The other thing that I was amazed at was the prices that people were selling profession patterns and recipes you can purchase from various NPCs around the world. I know people like Faid have made a habit in the past of selling these patterns but I was amazed that something so (relatively) easy to acquire would be selling for so much. (That said, I didn't really sell that many but at those prices it only takes a few.)

Another thing I was surprised at was that white and grey items were selling, particularity white items. I think I'd assumed that white items weren't very valuable because they can't be used for transmog but I ended up selling quite a few including early Blacksmithing items I didn't think would sell at all.

Conclusion

So in closing I think that the experiment was a success. Yes. A character armed with modern-day gold-making addons and tools can make quite a bit of gold even if all they are selling is the items that drop for them and the items the mine.

Leveling in an "old-school" way, while slow and sometime tedious did give me an appreciation for not only the quiet moments and reflection that taking things at a lower pace can give you but also helps me appreciate all the ways that Blizzard has changed the game to make leveling a faster and more enjoyable experience.

Things like mounts at level 20, heirlooms, and the Looking for Dungeon tool make getting through those lower levels quite a bit faster.

But I think there is something lost when you level by only sitting in the city queuing for LFD or blaze through zones out-leveling them quickly because of heirlooms not to mention the fact that heirlooms often make you a bit over-powered for the content and therefore make it so you never feel any danger.

I'm not saying we  should go back to Vanilla-speed leveling but there was something about spending hours and hours there with your character that really made you connect with them and I'm happy that I've spent this time leveling this Warrior even though she is only level 49.

I feel I've learned (or re-learned) more about the Warrior class in these last 49 levels than I've learned about the class in the last fe years.

And I made over 5000 gold while doing it. (And I still have 11 more levels to go).

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