20 Days of Gold Making (Day 10) - My Farming Theory

This entry is part of a series of gold making posts answering the questions in the 20 Days of Gold Making Challenge started by Nev over at Auction House Addict.  If you also blog, then be sure to check out the gold blogging challenge for post topic ideas.

20 Days Of Gold Making - Day 10

Do You Farm Materials?  What, Where & Why?

Do I farm on my World of Warcraft characters?  Yes & No.  Do I spend time running around farming for raw materials alone?  Never.  Farming as a primary objective is almost never worth the time investment that is required.  I do however still collect raw materials while out and about in the World of Warcraft, but it's not farming in the true sense of the word.

Crafter / Gatherer Alt Combos

I still level each and every alternate character to unlock the ability to craft within every profession.  I do this in order to have greater diversity and flexibility within the auction house markets.  I still stick with the old-school way of thinking and have a gathering profession paired with each crafting profession.  Since none of my alternate characters are just "stand in town and do nothing but craft" type of characters, I don't have double crafting professions on any character except my Tailor / Enchanter.  Nowadays, Tailoring is also a gathering profession after the inclusion of the Northrend Scavenging bonus.
Since each of my characters are out in the world leveling up and doing dailies for reputation grinds to unlock recipes, I have a gathering profession on each and every one.  I don't go out of my way to farm materials, but I also hate running past materials that are right there free for the taking.  So each character of mine will be able to grab up the ore, herbs, or skins that present themselves within my already chosen path.  If I'm questing and leveling a character up, the nearby raw materials take hardly no extra time to grab and provide the leveling alt with experience as well.  So it's a win win in my book. 

How many materials have you flown over and ignored because you are a dual-crafter?  Wasted opportunities in my opinion.  This expansion it has been pretty easy to not even have to buy many raw materials off of the auction house for crafting because my army of leveling gatherers brings in a nice amount of ore and herbs.  And these are herbs and ores that are near what I'm already doing anyways!
Occasional Targeted Farming

Once in a blue moon, I may set time aside to go and farm something specific, but the desired item must meet specific criteria.

1. Is this item not available in sufficient supply on the auction house?
2. Is this item required in a crafted item that would make it worth my time to even farm to begin with?
3. Are these crafted items selling well on my server's auction house?
4. Must I farm extra resources just to keep up with the demand of the crafted item?

So on the rare occasion an item required in a recipe that I craft that is a nice profitable stable of my auction house business will run low or out of supply on the auction house.  In this rare instance, I may spend some time farming up that specific material in order to keep my crafted end products selling on the auction house.

The best example I can think of is during older expansions when I would commonly go out and spend 30 mins to an hour farming up my own Globes of Water (fishing them from pools in the old Azshara zone).  These are required as a crafting component of the Tranquil Mechanical Yeti companion pet and the auction house would often run dry.  This was during older expansions when the Engineering pet market was a very viable gold making market.  I wouldn't dare think of farming Globes of Water anymore because the market for damn near all pets is now shit, and the Yeti is no exception.



Recommended Guides: Secret Gold Guide | Journal of Marcus Ty | WoW Secrets