GW's WoW Tips for Gold – The Grinding and the Farming

Intro
Tips
Where to go
Picking pockets

So Ya Wanna Be a (gold) Farmer?

Earning gold in the World of Warcraft isn’t that big a deal. It’s pretty easy really. You can start with zip, at level 1, and by the time you hit level 70 be able to spend the 6 grand for your Epic Flying Mount (and training.) Heck, do a few things right and you’ll keep yourself in nice gear throughout your leveling. At level 80, with all the cash provided by the Northrend quests, yoiu should be doing very well, indeed.

Grinding, for the purposes of this page, refers to ...

leveling with the help of lots of convenient mobs of the right level. Along with the grinding you will pick up items to sell to the vendors or the Auction House (AH.)
picking a nice spot and mashing mobs until your brain melts. The standard recomendation is to stock up on Mountain Dew, Pizza, and tunes.

Farming is where you park in a certain area and farm mobs, or ore/herbs until your bags are full or your head falls off from the tedium. The mobs in the area might well be far below your level, but the looting is good. Farming only differs from grinding in the grinding is primarily for XP and farming is primarily for loot.

For example, if you're level 63 and you're hacking away at the Basilisks in Tewrokkar Forest, then you're grinding, since you're getting XP. If you 80 then you're farming, since there's no XP to be had. Why the Basilisks? They drop good skins, eyes (for rep,) meat (which cooks up into a food wanted by casters,) and the occasional item.

Generally, unless you are going for skins and/or meat, humanoid mobs are the best to farm since they drop items, cloth, vendor junk, and cash. Skip the beasts. That said, some beasts are nice to farm.

Basic Tips for the Farming session:

Stock up on your favorite drinks, munchies, and tunes.
Get the biggest bags you can afford and empty them of anything you don't need.
A mount makes the farming easier and a flying mount is even better (these are also good for sneaking up on other farmers and ganking them.)
Get a map of your looting routes (the gathererer addon provides one, or use your own)
Start a farmin'

Where to go

Pretty much every zone in the World of Warcraft has a least a couple of areas that are good for farming somethng. Almost all the zones have herbs, ores, beasties (for skinning) and so on.

All of your secondary starting areas are good for low level herbs and skins. These sell for a few gold a stack and beginning Scribes and Alchemists need these herbs, and the Leatherworkers and Tailors need the skins.
The same areas, except Teldrassil, are good for copper ore.
Any concentration of humanoids is good for pickpocketing, cloth farming, and picking up some cash.
Elementals, of any sort, will drop elemental items, such as motes of fire, breath of air, crystallized this and that, and so on. These items are used by crafters. Find a bunch of elementals and go to town.
In the Outlands the Blood Elf mobs and Fel mobs drop reputation items (marks and signets and the like) which sell very nicely. Northred has lots of rep items to collect in the higher level areas.
Reputation items of any sort will generally sell quite well.
Any critter that drops meat that can be made into a buffing food is a good one to farm.
Fishing is a decent money maker, expecially since the 3.0 patch added the Acievement system. There are various cooking achievements now, so cooking, and the fish needed for cooking, are much more popular than before and the fish you catch sell well.

Specific types of critters, as mentioned above, will drop specific types of loot.

Humanoids are great for cloth, cash, and items
Beasts are great for skins. They also drop meat for your cooking (or the other guy's cooking) and bits such as the large fang.
Spiders drop various kinds of silk, used in crafting
Dragon whelps seem to have a better drop for nicer items than many mobs.
The Arakokra (Outlands) drop feathers for rep as well as other stuff.
As mentioned above the various elementals will drop crafting bits appropriate to their type, eg: fire elementals drop mores of fire or (in Northrend) crystalized fire. Void walker type things will drop shadow bits. Herbs will sometimes drop life bits.
If you're looking for a specific item check ouit Thottbot.com. Search on your item and see what drops it, then sort that list to show the thing(s) that drop it most often.

Farming for Rare and Epic Drops

Ummm... yuck. Ok, you farm a group of mobs for ten hours looking for that epic drop. And it drops. You sell it for 1,000 gold. You could have made more, a lot more, just by doing your daily quests. At level 80 doing your dailies for ten hours will have netted you at least 2k gold plus drops plus rep. At 70 it will still be well over 1k gold plus drops and rep and you'll have more fun doing it.

So no, farming specifically for epics (or blues) isn't such a hot idea, but if you find it interesting then go for it.

Take notes as you level and explore areas. Eventally you will have a list of areas to farm that will be your own. If one area is too crowded just move to the next.

While mindless and dull the farming/grinding routine is still a good way to make a reliable steady gold gain. You can easily make several gold an hour at very low levels and upwards of 200 an hour (or more) at high levels. All you need is an area that works for you and has little enough competition that you can repeatedly fill your bags with loot.

Pickpocketing

If you are a Rogue you can also pickpocket these guys for additional cash and the occasional item, potions, and lockboxes. Put your Pickpocket skill in a macro with your opening attack (or sap) and the Pickpocketing becomes automatic. In the long run you will pick up a lot of extra gold this way. Here's an example macro:

This particular macro assumes you're a subtlety Rogue, if you aren't just delete the Premditation part of the macro. Next, replace Cheap Shot with Ambush or whatever you use as an opener.

enter the following into the new macro text box

#showtooltip Cheap Shot
/cast Premeditation
/cast Pick Pocket
/cast Cheap Shot

This macro will pickpocket your opponent first, then attack. It's free cash, so go for it. If the mob cannot be pickpocketed (such as Basilisks) the attack will still happen.

Another macro which makes pocket picking easier, if you're just doing that and not attacking, is this one:

/cast Sap
/cast Pick Pocket

Stun them and pickpocket. This pretty much eliminates the chance that the mobs will catch you with your hands in their pockets.