1000 Gold Per Hour. That’s Fast Gold!

I regularly make 1000 gold per hour now in World of Warcraft.  That’s a conservative number (I’ll show you why.).

You can find the details about the addons here on the site, but here’s exactly what I do:

I have installed Routes addon from Curse.com.
I have installed Gatherer and Gathermate and Cartographer Mining and Herbalism addons.
(UPDATE: use Gathermate_data addon as well to add the spawnpoints to your mods)
I am level 80 and have an epic flyer.  (You can do it with a non-epic flyer, but might be a tad slower, obviously.)
I have Mining and Herbalism maxed out.
I go to Icecrown and use the Routes addon to create a route in Icecrown.  I add all the herbalism and mining waypoints from all of the addons that it can use (Gatherer, Gathermate, Cartographer).
I ‘cluster’ the waypoints with the default setting of 60 yards.  That creates fewer waypoints for the route.  It will fly close enough to a mineral or herb spawn point without making me travel exactly from point to point.
I use the Extra Optimization option from the Routes addon.  This makes the route as short as possible.
I then simply fly around the route.  I’ll skip nodes that are in really dangerous spots, like the one next to the Elites or the cluster of evil paladins…it’s too much work to kill them just for some ore.
Note:  I have both Herbalism and Mining.  So I use a simple ‘castsequence’ macro that’s bound to my Z key that toggles Find Minerals and Find Herbs back and forth.
Note 2: I have a route that includes both herbs and ore which is long, and I can toggle back and forth.  I also have a route that is only for ore, and I stick with mining only for that one.  BOTH have produced 1000g per hour.
To calculate how much I’m making, I use the Auctioneer addon, with all the details in the tooltips added.  I use Appraiser when I’m at the auction house (that’s a tab available when you have Auctioneer installed).  I have customized my minimum settings so that I will almost always undercut the competition.  I don’t care.  I’m all about volume.  I’m not trying to squeeze every last copper out of each transaction.  That’s too much like work.  I’m in, I post my auctions, I’m out.  Movin’ on.  Yah…I’m sure some folks hate me for undercutting them all the time.  They’ll deal.  The market goes up and down, and somebody is happy because they were able to buy cheap goods.  I’m the WalMart of the Auction House…small business hate me, but the customers love me.  (And if crafters were smart they would contact me and work a deal where I provide for them.)

Anyway, when I’m at the Auction House, I open Appraiser, and just hit ‘Refresh’ on each item I’m about to post so it scans just that item.   No more long Auction House full-scans.  Just one item name at a time.  I use the Histograph as the calculation for the price, and the ‘Beat Competition’ box (or whatever it’s called) checked.  That makes me, almost always, the lowest priced items out there.

EVEN WITH UNDERCUTTING EVERYONE I AM MAKING 1000G PER HOUR.

It seems that, regardless of whether I’m just getting Ore, or both Herbs and Ore, the value of what I pull is pretty consistent.  I’ve noticed that no matter how many times I repeat the circuit, no matter what time of day, etc., I am getting a consistent average of Titanium ore, blue uncut gems, Frost Lotus, Crystallized Life and Fire, etc.

The exact way I calculate it is to empty my bags, go to Icecrown and trigger a self-buff that lasts 30 minutes.  Then I fly the route until the buff expires.  Then I mouse over each stack or item that I’ve gathered and look at the Undercut price in the tooltip, and add it up.  It’s always been a little over 500g after 30 minutes.  And it’s repeatable…I’ve done so many times to make sure it wasn’t a fluke.

If I wanted to make it even faster, I’d take advantage of the ‘Taboo’ feature of Routes, which blocks off certain areas.  This would be nice to avoid those sections where the Elites make it too tough to get to the nodes.  But I’m too lazy and am making too much gold just flying around as it is.

I usually just log on and chat with guildies while flying around waiting for an opening in a dungeon run or battleground.  There’s not much left for me to buy in the game, so I don’t farm ‘hard’…mostly I just do it for fun to see how much I can make, and to be able to splurge if I want to power-level a different profession on one of my other toons.