My Gold Income Over 30 Days, Patch 7.3 Edition

A couple of years ago, I conducted an experiment to determine the effectiveness of my gold farming habits by gathering information over 30 days. The results showed that even though the Warlords of Draenor expansion had been out for a little over half a year, I was able to make enough gold to pay for my WoW subscription for at least a couple years. I found that my style of performing simple daily tasks and selling excess items that were produced was extra effective due to how well the Garrison complemented that playstyle. Shortly after, a Q&A with Watcher and additional data reinforced this observation and much later, the effectiveness of farming the Garrison was nerfed by altering mission rewards and making Draenor materials somewhat obsolete with Legion's release.

The content design of Legion, among other factors, led to an adoption of pre-Warlords playing habits that were still simple daily tasks in a sense but generally more interactive and time-consuming. While this meant more effort had to be exerted compared to managing the Garrison, I personally enjoyed the game more. As a bonus, the activities I was doing were quite lucrative based on preliminary data I gathered months after the expansion's release. Over time, however, I became concerned about how lucrative Legion content was due to potential issues with adding to the hyperinflation of gold.

This led to a few days ago when I finished gathering data about my gold farming habits once again and thanks to a certain addon, I have a lot more information to analyze. In this article, I will describe the typical activities that contributed to my income and analyze the results.

My Activities

Since patch 7.3 had come out recently when I started gathering data, I was playing the game a little more than normal initially. However, available content was rapidly exhausted and what I spent my play time on became more routine to the point I can safely say that until the Antorus raid is available, I'll likely do something similar to what I was near the end of the data gathering session. The activities consisted of the following:

• Order Hall missions.
• Order Hall missions, much like their Garrison counterpart, benefit greatly from my style of daily play since I can consistently complete and start new missions on a regular basis. Over time, I noticed that Order Hall missions may actually be more rewarding than their predecessors though they require a bit more maintenance in the form of the more actively acquired Order Resources.
• The previous observation especially became apparent with the new Argus missions since missions generally seemed more rewarding, especially when it came to gold and Blood of Sargeras.
• Some additional information worth considering is I sent about 3 missions per character per day on average. This is pretty low considering the equipment available that can speed up mission time but I preferred to focus on success rate on longer missions to make my Order Resource usage more worthwhile. This method has the drawback of me unlocking Argus missions slower in addition to generating less income from missions overall.
• Completing Argus faction emissary quests.
• When Argus became available, I quickly identified a few items I would love to have on all of my characters that were available from the faction vendors. While the Krokul Mining Pick doesn't work properly on the Broken Isles for some reason and the Krokul Flute was hotfixed to provide an account-wide benefit, by then I had farmed so much reputation I reasoned that it was best to finish what I started.
• What the above point basically translates to is that on my 12 maxed characters I completed 4 Argus world quests each time an emissary quest became available, focusing on the most convenient ones to complete and out of those, I prioritized Order Resources and reputation tokens as rewards. Because of the equipment of some of my Combat Allies in addition to the vendor trash I acquired, I ended up making a fair amount of passive gold.
• Occasional farming sessions.
• In the past, I usually used daily profession cooldowns and rarely did any active farming of raw materials excluding leather. Over time, I ended up finding methods to farm raw materials and other goods that didn't involve the traditional method of node gathering that I found unenjoyable. For example, I aggressively farmed Pandaria rares because all of them could drop a small bag of reagents. In Warlords of Draenor, this consisted of using Garrison buildings such as the mines, herb garden, and barn. As a bonus, these methods were not that strenuous and in the case of the former, the activity was enjoyable to me.
• In this expansion, world quests consisted of my reagent gathering method for a while since quests generally consisted of very lucrative forms of node gathering. Aside from this, I always found the salvaging aspect of Skinning to be enjoyable so I found areas where I could occasionally massacre huge packs of skinnable mobs with impunity when I felt like it. 
• With the release of Argus, the holy grail of salvage farming was available in the form of mining Felfang Basilisk corpses. While I used routes I found online to actively farm some Empyrium, I often just camped an area with multiple spawns and did something else like watch Youtube or play Old School Runescape. Because of how well the ore sells, this became a major money spinner.
• Selling excess materials and other goods.
• When I gathered data a couple years ago, I found a lot of my gold came from selling off the excess items I earned from activities in the Garrison, especially from Savage Blood. I didn't seem to get as much in the way of surplus this time around but there was still a fair amount due to the aforementioned farming activities and items I gathered while doing World Quests and other activities.
• For example, I ended up increasing my already large supply of Blood of Sargeras mostly due to Argus Order Hall missions and the Bloodhunter shoulder enchant. I then traded these Bloods for expensive reagents which I then sold.
• In addition, I had many Armorcrafter's Commendations and some spare materials, so I occasionally made legendary gear to sell. I noted when I sold legendary gear in the album, which turned out to be four out of the five I made over the month.
• I also tried to do a couple minor flips such as a method that involved obliterating cheap items to produce Obliterum which I then sold. These were only moderately lucrative since I didn't invest much gold as I didn't want to risk the wealth I built using more consistent methods.
• Raiding.
• Over the whole data gathering session I raided twice a week. This probably didn't have too much of an impact on my gold since repair bills were covered by whatever I got from the bosses. However, raiding did impact how much time I could spend doing other activities that affected my gold more such as World Quests.

There are a few activities that weren't listed most because I considered them to be such a minor part of my play time that I believe they had minimal impact on the gold I made. If there's a demand to break down activities in more detail or inquiries about the nature of the activities I listed above, I'm open to providing more in-depth descriptions.

Analyzing the Results

Shown above is the numerical info taken from the Altoholic and Accountant Classic addons respectively. The former is of limited use and only really shows that my Warrior bank alt, which I did all of my auctioning on, made a lot of the gold. Meanwhile, my other characters mostly produced gold from Order Hall missions. While I only got a portion of the income data in the latter picture, the breakdown is a lot more helpful if a little inaccurate. Based on the Accountant Classic info, I was able to derive the following information:

• I believe the Order Hall mission data is accurate since it seems to match up with the Altoholic data well. If this is the case, missions accounted for a substantial amount of my income at roughly 20% based on only what Accountant is showing. However, I believe this number is closer to 25% since I didn't gather over a week's worth of data with the addon and any mission gold made then would be rolled into the Unknown category.
• Questing made an underwhelming amount of gold. While some of the merchant and loot income would be produced due to questing, this activity seems to account for about 5% of my income.
• Auctions, as expected, made up the lion's share of my income. The amount I made off of auctions is roughly equal to that of the Auctions and Mail category since for some reason the addon doesn't properly determine gold I got in the mail was due to a successful auction. When ignoring the Unknown category, this means Auctions made about 70% of my gold.
• Breaking this down, about 360,000 gold from the auctions is from legendary gear, meaning the remainder of the gold mostly came from raw material such as the Empyrium I farmed.

Based on the information above, it seems that much like in Warlords of Draenor, a lot of gold I made came from diligence in activities that provided consistent rewards I could sell to other players. Unlike before, while the activities I did were well within the parameters of "simple daily tasks," I had to exert a bit more effort than before. Were I to exert a lot more effort, I could easily have made far more gold but I feel that would come at the expense of my enjoyment of the game.

Furthermore, I think I may have been right about Legion content contributing too much to the inflation of gold since Order Hall missions rewards, which produce gold from thin air, are concerning in themselves. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the gold made from these missions were far more than that of Garrison (and shipyard) missions. On the plus side, I won't have to worry about my WoW subscription for a while if I just do Order Hall missions. I expect they will be nerfed by the end of the expansion.

Final Statements

This concludes the presentation and analysis of my recent gold income that I think is fairly representative of the amount I'll make for some time to come. While I can only pay for a little over a year's sub time each month, which is less than I was capable of in Warlords of Draenor, I have more shopping options since I can buy Battle.net Balance directly. Based on the information above, I'm confident that anyone who managed to at least set up a few Order Halls that can consistently complete gold reward missions can at least maintain their subscription. If anyone wants some advice though, I'd be happy to offer some tips and point you to some resources such as the woweconomy subreddit.