How to Make Gold in Forever

Facts from the BlizzCon Deep Dive and the September breakdownsNo gold-per-hour figures anywhere on this pageOur opinion is labelled as ours

Start from the number you are saving for

Most gold guides open with methods. Start instead with the target, because it decides which methods are worth learning at all.

Some of what other players have already paid for is visible from outside the game, and public character profiles show which trades a realm already supplies.

Part of that target is earned from other players' orders rather than from a shelf, and fees paid for a crafting service are agreed in a whisper instead of posted at auction.

Part of that target is reached by spending fewer hours on the road, and what a camp is worth is counted against the levelling clock rather than the purse.

That target is saved for under different conditions before the instances open, and the first month economy pays for levelling goods rather than for raid stock.

No part of that target is reachable with a card either, and the two wallets in Forever never convert into one another.

That target is set against a known update schedule, and the fixed patch calendar decides when demand for materials rises again.

Part of that target is a gearing list rather than a single purchase, and the pre-raid shopping list separates what coin can close from what only runs can.

Part of that target is never reached through the shelf at all, and loot council and DKP rules settle who gets the item instead.

The same target is reached at different speeds on different realms, and gathering income by realm type is settled before the first route is planned.

For a raiding character that target keeps moving upward, and what a tier set costs is the longest-running item on the list.

That target stops being a savings goal once the instances open, and what one raid night costs is charged again every week.

Some of that target is earned off a bench rather than a node, and selling enchants as scrolls would pay a crafter while they are logged out.

Which side of the map that target is earned on narrows the methods too, and choosing a faction for gold settles who competes for your nodes.

That target is reached at a different speed depending on where the character stands, and a ruleset's effect on farming is settled before the first node is touched.

Fishing is the cheapest way into gathering and the easiest to waste. The rod and the early ranks cost very little, there is no node to lose to somebody who got there first, and a character can start at any level. What ties fishing to level is the water itself: pools and the fish in them are banded by zone, so a starting zone yields a starting-zone catch and a contested or end-game zone does not. A character who has not raised the skill yet loses most casts in high-band water, and high-band water is exactly what sits beside the major cities. The canals, harbours and docks that look convenient are among the worst places for a new fisher to spend an evening.

The practical order is the reverse of convenience. Fish the starting zones first, where nearly every cast lands and the skill climbs without interruption, then move outward one band at a time as the skill catches up with the water.

The first evenings follow different rules than the rest of that plan, and prices during the opening days are set by how few sellers are online rather than by demand.

Staying close to the low zones early also keeps the travel bill down, and time on the road decides how much of an evening a loop actually pays for. We have no beta reports describing how quickly the skill rises inside each band, so treat the ordering as the rule and the pace as unknown.

A rough scale to check yourself against. Beta reports described the same three checkpoints often enough to be worth repeating, so treat them as orientation rather than as a rule. At 20, the coin on hand should cover the trainer ranks that are actually in use plus a second pair of bags, without emptying the purse.

That second pair of bags is part of a wider start-up bill, and bags, reagents and ammo are charged against the same early coin as the ranks.

That line of the scale has a published total behind it now, and the full trainer bill to 60 is one of the few levelling costs with an official figure attached.

That total is the same whichever class is being levelled, and the flat training bill is paid in small amounts at every trainer visit.

At 30, it should cover trainer ranks, bags and the movement a questing route now demands, since flight master fares between zones are charged again on every hop. At 40, the shape changes: what is earned from there is held rather than spent, because the next purchase is the mount.

That purchase is where the beta reports disagreed with most levelling plans written around them. Riding and the mount open at 40, but the characters described in those reports were rarely buying at 40

Part of that target is earned without a gathering route at all, and portals sold for gold pay a character for being in the right place at the right hour.

Part of that target is paid to other players rather than to a vendor, and hard reserve and carry fees are where most of that spend lands once raiding starts.

— the usual moment was 44 or 45, after 4 or 5 levels of ordinary questing had closed the gap. We do not know how typical that is across a wider sample, so read 40 as the earliest point and 44 to 45 as the realistic window. If a character is ahead of the scale at 30, the mount lands nearer 40. If it is behind, the better move is to keep levelling rather than stop and farm

No storefront shortens that saving plan either, and items sold for real money cover neither gold nor the mount.

, because quest rewards in that bracket pay more reliably than the routes open to a character still travelling on foot.

Part of that target is spent on correcting earlier choices, and paying to move Legacy points is charged every time the plan behind a character changes.

Legacy points are counted per character, not per account. Nothing in the published material describes a shared pool that alts draw from, so a gathering perk earned on a main does not appear on a second character that was levelled afterwards.

That rule is the expensive half of any class change, and rebuilding Legacy points on a reroll starts the tree from zero again.

Each alt earns its own points and spends them again from the start. For a gold plan built on alts this matters more than the reset fee does

Part of that plan is spent getting to the route at all, and time on the road decides how much of an evening a loop actually pays for.

: the farming bonuses that make a route worth running have to be rebuilt on every character meant to run it, and until they are, that alt gathers at the plain rate. Plan the order in which alts get levelled around which of them is actually going to spend hours on nodes.

The cap on how many points a single character can hold is the part players keep arguing about. Expanding it is discussed as something on the roadmap rather than as something announced

Which realm list that character appears on is settled earlier still, and EU and US gold markets never pool their supply.

, and we have not found confirmation of it in any official text, so treat the current cap as the number to plan against. How many characters can be stacked behind that plan at all is a separate limit, and the per-realm character cap is fixed before any of this is relevant.

Few of those methods are run by a single character, and the character limit per realm decides how much of the plan can run in parallel.

The respawn rate you farm at in the first days is not the one you keep. Crowded launch conditions are normally handled by raising node and creature respawn in the starting zones while everyone is standing in them, and that adjustment is described as a temporary measure rather than a permanent setting. We have not found an official text naming which zones are adjusted, by how much, or for how long it is held, so the honest reading is that it will be rolled back once the population has spread out. Plan around the ordinary rate and treat anything above it as borrowed.

Two things follow for a gold plan. Income measured in that window is measured against conditions that will not last, so a loop that looks worth an evening on day one can be ordinary a fortnight later — which is one reason gathering income by realm type is settled before a route is committed to, and why time on the road matters more once the nodes stop refilling behind you. The second is that early prices for copper, linen and light leather are set by a supply that is temporarily larger than normal, so they are a poor guide to what the same stacks fetch after the rollback. If a low-level route was dismissed in the first days because the materials sold for little, it is worth re-checking once the starting zones have emptied.

Plan the loop before the client is even open. Gathering addons draw nodes on the minimap once a character is already standing in the zone, which is useful in the moment and useless the evening before. The filtered zone maps on Wowhead do the other half: pick an ore or a herb, read the density across two or three adjacent zones, and decide where the loop starts and which road closes it. That part costs nothing and happens outside the game, so it does not eat playtime at all.

Two caveats we will not paper over. Those node tables are built from other versions of the game, and we have no confirmation that Forever uses identical spawn tables, so treat an external map as a shape to test rather than as a finished route. And a planned loop is worth most in the first days, when nobody has learned the zone yet and the route is competing with players wandering between quest objectives rather than with established farmers.

A guild cuts the startup bill before it is ever paid. Recruitment posts treat this as a benefit in its own right, and the arrangement behind it is simple: professions are divided across the roster so the same trainer ranks are not bought three times over, and the materials a crafter needs come out of a shared bank tab rather than off the auction house. A gatherer who deposits ore and herbs is paying for somebody else's recipes in kind, and the blacksmith or alchemist on the other side of that deal returns the favour in finished goods. Nothing published puts a figure on what the arrangement saves, so treat it as spending avoided rather than as gold earned.

The same split is worth planning before a character is rolled, not after. A guild that already has 2 alchemists and no enchanter will buy what it is short of at full price, which is the one cost this arrangement is meant to remove. Supply for consumables for a raid night is the usual place the shared bank proves itself, since that demand repeats every week instead of ending once a character is geared.

Part of that target leaks out in coppers rather than in gold, and what a flight master charges is paid again on every trip across the map.

Which stream funds the first 60 levels is settled before any of that, and quest rewards against mob drops is the comparison most plans skip.

The 2 November notes touched both of the inputs every farming estimate rests on. They listed adjustments to monster respawn timing and to the value of quest rewards. Those are not cosmetic lines: respawn timing decides how long a grinding loop has to be before the first camp is standing again, and quest reward value decides how much of a levelling bracket pays for itself without a route at all. We have not seen a zone-by-zone breakdown of what moved and in which direction, so we are not repeating figures for either, and anything written against the pre-November numbers should be treated as out of date until it is re-run.

Part of that levelling spend comes back at a camp fire, and food that pays for levelling keeps a buyer list open well below 60.

What this means in practice is that income per hour is not a fixed property of a method, it is a property of a method on a given build. A loop that was tight enough to run solo can turn into dead walking time if camps come back slower, and the same change makes a longer circuit, or a second farmer splitting the route, the better answer. Where reward values moved, the balance between handing in quests and killing for drops moves with them, which is the reason quest pay against grinding mobs is worth re-checking after every patch rather than settled once. Re-time one familiar loop yourself before rebuilding a plan on it.

One shortcut to that target does not exist in this line, and the real-money shop in Forever sells nothing that converts into coin.

The other half of that target is spent again every week, and who restocks potions and water is the steadiest buyer list on the realm.

Five of those buyers arrive together once the instances open, and the party's consumable spend is ordered in stacks rather than singles.

Part of that target may not need gold at all, and guild supply lines for materials cover items a solo player would otherwise buy.

Farming is the only route to that target for a reason, and why Forever has no Token explains what was taken off the table before any of these methods were planned.

One purchase comes before any of those methods pay properly, and bags sold at launch decide how long a route can run before it stops.

That purchase is repeated more than once over 60 levels, and bank and bag upkeep is charged again every time a trade outgrows its rows.

What the route brings back still has to reach the character that uses it, and mail between your own characters is the cheapest way to move it.

Some of that plan is sold to you before it is played, and levelling guides behind a paywall charge for the route rather than for the gold.

The shelf that target gets sold into is wider than one realm type, and pricing against every ruleset at once changes what a stack clears for.

The first sale in any of those methods is charged for before it pays, and what a listing costs to post decides whether a stack belongs on the auction house at all.

One version of that target has a date attached, and the cost of a pre-raid set is counted backwards from 9 December rather than forwards from today.

Where that target gets sold is a mechanical question as well, and the retail auction window changes how a stack has to be listed before it clears.

If part of that target is going to be bought rather than earned, RMT rules at launch are set by the account agreement rather than by the seller.

One item on that list is not a method at all but a purchase, and buying a quest drop outright is how a collection step stops costing an evening.

Some of that income is decided by a roll rather than by a route, and BoE drops split 5 ways are settled in party chat before the item ever reaches a listing.

When that target tips toward buying rather than farming, ban reports from the beta are worth reading as claims before they are read as facts.

If part of that target is going to be bought rather than farmed, what a trade leaves behind is the part most buyers only look at afterwards.

One trade on that list cannot post anything at all, and enchanting outside the auction house changes how the sale has to be arranged.

The income behind that arrangement works unlike any other bench, and an enchanter selling hours instead of items is paid for attendance rather than for stock.

That attendance is only half of the trade, and tips quoted in trade chat pay on a different schedule than anything posted on a shelf.

The same question applies to every bench in the plan, and which crafted items can be traded decides whether a recipe is stock or personal gear.

When the answer is personal gear, the income moves to the other side of the bench, and what a crafter charges for labour is the only line left to sell.

That line is a business in itself once orders start repeating, and selling bench time by commission runs on a client list rather than on a shelf.

The other half of that arrangement is the enchanter's time, and paying an enchanter to show up is what the fee actually buys.

That target changes shape once the raid nights start, and where a raid budget actually goes is mostly items rather than hours.

That spend arrives on a schedule rather than once, and what a raid seat costs is ordered again every lockout.

That target is also set by where the character stands, and gold on the RP-PvP realms is earned in a market that opens with no supply behind it.

The first coin most characters see is not farmed at all, and what quest turn-ins pay funds the early levels before any route does.

One beta account is worth putting next to that. A player levelling on the beta described the first 30 levels as unusually comfortable: quest rewards plus the coppers from vendoring trash covered ability training and the early ranks of a profession without setting aside a session for farming, which is not how the same stretch reads in Classic. We pass that on as one player's impression rather than as a measurement, and it may change before launch, but it matches the general direction of the rewards shown so far.

If that holds, it moves the shape of early demand. The bracket where a character is short of coin is not the opening one; it is the stretch after it, where training ranks, bags, consumables and travel all arrive at once and quest rewards against mob kills stops being a question of preference. Players planning to buy rather than farm tend to assume the pressure comes first and eases later, and the beta reports point the other way.

A share of that income never leaves the character at all, and water, food and ammunition are bought back every time the bags run down.

Part of that line is tied to the spellbook rather than to the bags, and what spell reagents cost is paid per cast on every character that has them.

One of those methods belongs to a class rather than a profession, and pulling packs as a mage is paid for in mana before it is paid in coin.

The character doing that farming was also chosen on a creation screen, and what a racial is worth in coin is smaller than most rosters assume.

One of them costs no profession slot at all, and what an hour of fishing returns is worth pricing before an evening goes into it.

One class of drop stops being vendor fodder once looks have value, and what an appearance costs to change is charged by an NPC rather than by another player.

Cultivation is the other way past a profession slot, and it has a limit worth stating before an evening is planned around it. It lets a character pick herbs without taking Herbalism, so the nodes are harvestable, but the tracking that comes with the profession does not come with it.

A second set of those slots is a licence question rather than a character one, and a second account licence widens the gathering roster before it widens the bill.

Forum reports from the beta describe the practical result the same way: with no Find Herbs on the minimap, finds are whatever the route happens to ride past, and two characters covering the same ground can end an hour with very different bags. We have no measured figures for that spread and will not invent any.

There is also a cooldown on it, and it is the part most plans leave out. Beta reports describe Cultivation as harvesting one node per 15 minutes rather than every herb the route passes. That is a ceiling, not a rate: it caps how much the ability can return in an evening, but it does not promise that much. The cap is only reached if a harvestable node happens to be in front of the character each time the ability comes back up, and without minimap tracking that is a matter of where the route runs rather than something that can be planned.

The ability itself is not settled yet, and that is worth saying before a farming plan is built on it. Forum threads from the beta ask for Cultivation to be replaced outright, and the argument given is the auction side rather than the levelling side: herbs picked by characters who never trained the profession land on the same shelf as herbs picked by gatherers who did. We have no statement that the ability is being changed and no statement that it is staying as it is. What exists is an unreversed design decision and an open request against it.

For planning purposes that means treating Cultivation as income that may not survive to launch in its current form. A herb route built around it still works today, but the character behind it should have a second source that does not depend on the racial — a trained gathering profession, or a bench whose materials come from somewhere else. The effect of the supply arriving at all is a separate question from where it is sold, and one auction house across every realm is what decides how far that supply travels once it is listed.

So the honest way to read it is as a cap with gaps under it. In a picked-over levelling zone the ability will often come off cooldown with nothing in range, and the gap gets wider the longer the stretch of riding between usable nodes runs. We have not seen a measured figure for how often the cooldown is actually used on a normal route, and we are not going to publish one we cannot stand behind. Plan the evening around the route; treat anything Cultivation adds on top as income collected along the way.

A movement racial and a gathering route pull against each other, and Tauren is the clearest case of it. A passive speed bonus only pays while the character is moving, and a gathering evening is a sequence of stops: every node is a dismount or a halt, a cast, and a restart. The more often the route stops, the smaller the share of the hour the bonus is applied to, which is the opposite of how a travel bonus reads on a creation screen. Paired with Cultivation the effect gets worse rather than better, because finds without minimap tracking are unplanned, so the stops land off the line being ridden instead of along it. The route that suits the racial is a long uninterrupted one; the route that suits Cultivation is a short detour-heavy one.

We are not treating the size of that trade-off as settled. The final wording of the ability is the part we have not checked against a current build, and how racials affect income is worth reading as an argument about ordering rather than a measured figure. Anyone building an evening around it should test their own loop with and without the stops before deciding the race changed anything.

The second complaint is about where the nodes are rather than whether they show up. In levelling hubs and the zones everyone passes through, herbs are picked clean by the people who do carry the profession and are watching the minimap for them, so the ones left standing tend to be off the road.

The scarce end of that route prices differently, and what Devilsaur Leather clears for depends on who is holding the camps that evening.

That turns the method into time spent riding between nodes rather than a loop, which is fine as income collected while something else is being done and poor as a plan for the evening. Treat Cultivation as a reason not to walk past a herb, not as a replacement for the gathering profession.

That method survived the beta changes, but each pull now takes longer than it used to. The working sequence depends on a slow landing before the pack is gathered rather than after, which adds a step to every pull and a cast to every mana bar. Nothing about gathering packs on a mage has been removed; what moved is the ratio of setup to damage, so a route that used to be counted in packs per hour is closer to packs per mana bar. We have no measured figures for the difference and will not invent any.

The second change is a running cost rather than a rotation. Minor speed on boots has stopped being a comfort option for this route: without it the gather phase runs long enough that the slow wears off before the pack is in place

The enchanter charging for that application has a bill of their own behind it, and what levelling Enchanting costs is paid in destroyed items before it is paid in coin.

, so the enchant belongs in the same budget line as water and reagents, and it has to be paid for again every time the boots are replaced. It is also one of the trades that never reaches a listing, and an enchant applied in the trade window is arranged with an enchanter directly. Anyone pricing an evening of this should count that spend against the route, not against the character.

Another evening spends instead of earning, and the consumable bill for PvP runs against the same budget a farming route fills.

Part of that target is saved in minutes rather than coin, and what a camp pays back is counted in trips not taken.

One trade on that list never posts a listing at all, and how an enchanter gets paid runs on whispers and tips instead.

That sale has no object to hand over either, and an enchant applied in person is why a trade window does the work a listing cannot.

A rogue earns the same way without any trade slot involved, and charging to open lockboxes is tips collected between other things.

For many characters that target is dated rather than open-ended, and saving for a raid start sets both the amount and the deadline.

That deadline is only the first instalment, since a tier one raid week repeats the same bill with every lockout.

Part of that target is never paid in coin at all, because hours lost to travel come out of the same evening the farming does.

Some of that target never reaches a listing at all, since materials that move inside a guild are settled in favours rather than coin.

One correction worth applying before any gathering route is timed: the speed that builds up while a character keeps running is lost the moment a node is gathered. Picking a herb or mining a vein stops movement, and the ramp starts again from the bottom on the next stretch of road. On a circuit where nodes sit close together, the character almost never reaches the faster part of that curve, so run-speed bonuses change very little about how long a lap around an ore or herb route takes.

Where those bonuses do pay is the part of an evening with nothing to gather in it: the ride out to a zone, the return trip to a mailbox or an auction house, the hop between two farming areas that do not border each other. Count them against transit rather than against the route itself, and treat the hours a route spends moving as the line they actually shorten. We have no measured figures for the size of that difference and will not invent any.

One plan reaches that target with several characters rather than one, and what a 4-alt roster costs is the bill it runs up first.

One of those characters can earn without farming anything, and what a group pays a tank is income that never reaches a listing.

One pickup on that list belongs to a race rather than to a profession. Dwarves have Treasure Finding, which marks nearby treasure chests on the minimap and, in Forever, carries a chance of additional items when one of those chests is opened. It costs no profession slot, no training and no skill points, so it sits next to the herb and ore pickups on the way rather than competing with them: whatever it returns is on top of what the route was already collecting.

What it is worth depends on the route, not on the racial. A chest 2 minutes off the path is paid for out of the evening rather than out of the drop, and hours lost to travel come out of the same budget the farming fills. On a loop that already runs past chests — dungeon approaches, coastal paths, mine entrances — the detour is short and the extra roll is free. We have no measured figures for how often that extra roll lands and will not invent any. Treat it as a reason to prefer one farming loop over another of equal value, not as a method on its own.

If that roster is meant to span both factions, there is a cost that does not show up in a profession plan. Legacy perks are tied to the account that earned them, not to the characters on it, so a second account opened to hold the opposite faction starts without them.

That split also decides what the second account sells into, since a faction's buyer pool is rarely the same size on both sides of a realm.

Everything the first account accumulated stays where it is, and the new one begins from nothing on that front. Players planning a cross-faction setup run into this at the point where they decide whether to use a second account at all.

Before that question comes a simpler one, since a holding character for the roster is what makes several alts behave like one business.

Treat it as a line in the alt budget rather than a reason to abandon the idea. A one-account roster keeps the perks and is limited to a single faction's markets and quests;

Within a single account the perks compete with each other rather than stacking. Legacy points come out of one pool, so a perk taken for income is a perk not taken for anything else. The fishing perk and the combat perk Talented sit at the same cost of 10 points, which puts a gathering improvement directly against a levelling one at the moment those 10 points are available. Forum threads usually frame that as earnings given up, which is only half of it.

The other half is that the set is rebuilt on each character rather than fixed once at the account level. A choice made on one character does not bind the next one: a character levelling through contested ground can take the combat perk, and a later character that exists to gather and sell can take the fishing one, out of the same earned points. So the first allocation is a working decision for that character, not a permanent line in the account budget. What carries over is the points, not the spot you put them in.

One slot on that roster earns from a very short buyer list, and what an engineer sells comes back on the raid calendar rather than on demand.

a 2-account split opens both sides and pays for it by leaving half the characters outside the perk set. Which way round that falls depends on what you were going to do with the alts, and spreading professions across several characters is the part of the plan the split hits first, since the gathering alt and the crafting alt may no longer sit on the same account.

The perks are also capped, which changes how the list should be read. On the beta an account can hold 16 points at a time, so the set is a selection rather than a collection: taking one line means not taking another, and the character that benefits is the one the points were spent on. Part of that allocation does not go into combat or utility at all but into rested experience, which pays back on levelling speed instead of on anything you can sell. A roster built to level alts quickly therefore spends points that a single main would have put somewhere else. We have not seen a statement on whether 16 is the number the live version ships with, so treat the cap as a beta figure and check it against your own account before planning around it.

A roster like that is also the reason the cheapest gathered goods keep a buyer. Tier 1 herbs and ore are usually written off as levelling filler for crafters, and that is only half the market. The other half is the players stocking field kits and buff materials before they go out, who want low-tier reagents in bulk and are not fussy about which node they came from. That is a different buyer from the crafter working through the first ranks of a trade, and the reagents a camp consumes get used up rather than turned into something that gets resold.

On the beta this is what kept the low end from going dead once the early rush moved on: characters were still being rolled, and people were still starting late, so the bottom of the gathering range had a steady floor under it rather than a single wave of buyers. How that behaves on a live realm we do not know, and it depends on how long new characters keep arriving. If you are running professions spread across several alts, treat the low-tier stacks as sellable stock rather than as something to vendor on the way past.

Which professions the perks actually touch is the part we cannot pin down. Player write-ups from the beta describe lines that help gathering trades first, with mentions of faster node pickups and of skill-ups coming through at a lower cost in materials. The same write-ups are much vaguer about the crafting side, and we have not found a report that lists a perk tied to a specific crafted good. None of this is confirmed by the wording on the perk cards themselves, which is what we would need before treating any of it as a plan rather than as hearsay.

Read it that way when you decide where the earning characters sit, because the profession spread across a roster is the thing a wrong assumption here would cost you the most to undo. A gathering alt parked on the account with the perks is a cheap bet either way, since the character still gathers if the perk turns out to do nothing for it. Rebuilding a crafting chain on the strength of a perk that was never written down is the version that wastes an evening, so leave that decision until the card text is readable in front of you.

The vendor recipe circuit is the one classic method that carries over worst. The old routine was simple: learn which vendors stock a limited run of a recipe, ride the loop, buy the stock out before anyone else, and post the copies on the auction house at whatever the crafters will pay. In Forever that loop is cut at both ends. Part of the recipe list is bind-on-pickup, so the copy you buy is learned by the character standing at the counter and never reaches a listing. On another part of the list the stock limit has been removed instead, which means the vendor sells as many copies as anyone asks for and there is no scarcity left to resell into. Either change kills the same trade, and they do not always apply to the recipes you would expect, so the list has to be checked vendor by vendor rather than assumed from a classic database.

What survives is narrower and worth knowing before you plan an evening around it. Recipes that are still tradable and still limited are the only ones the old method applies to, and the margin on them depends on how many people on your realm are running the same loop. Everything else is now either a personal purchase for your own crafter or a commodity any buyer can fetch themselves. If you are deciding whether to ride the route at all, weigh it against hours lost to travel, because the circuit spends most of its time between vendors rather than at them. We do not have a published list of which recipes fall into which group, so treat any classic route guide as a starting point to verify rather than a plan to follow.

If the question is where the first point goes for income, the answer depends on which half of the economy the character works in. For a gatherer, Bountiful Harvest is the line that touches output directly: it gives a chance for a node or a skinned beast to yield twice, so the same route returns more without the route taking longer. For a crafter, the line that raises the chance of a skill-up on a craft matters more, because levelling a trade is paid for in materials and fewer wasted attempts is money not spent. The third candidate is faster rested experience, which is not income at all but shortens the time before an alt reaches the bracket where its profession is worth selling from.

Before any of that, there is a short list of things to buy in the first town. Skinning does not work with bare hands: the knife is a tool carried in the bags, sold by general goods vendors, and a character who took the profession and skipped the tool will stand over a dead beast with nothing to click. Mining has the same arrangement with its pick. Both are cheap enough that the grey hides and vendor trash from one levelling route cover them, which is the point — the purchase is paid back by the same evening it was made in, not by the auction house.

The second purchase is a bag kept for gathering output. Skins and herbs stack, but they fill slots faster than quest items do, and a gatherer with full bags either walks back to a vendor or leaves material on the ground. That is the quiet version of the problem hours lost to travel describes: the route is not slower, the trips back are. One extra bag removes several of them. The last item on the list costs nothing and is missed most often — herb tracking is an ability you switch on, not a passive that comes with the profession. It stays off until you turn it on, and a new herbalist can cross a whole zone with an empty minimap and conclude the zone has no herbs in it. Mining tracking works the same way, and only one tracking type runs at a time.

Which class to farm on is a separate question, and the beta forum answers it with an opinion rather than a measurement. The hunter is the name that comes up most often there, called both the best leveller and the best gold farmer on the same thread, and the reasoning is usually the same 3 points: damage delivered from range, so most of a pull is spent at a distance from it; a pet that scales with the character instead of falling behind as the levels go up; and a threat drop that hands the fight back to the pet when a pull turns out larger than planned. The argument is that those 3 together let a character keep farming without stopping to recover between packs.

We have not measured that against other classes and we are not going to publish a ranking we cannot support, so read it as what it is: a view held on the beta forum by players who have levelled there. It is also an argument about sustained uptime rather than about any single pull, which is why it tends to be made about routes outdoors rather than about indoor pulls. Pulling packs as a mage is the usual counter-case raised in the same threads, and it runs on a different constraint, so the two are worth comparing on what each one spends between pulls rather than on which class a forum prefers.

Player discussion puts the crafting skill-up bonus and the rested rate at 4% each, and we have not seen either number in official material, so treat them as community figures rather than as settings to build a budget on. What holds regardless of the exact percentage is the ordering: a gathering character is paid on the first point, a crafting character is paid later and in materials not bought, and rested experience pays only on a roster that is still levelling. Points spent on rest come out of the same cap as everything else, which is the part most first allocations under-count. A doubled yield is also worth less than it looks on a long route, since hours lost to travel come out of the same evening.

For a gold plan the practical effect is that the perk you were counting on may be sharing a budget with the one that speeds up the alts. That matters most for the per-kill heal, since who stops buying cheap consumables only applies on characters whose account actually took that line, and a cap spent largely on rested experience leaves the consumable bill where it was.

One of those perks belongs on the spending side of the ledger rather than the earning side. The one that heals on a kill cuts how often a character stops to eat, drink or bandage, and a character that stops less often also buys less: fewer stacks of food and water before a session, fewer bandages carried as backup, fewer healing potions bought to cover a bad pull. None of that shows up as income, but it comes off the same purse the farming was meant to fill. Forum posts describe it as removing most of the preparation routine while levelling

The same perk has an effect on the other side of the counter, and who stops buying cheap consumables decides which trades lose a customer.

, which matches what a heal on every kill would do to downtime, though we have not seen a figure for how much it restores or whether it scales with level.

Count it as savings when deciding whether a second account is worth opening, and count it twice over on a character that kills in volume — pulling packs as a mage is where constant small heals replace the most consumables. Our own view is narrower than the forum one: it reduces restock trips, it does not remove them, since a fight that goes wrong still needs something in the bag that a per-kill heal cannot supply in time.

Gathering plans live or die on how fast a node comes back, and the beta reports point one way on that. Players describe taking mining from the first point to 60 inside the opening 20 minutes of a character, and at least one account of the same session has a single copper vein mined 3 times in a row while the player stayed in the area. If that holds, a route is not a loop between distant spawns so much as a short circuit worked repeatedly, which changes what an hour of gathering puts in the bag and how early a crafting alt can be fed without buying anything.

Two things keep this from being a number to plan around. These are observations from characters in the bracket below 30, in starting zones with low-level ore, and nothing says the same timing applies to the nodes that matter at 60. They also come from a beta where far fewer players share a zone, so the respawn may be generous or it may simply be uncontested — the reports cannot separate the two. What the speed does affect for certain is the part of the evening not spent gathering at all, and hours lost to travel shrink when the same spawn pays out more than once. Treat the rest as untested until the same route is run on a live realm with competition on it.

Part of that target is settled before the first node, since which racials pay on gathering changes what an hour on the same route returns.

One of those racials has reportedly changed. Forum posts from beta testers describe a rework of the Tauren set: Cultivation now runs on a 15 minute cooldown, Plainsrunning no longer keeps its stacks between uses, and Endurance has traded its 1% hit for 2% crit damage. We have not seen this confirmed in patch notes or in a Blizzard post, so treat it as a player observation rather than a settled fact, and check the tooltip on your own character before planning a route around it.

It matters here because this guide treats Cultivation as the way a character with both profession slots already spent can still pull something out of a node. On a 15 minute cooldown that is a few picks an evening, not a parallel income, and the Endurance change moves the Tauren case away from gathering toward combat value. If the plan was to gather without a gathering slot, tool items sold with limited charges are the part of it that does not depend on which race you rolled.

Find Treasure is the other passive that touches a route's income, and it is the harder one to plan around. Testers agree it adds something on top of what a character would have carried home anyway, but we have not seen a figure published for how much, and nothing states whether it applies to every kill, to certain containers, or only in some zones. That leaves it as a bonus you notice at the end of an evening rather than a method you can build a farming loop around.

Treat it the way we treat the rest of racial passives on a farming character: useful if you already have it, not a reason to reroll, and not something to subtract from a target when deciding how long a route takes. If a percentage and a scope are confirmed later, that changes the maths; until then the honest answer is that the gain exists and its size is unknown.

The same uncertainty sits over the first few levels, where the race you picked decides how much coin arrives before any profession does. Several beta reports claim the Skyborn starting zone pays out more silver than the older ones and packs its quests closer together, so a character leaves it with a larger purse and fewer empty minutes. We have not seen a per-quest reward table for any starting zone, and nobody has published a side-by-side count, so this stays a claim rather than a fact. What is plausible in it is the second half: quests that sit closer together return more per hour even when each one pays the same, because hours lost to travel are what thin out early income in the first place.

It is also the easiest thing on this guide to measure yourself. Run one character to the end of its starting zone, write down the coin on hand and the time it took, then do the same on a race with an older zone and compare the 2 numbers.

The same evening can also be spent on more than one account at once, and running several accounts at once changes what one route returns.

Buying is only half a decision until the handover is planned, and trade window versus mailed gold is the part that happens after the order is placed.

Income only counts once it reaches the character that needs it, and gold frozen during a deal is the case where it does not.

Until somebody does that across every start, treat any ranking of racial starting income as untested. In practice the gap, whatever its size, is small next to the first riding tier, so it is a reason to expect a slightly easier first evening on a new start rather than a reason to reroll a character you have already levelled.

A similar claim circulates about the Sky Elf start. Beta posts describe that zone as granting a movement speed effect from the first minutes and paying out more generous quest rewards than the older starting areas, with players saying they had a noticeable amount of silver on hand by level 3. No reward table has been published for it either, and we have not seen the speed effect written down in patch notes, so it sits in the same category as the rest of the starting-zone reports: plausible, unmeasured. The part that fits what the rest of this guide assumes is the movement half, since a character that covers the same quest chain faster finishes it with more of the evening left, and hours lost to travel are the cost that early levels pay most heavily.

The route players actually take to level 30 has settled on mob grinding rather than quest chains. Beta testers comparing notes report the same stretch taking 72 hours solo on quests, 45 hours when the time was spent grinding, and 24 hours in a group running the same pulls, with a stated group experience multiplier of 1.4 for a party of 5. We have not seen those timings confirmed by Blizzard, and they come from players tracking their own runs rather than from a published table, so read them as a direction of travel and not as targets. What they explain is why caves with tight pull spacing and fast respawn have become the default: the mobs come back before the group runs out of things to kill, so nobody is standing still.

That matters on a gold page because the grind pays twice. A cave loop returns vendor trash and coin drops the whole time it is running, and the same loop passes gathering nodes a questing route would never cross, so a character with a gathering slot banks materials on the way through. The quest route pays better in single rewards and worse in volume, and the 2 incomes are not interchangeable. If you are levelling in a group anyway, treat the materials as the part worth sorting at the end of the evening and the trash as the part that covers repairs, since hours lost to travel are the one cost a stationary cave loop does not charge you.

One caveat applies to every bracket below from level 40 onward: income per hour drops even when the method does not change. Beta testers report that mob health has been raised across the board, with the figure most often quoted being around 30% on average, and mobs in the level 50 and above ranges sitting near 4000 HP. We have not seen either number in patch notes, so treat them as player observations rather than published values. The direction, though, is consistent in the reports: the same pull takes longer, and anything priced per kill rather than per node returns less for the same evening.

That matters for how this guide's brackets are read. A route that paid well at level 30 is not broken at level 50, but the kill-based part of it has slowed while the gathering part has not, so the balance between the two shifts toward nodes and toward professions as you climb. If you are comparing your own results against what a lower bracket returned, measure again after 40 rather than assuming the earlier rate carries forward, and remember that hours lost to travel stack on top of the longer fights rather than replacing them.

What that early silver actually buys is worth keeping in proportion. It covers bags, the first profession training and the stack of reagents a crafting character needs before anything sells, which is the stage where being short of coin slows you down most. It does not change where a character stands at 60, because the sums involved at that point are of a different order. Treat a richer start as a few fewer errands in the first evenings rather than as a head start on a riding tier, and check the tooltips on your own character before building a levelling plan around either claim.

One beta tester has published a figure worth measuring these plans against. Their account describes reaching 120 gold over the first week of play, at a working pace of about 5 gold per hour, on a character levelling normally rather than grinding a single route. We did not run that test and cannot confirm which build it was done on, so read it as one player's report rather than as a rate you should expect. Its use here is scale: at that pace the first riding tier is roughly a week of ordinary play, and the top tier is plainly not something a first character arrives at by accident.

Two things move a number like that in either direction. An evening spent walking rather than gathering returns nothing, which is why hours lost to travel belong in the same sum as the nodes themselves, and a route run a second time almost always pays better than the first, because you stop stopping to read the map. If your own evening comes out well under the tester's pace, the gap is usually in the minutes between nodes rather than in what each node gives.

One limit applies to every mob-kill figure quoted on this guide. The beta measurements we have seen were taken below level 30, on characters working through early zones where a kill ends quickly and the coin per kill is close to the coin per minute. Beyond that point the comparison stops holding: beta testers report that mob health climbs noticeably faster in Forever than it does on Wild, so the same route takes longer per kill even when the drop itself is unchanged. We have no published health table for either version, so the size of that gap is a player observation and not a figure we can put a number on.

In practice this means kill-based income should be re-measured on your own character once you pass 30, rather than carried forward from a lower bracket. A method that looked worth the evening at 25 can fall behind gathering at 40 purely because each fight runs longer, and the minutes that difference eats belong in the same column as hours lost to travel. Nothing here says mob killing stops paying; it says the early numbers describe early levels, and the honest version of that claim is to say where the measurements end.

Everything above stops at the levels the beta actually opens. Past 30 the announced content moves on to the Riverglades and then to Mount Hyjal, with the Barrow Deeps raid built for 10 players sitting at the end of that stretch. That is the map a plan running to 60 has to cross, so it is worth knowing it exists before you decide which profession pair to carry up there.

What we cannot tell you is what any of it pays. No node layouts, no herb or ore tables, no drop lists and no vendor material from those zones have been published or reported by testers, and the raid's loot is in the same state. Anyone quoting a route or a gold rate for the Riverglades or Mount Hyjal right now is guessing. The practical move is to keep the later brackets out of your target maths entirely: budget what you need using the zones you can measure, and treat whatever the higher zones turn out to give as something that shortens the plan rather than something it depends on.

The faction you picked sits inside that same sum, because the roads are not the same length on both sides. Flight networks, zone entrances and the position of the nearest repair vendor differ between Alliance and Horde, so 2 characters gathering the same ore in the same contested zone can spend very different amounts of the evening in transit. We have no published comparison of hop counts or flight durations for Forever, so we will not put a figure on the gap, but the direction is easy to check on your own route: time the leg from your capital to the first node, then time the leg back with a full bag.

The second half of the bill is repair. A longer approach means more deaths happen far from a vendor, and a corpse run that crosses 2 zones costs the same minutes whether the route was profitable or not, with the repair charge waiting at the end of it. If your hub sits far from the zone you farm, it is usually worth planning the loop around the vendor rather than around the densest node cluster, and counting minutes spent moving between hubs as part of what the route pays rather than as overhead outside it.

A third thing moves it, and it is not under your control: how full the zone is. Beta reports describe zones that stay packed, with mobs standing back up almost as soon as they go down, and with ground loot and chests gone before anyone reaches them.

Those stripped routes have a buyer waiting at the other end, which is why raid night consumable spending reads as a gathering income as often as an expense.

Those 2 effects pull in opposite directions. A kill route in a crowded zone is limited by your own damage and downtime rather than by how many targets are available, so the pace holds up. A gathering route is limited by a fixed set of spawn points shared with everyone else in the shard, and whoever rides past first takes them, so the same loop can come back half stripped.

The practical reading is that a mob route and a node route are not interchangeable at peak hours, even when they look similar on paper. If one of your routes pays well on a quiet night and poorly on a busy one, it is almost always the node route, and the answer is a different zone or a different hour rather than a faster mount. It is also worth measuring the two separately before deciding either is weak, because time spent riding between nodes and time spent waiting for a respawn look the same at the end of an evening and have different fixes.

One target is reached without selling a single item, because gold paid for class utility is charged for minutes rather than goods.

Whatever the target, the coin still has to change hands, and trade limits and transfer channels decide how long that last step takes.

One route to a target sells no goods at all, since a tank selling dungeon runs is paid for the role rather than for anything carried home.

Those offers are posted in a place of their own, and runs advertised in the services channel are priced in loot as often as in coin.

Every target also assumes the 4 ways of passing goods on are open, which is what a hold on trade and mail takes away.

One target is a crafting slot rather than a mount, and what BoP crafters can sell decides whether it ever pays itself back.

Every target assumes coin can move when you need it, which is the question behind a hold placed on trade and mail.

One method runs all night without anyone at the keyboard, which is why fishing output and automated anglers belong in the same paragraph.

A smaller part of the income on this page is set by the clock rather than by how many hours you put in. The Stranglethorn fishing event runs on a fixed weekly slot — Sunday, 14:00 to 16:00 server time — and the pools it uses are worth nothing before or after that 2 hour window. Nothing in the rest of this guide behaves that way: a mining route or a cloth farm pays the same at 2am as it does on a Sunday afternoon, so you can fit it around work. An event with a window cannot be fitted around anything. You are either logged in when it starts or you are waiting a week.

That matters more than it sounds, because server time is not local time for everyone on the realm. A player whose realm sits several timezones west of them can have the window land in the middle of a working Sunday afternoon

Any plan that depends on holding stock until the price rises should be read against buying out a market.

, or in the middle of a working Monday morning if the gap runs the other way. There is no catch-up version and no second run later in the week, so for part of the population this income is simply not available, and planning a target around it is planning around a slot you may not be able to attend. Check what 14:00 server time means on your own clock before you treat it as income rather than as something you do when the timing happens to work out.

One target comes from outside the game rather than from a mount list, and cash prizes and gold demand explain why some players prepare at prices nobody else would pay.

One target is a second set of gear on the same character, and a healer's off-spec gear bill is the version of it most parties meet first.

If the target came from something you watched sell on the test client, read it against how beta builds move item values before you trust the figure.

Riding in Forever costs 100 gold for the first tier and 1,000 for the top one, and the mount comes with the training rather than from a vendor.

A character with no gathering slot free can still turn a vein into coin, which is what tool items sold with limited charges are for.

A character that never sells into a listing saves toward those same 2 milestones on vendor payouts alone, which is the arithmetic behind playing without the auction house.

Those 2 figures are confirmed. Beside them, everything else a levelling character buys — bags, trainer ranks, the odd reagent — is small change.

So the plan has 2 milestones and not 20. Reach 100 gold comfortably before the first riding tier unlocks, and build toward 1,000 across your fifties.

A character saving toward either milestone between battlegrounds pays a second bill first, and bombs, bandages and repair bills is where it lands.

One method that used to shorten that climb is gone, which is the subject of the resale loop between merchants.

Those milestones arrive once per character rather than once per account, which is the arithmetic behind running a roster of alts.

Beside those milestones runs a smaller, steadier outflow, and reagents a class burns weekly is the part no mount list shows.

Before either milestone, a crafting slot asks for its own stock, and the material bill behind a skill-up is the first spending most characters meet.

How quickly you reach those milestones depends on hours in the saddle, which is the subject of the boost market Forever never opened.

Long before either milestone, a new character pays for weapons the quests never hand out.

Before committing a slot to a trade, it is worth knowing which professions beta players picked and how that reads in the listings.

One way to reach them buys and digs nothing at all, since charging gold for a summon sells travel time instead of goods.

Anything earned in a group is earned under a rule somebody set beforehand, and how a party divides its loot decides which share of a run is yours.

Whichever milestone you are saving toward, the listings you sell into are shaped by buyers who relist what they bought.

Under both milestones sits a number that never moves with demand, what an NPC pays per item, and it is the worst evening you can have.

One expense sits below both milestones and gets paid first: bag and bank space for everything a gatherer brings home.

Gear wears out on the way home as well, and durability lost in one death is the bill that arrives whether or not the bags came back full.

On a PvP realm that bill arrives more often than the route planned for, which is the arithmetic behind what ganking costs a gatherer.

A method that cannot plausibly get you there is a hobby, not a gold strategy.

There is no Realm First title to race for, and people still race. The reward for reaching 60 early is position rather than a server-wide announcement. The first players at cap work the gathering routes at the top of the level range while most of the realm is still climbing toward them, they finish profession ranks before the recipes are being bid over by everyone else, and they set what early auction house supply looks like instead of selling into listings somebody else put up first.

Part of the starting gear moved from white to green quality, and the green versions are Bind on Equip. That matters for the lowest bracket on this page more than any route change does. Drops and quest rewards out of Elwynn Forest, Dun Morogh and Tirisfal Glades that used to go to the nearest vendor in a stack now include items another levelling character can buy and wear, so the early hours produce listable goods alongside the usual trash. We have no figures for how often the green version appears instead of the white one, and we are not going to invent any, so treat this as a change in what the bags come home with rather than as a method of its own.

Two things follow. Carrying capacity is worth more at low level than it was, because sorting sellable greens from vendor fodder only works if there is room to keep both, which is the plain case for bag and bank space early. And the decision of what to list and what to hand over the counter now needs checking against what an NPC pays per item, since a green that nobody bids on is still worth its fixed payout, while one that sells on the board is worth whatever the first levellers on the realm are willing to spend.

Levelling in a group got slower on 15 October. Items that start a quest — the Gold Pickup Schedule, Croaky's Head and Elmpaw's Head are the named cases — now drop for 1 party member instead of for everyone standing there. A pair working the same chain has to see the drop twice before both can pick the quest up, so the chain stretches across more kills than it did before the change. The reward at the end of those quests is the same; the hours in front of it are not, and that is the figure this page prices brackets against.

Who gets the first copy is a question the party settles in advance rather than at the corpse, which is why how a party divides loot matters more in a duo than in a full group. We have not checked whether other drops behave the same way after that build, and we do not assume it: beta builds move item values in ways the notes do not always spell out.

Gathering that does not use a profession slot moved with the 15 October build. Cultivation now returns on a 15-minute cooldown instead of 60, so a character levelling through a zone presses it several times in an evening rather than once and forgetting about it. Dwarves got the other half of the change: Find Treasure now carries a chance at additional items from most chests, which makes the map pings worth walking to instead of noting and ignoring. Neither of these is a substitute for a gathering profession, and we have no figures for how often the extra roll lands or what it tends to contain.

For the plan above this mostly matters to characters whose 2 slots are already committed to crafting, since both effects pay out without a slot of their own. On a levelling route the cooldown is short enough to line up with normal questing rather than asking you to stand still for it, and chest detours now have a reason beyond the silver inside. A character earning this way and spending at vendors rather than in listings is close to playing without the auction house, which is a slower road to both milestones but a predictable one.

The zone you start in decides how early any of this can begin. Teldrassil has no ore nodes, so a night elf who took Mining carries the skill for several levels before the first vein appears, and the first veins are in the zones beyond it. Skinning on the island runs almost entirely off nightsabers and the other beasts the starting quests send everyone to kill, which means competing for the same spawns with players who are there for the quest credit and not for the hide. Herbs are present but spread thinner than in Elwynn Forest, where a short loop passes several patches and a new character can fill a bag between quest turn-ins.

None of that is a reason to reroll, but it changes the order of the plan. On a starting island with no veins, the sensible move is to take the gathering slot you can actually feed

One line of income never reaches a listing at all, since services sold for coin are paid for an outcome rather than an item.

, keep the second slot open until you reach a zone that supports it, and treat the early hides as stock for a crafter rather than as income, since what a vendor pays for low-level skins is the floor you fall back to when nobody is buying. Players who already have a main on another route can skip the problem entirely by parking the gatherer where the nodes are, which is part of equipping an alt for gathering.

The second half of that motive is alts. A character at cap funds the ones rolled purely for the economy: a second gatherer covering a different route, a crafter parked beside a trainer, a bank character that never leaves the city.

That last character often ends up holding a guild's shared bank fund as well as the main's spare stock.

What that second gatherer costs to equip before it earns anything back is set out in what equipping an alt costs.

Each of them is cheap to level once the main can pay for bags and riding, and each adds a supply line that does not compete with the others.

An hour given to somebody else's levelling is an hour not spent on any of those routes, which is the arithmetic behind selling levels for gold.

We do not know which trades the unannounced professions will turn out to be, so plan the alts around routes and storage, which are confirmed, rather than around a recipe list that is not.

The Legacy perks sit on top of that alt plan, and they are the part of it we are least sure about. A perk opens once you hold 10 points, and the one that matters for gathering is Bountiful Harvest: 5 ranks, up to 20% more scarce materials from the nodes you were already clearing.

Where those 10 points come from is a spending decision as much as a playing one, since crafting to 150 and 225 is the route paid for in reagents rather than in evenings.

On paper that is a flat bonus to every gathering route an account runs, which is exactly the kind of thing you build a second and third gatherer around.

What that does is turn the point grind itself into something people want. On the beta forums Bountiful Harvest was the perk most often described as the one that will pay for itself later, and the argument is simple: a perk that raises the yield of every route an account runs is worth more to a gatherer than any single recipe. Players who accept that argument are not grinding points for the perk alone, they are grinding them because the account that holds them gathers better forever after. That is a different kind of demand from the usual one — it is demand for hours on an account, not for an item in a listing.

Some of that demand was already being settled with money during the test. Beta reports included players covering their point grind with donations rather than evenings, which is the same arrangement as hiring someone to level a character pointed at a perk track instead of at the level bar. We do not know how common that was, whether it carries over to the live realms, or what it will be worth once the first wave of accounts has 10 points, so treat it as a thing that happened on a test client and not as a market with a going rate.

In practice, beta players have reported their point total reading differently from one character to another on the same account, and we have not seen an explanation of why.

The same caution applies to takings that never arrive, since gold stuck in beta listings is worth telling apart from gold that was actually spent.

It may be a display problem, it may be that points are earned and spent per character. Until that is settled, treat the perk as something each gatherer might have to qualify for on its own rather than a bonus the main unlocks once for everybody. The safe version of the alt plan is the one that still pays without Bountiful Harvest: routes that do not overlap, storage that is paid for, and a crafter that has work whether or not the materials arrive 20% faster.

The same caution belongs on Cultivation. It is read as a way to pull herbs without spending a profession slot on gathering, and on that description it looks like a free supply line for a crafter. One tester reported a 60 minute cooldown on it. We have not seen that confirmed in writing anywhere else, so treat the figure as a single report rather than a published number, but it changes what the ability is for: a racial on that kind of timer is an occasional pickup, not a route you run.

What that means in practice is that the income from a racial is capped by how often it fires, not by how long you are willing to farm. An evening spent walking herb spawns will out-earn it, and a second gatherer with the actual trade learned will out-earn it by more. Plan the slot the way you would plan any other, against which professions beta players picked, and let Cultivation be the thing that tops up a crafter between deliveries rather than the thing that supplies it.

What is actually different here

Forever is not Classic 2004 and it is not retail. 6 confirmed changes move gold-making specifically; everything below is built on them.

Among the costs still unpriced is what a talent reset charges, which now covers 2 separate systems rather than 1.

2 further trades turn up in the beta files and nowhere else, which we weigh against the same supply in the unannounced profession list.

2 of those confirmed items deserve a second look, because they are the ones most guides list and then walk past.

The free gathering profession changes the shape of the market. In every previous version, gathering was a deliberate choice made by people who already knew the game, so the early auction house was thin and raw materials sold high.

The same arithmetic applies to the drink and reagents a caster burns on the route, which is what mana costs per evening.

Here it is the default for everyone who does the quest. Expect the opening weeks to carry far more ore and herbs than Classic veterans remember, and price accordingly — volume, not margin.

One material is going the other way on the test client, and the pristine leather shortage shows what a thin supply does to a levelling craft.

Where all that volume lands once it is listed, and why the same stack moves the price faster here than on a 2004 realm, is the subject of one shared sales channel.

Fishing is the one method with no entry cost at all. A pole, a bank of water and a free afternoon are the whole setup; there is no route to learn, no competition for a node that somebody else tagged first, and no gear requirement beyond standing still. What it pays is tied to time spent casting rather than to level, which is why it has always been the classic way to grind toward the first riding tier on a character that cannot farm anything else yet. The catch is that the income curve is flat: an hour is an hour, and the only lever you have is how many of them you spend. Where the fish end up decides the rest, since cooked stacks and raw stacks both go into one shared sales channel at very different prices.

The same flatness makes fishing the most convenient loop in the game to automate, and it draws bot traffic for exactly that reason — a single repeated action, no travel, no decisions. We do not know how Forever handles that, and nothing has been announced about it, so treat the effect on prices as unknown rather than assumed. For a player, the practical reading is simpler: fishing is reliable, it is slow, and it works best as the thing you do on evenings when a gathering route is not worth starting.

Camping is a farming buff disguised as a convenience. A campfire becomes a campsite with vendors, repairs and workspaces in the field.

The same campsite is where plots would sit, and a herb garden at camp turns waiting time into supply.

The repair half of that convenience has its own arithmetic, worked through in what the spirit healer charges.

What actually caps an evening's farming is not how fast you gather, it is the round trips to town to unload and repair. Remove those and output per hour rises for everyone who bothers to place a fire.

A caster working the same route pays a second toll the fire does not remove, since refilling a mana bar is restocked in town like anything else.

The other lever on the same evening is the build itself, since Legacy perks a gatherer takes change what the same route yields.

One of those perks does not work yet. Luremaster, the fishing line of the Legacy tree, is listed in the interface on the current beta build but has no effect in play: the bonus it describes does not appear when you fish, and nothing we have seen from Blizzard says when that will be fixed. Rank it up if you like the look of the tree, but do not build an evening around it.

The rest of the tree is worth reading as a budget rather than a bonus list, which is how we take it apart in what Legacy points do to income.

There is an open argument on the beta forums about what the tree is for at all. One camp reads it as an economic system first: most of what it hands you is quality of life and a smaller bill — fewer trips, less waste, less spent on the same route — so the right way to judge a rank is whether it pays for itself over a week of play. The other camp treats it as a power tree and ranks it the way talents get ranked, by what the character is worth at 60. Both sides are looking at the same interface and reaching different conclusions, and Blizzard has not framed the tree either way in anything we have read.

We lean toward the first reading, and we say so as an opinion rather than a finding. If your evenings are spent gathering and selling, a rank that shaves time off every lap is worth more to you than one that matters in a raid you have not reached yet. If you are levelling toward endgame and buying your materials, the calculation flips. Neither reading is settled by anything confirmed, so take the tree in the order that matches how you actually spend your time.

Read the gathering perk wording carefully as well. A rank described as 100% to rare resources is a modifier applied to a roll that rarely comes up in the first place. It does not mean a node hands you a rare material, and it does not mean every second node does. Doubling a small chance leaves a small chance, so an hour of routes can finish with nothing but the common ore and herbs the same route always gave you, and the next hour can finish the same way.

Bountiful Harvest may be giving nothing at all right now. Beta reports from skinners running the perk at 5 ranks describe thousands of skinned corpses without a single scarce material dropping from the bonus. We have not tested that ourselves and Blizzard has not commented, so treat it as reports rather than a confirmed state of the build. What it does mean in practice is that an evening of skinning should be costed on base loot only: the leather and hides the mobs drop anyway, at the price those stacks actually move for. If the perk starts paying later, that is upside you did not plan around.

The same caution applies to the ore and herb ranks until somebody runs a long enough route to say otherwise. Spend the points if the rest of the gathering Legacy perk ranks suit how you play, but build the gold target out of what the route gives you on a normal night, not out of the percentage printed in the tooltip.

That matters because the perks are written up as an income source. Plan the evening on the common materials you are certain to bring back, and treat anything rare as a bonus that landed rather than a line in the budget. We have not seen Blizzard publish a base rate for those drops, so there is no honest way to say how often the doubled roll pays, and we are not going to guess one. If you want the full list before you spend points, the gathering ranks and their wording are set out separately.

That is why the fishing-and-cooking pair is absent from every bracket below. Cooked food giving stats plus a small experience bonus is confirmed and it is a real reason to level Cooking for your own raid nights, but the supply half of the loop is the part that would turn it into income, and on the beta that half is untested with the perk offline. We would rather leave it out than quote a method we cannot watch working. When Luremaster behaves, it goes back in, and it is worth checking against the other gathering ranks on offer before you commit points.

Some of it is gathered without the profession at all

2 things in Forever hand you raw materials while skipping the tradeskill that normally guards them, and they arrived from opposite directions.

• Cultivation, the Tauren racial, grows a duplicate of a herb beside it, and the duplicate is picked with no Herbalism skill whatsoever. Each plant can be cultivated once.
• Rockslicer, an axe out of the Deadmines, lets its owner mine copper, tin, silver and iron without the Mining skill. It carries 30 charges and then stops, though the weapon remains.

Each is small by design — 30 charges on one, a plant at a time on the other, with a reported hour between uses. What makes them worth a paragraph is the direction of travel: the skill requirement on a node stops being the wall it has always been in Classic.

Coins moving the other way carry a notice of their own now, which we take apart in the trade window warning.

A herb that wants Herbalism 300 can end up in the bags of a character who has no Herbalism at all.

On the Rockslicer side, the 30 charges are the whole story. The axe is a consumable with a weapon model attached: each node you mine with it spends 1 charge, and when they are gone the item stays in your bags but the mining stops. That makes it a fixed budget of 30 veins for the life of the character, not an income line you can return to. Treat it the way you would treat a stack of 30 one-use items — useful once, spent in an evening if you work a dense route, and then over. Nothing has been published about whether the charges can be restored, whether a second copy can be obtained, or whether the axe binds when it drops, so plan on the 30 and count anything beyond that as a surprise.

On the beta, the Legacy tree is not a choice yet. All 16 points are granted to the test character outright, which is enough to fill the tree completely instead of picking a lane. That covers the reagent and profession perks as well — Bountiful Harvest among them, with its 5 ranks and up to 20% more scarce materials — so the gathering side can be run at full strength and measured against the same route with the perks switched off. How many points a character earns on a live realm, and how fast, has not been announced, so treat the filled tree as a test bench rather than a preview of what you will level with.

It also colours the numbers people bring back from the beta. If every gatherer on the test realm is running the harvest perks at full rank, reported stack counts per route sit at the generous end, and so does the volume landing in the shared auction house supply. When you compare your own farming against a beta report, check whether the perks were on before concluding that your route is slow.

The practical consequence is where you spend them. Copper is the cheapest thing on the ore list and the most heavily listed in the opening weeks, so burning charges on it converts a limited resource into the material with the thinnest margin. Silver and iron are the better targets if your route passes them, and a character with no intention of taking the skill is better off using the axe on whatever it can reach at the highest value rather than on the first vein it walks past. None of that changes the shape of the climb toward the cost of riding training, which is still carried by a gathering profession's node list and the hours you put into it. The axe is a one-off top-up, and it should be read next to the free gathering quest rather than instead of it.

That last sentence no longer holds in the current build. Cultivation has been changed so the duplicate plant only appears on herbs close to the character's own level. On the expensive high-end herbs that a low-level character can walk up to, nothing grows at all. The racial still works, but it now reads the gatherer as well as the node, which closes the one case people were planning around: parking a fresh Tauren in a high-level zone and collecting whatever the herb list says is worth the most. We have not seen the exact level band published anywhere, so treat the cut-off as untested until you check it in game.

The herb people were quietly costing this against is black lotus. That is the one plant on a Classic herb list whose price is set by raid demand rather than by levelling demand, and the arithmetic doing the rounds before the change was straightforward: a Tauren with no Herbalism at all walks the high-level zones, cultivates a duplicate off every lotus somebody else has just picked, and sells into the alchemy market without ever training the skill. With the duplicate now tied to the character's own level, that version of the plan does not run. Nothing has been published about where black lotus spawns in Forever, how often, or whether the scarce herbs behave the way they did in 2004, so the income line was never more than an assumption carried over from an older game — and the change removes the part of it that depended on skipping a gathering profession's node list entirely.

The second half of the racial is the part worth keeping. Testers describe Cultivation also lowering the chance of failing a gathering attempt, which is a benefit that only arrives if the character actually has Herbalism, since a failed pick is something a trained gatherer experiences and a passer-by does not. Read that way the racial stops being a route of its own and becomes a small improvement to a route you were already walking: fewer wasted attempts on the same loop, on top of a duplicate plant here and there. No failure rates have been published, before or after, so there is no way to say how much of an hour it saves. Judge it as a minor bonus on a gathering character rather than as a reason to roll one, and keep measuring the output against the cost of riding training like every other line on this page.

The rest of the racial list, split into what it collects and what it saves, sits with choosing a race to gather on.

The direction of travel survives the change, but in a narrower form. Free materials still arrive without the skill, only at the level you were already questing at, which pushes common herbs into the auction house rather than scarce ones. Rockslicer looks unaffected, since its ore list stopped at iron from the start and was never a route to top-end materials. If you picked Tauren with this in mind, count it as a small bonus on a route you were walking anyway, not as access to herbs your character otherwise cannot touch. The market effect belongs with the rest of the gathering professions and supply: more volume at the bottom, no change at the top.

The cooldown matters more than the level band, because it caps the method before competition does. If the gap between uses really is 1 hour, then what you take home is set by the clock and not by the route: riding past 40 plants and riding past 4 produce the same duplicate, and a second Tauren on the same loop does not change that for either of you. Every other gathering line on this page scales with how fast you move and how many nodes you reach. This one does not, which is why it cannot be read as an income line for a character with no profession, however many herbs the zone has. The hour figure comes from testers rather than from anything published, so confirm it on your own character before you build a loop around it.

Read that way, the racial is worth what a single herb is worth, once an evening is the wrong unit for it entirely. A character without Herbalism who wants materials to sell is better off taking the free gathering quest in the first few levels and walking a normal route, since a gathering profession's node list pays per node instead of per hour. Keep cultivating the plants you pass anyway, because the cost is a few seconds, but count the output against the cost of riding training and it does not move the balance.

Our reading: not a route you should plan around. It is another small push on the supply side, and it belongs in the same list as free gathering at level 3 and the Legacy perks — each one alone is a rounding error, and the pile of them is why we expect stacks to be cheaper here than they were in Classic.

A third item sits in the same group, the grave robber's shovel. It digs up grave moss, a herb that normally sits behind Herbalism, and it works for a character who never trained the skill. Each dig returns 1 to 6 moss, the shovel carries 20 charges, the cooldown between uses is 2 minutes, and there are 2 points where it can be applied rather than a route of nodes. That makes it the most clock-bound of the 3: 20 charges spaced by a 2 minute wait is a handful of short visits, and once the charges are spent the digging stops the way mining with the Rockslicer does.

Run it through the same test as the other 2 and it comes out the same way. The ceiling is fixed before competition or density enter the arithmetic, since no amount of riding adds a dig, and the output is a single herb rather than the spread a trained gatherer brings back. Nothing has been published about what grave moss is used for in Forever's recipe list, whether the charges can be replaced, or whether a second shovel can be obtained, so treat the 20 as the whole of it. Worth doing if one of the 2 spots is near where you already are; not worth a trip. Against the cost of riding training it is a top-up, and the climb is still carried by a gathering profession's node list.

The Legacy perks come with a budget, and that is the part most summaries leave out. Points are earned from challenges — 65 of them, worth 1 point each — and once earned they belong to the account rather than to the character who finished the challenge. Spending is where the limit sits: a single character can have 16 points active at a time, split across 3 trees called Professions, Adventure and Resourcefulness. That turns every perk into a trade rather than an addition. Bountiful Harvest is 5 ranks out of those 16, so a gatherer who takes it in full is choosing not to spend that allowance somewhere else.

The first unlock is usually reported at level 25, or at skill 150 if the character pushes a tradeskill before that, which is exactly where the choice starts to matter. Well Rested speeds up the climb to 60; Bountiful Harvest raises what the same route yields in scarce materials. On a first character saving toward the cost of riding training, the levelling perk is the easier case to argue, because the bracket you are in decides the value of an hour more than the perk does. On a second or third character made specifically to gather, the professions tree is the one worth filling, since the points are already banked and the route is the whole point of the character. We have not seen a published list of which challenges hand out which points, so plan the 16 around what you have actually unlocked rather than around a full tree.

The points themselves have become a farm target. Organisers running challenge events on the beta report that players chase Legacy points along 3 routes: exploring zones, pushing a profession up through crafts, and grinding mobs for kill counts.

The same points sit next to Honor and battleground reputation rewards, which are earned on a different clock entirely.

The crafting route is the one with a shopping list attached, which is why we costed buying materials for Legacy points on its own.

None of those is free. Exploration costs travel time and, past a point, riding training. Crafting burns materials that would have sold raw. A kill count is paid for in hours on a camp that somebody else also wants to work. Nobody has published which challenges sit behind which activity, so treat the split as what organisers describe rather than as a map you can plan against.

The practical consequence is a second budget running alongside the first. A character levelling a craft purely for the points is spending materials that would sell raw, and the craft-or-sell test further down comes out the same way it always does: the item is not the reason for the spend, the point is. That is defensible once, because points are account-wide and outlive the character that earned them. It stops being defensible when the spending pushes back the cost of riding training on the character doing the actual levelling. Decide which of the 2 budgets you are filling before you start a craft you would not otherwise have touched.

The fishing perk is the clearest case for checking a line before you spend on it. Luremaster is written as a 50% chance of an extra fish whenever a lure is active, which reads like the sort of perk that pays for itself on a character stocking meat and fish for cooking. Testers on the beta report that it does not fire: with a lure on, the extra fish does not arrive, and the perk behaves as though the points had not been spent. Nothing has been published confirming or denying that, so take it as a report from the current build rather than as settled behaviour.

The caution is wider than 1 perk. A character can hold 16 points active, so anything spent on a line that turns out not to work is allowance taken away from Bountiful Harvest or Well Rested with nothing coming back for it. Check the wording against your own character before committing — fish a stack with the lure on and a stack without it, and see whether the counts differ — and do the same for any perk whose whole value is extra output rather than a flat saving. It matters most where the perk is the reason you were planning to stock in the first place, which is the question behind what fishing earns in Forever.

One scouting trick has no confirmed status in Forever. Hunters with Eagle Eye and Shamans with Far Sight can push the camera down a route and look at a node area before riding to it, which is how some gatherers decide whether a loop is worth walking at all. In several later versions of the game, tracked nodes stop appearing once the view leaves the character, and in others the display is tied to having the gathering skill at the level the node requires. Nobody has published which of those behaviours Forever uses, so we are listing it as untested rather than as a technique.

It matters for pace more than for income. If scouting works, a gatherer can skip a stripped area instead of riding through it, which is the same saving that a campsite makes by removing trips to town. If it does not work, the route is planned blind and yield comes down to density and to other gatherers in your copy. Both outcomes are livable; the point is that you should check it on your own character before building an evening around it, and not repeat a claim from a guide written for a different client.

The gap no guide can fill yet is the one a tracker addon fills for you. There is no public node database for the new zones, and the characters that would have built one are deleted when the test ends, so the map most gatherers work from in the opening weeks is the one they made themselves. Discovery logs exist for that job: the addon records every herb, vein, chest, fishing pool and profession object you personally interact with, stamps it with the zone and the coordinates, and draws the marks back on the map the next time you ride through. Forever Discovery Log is the name being passed around for this in the current build. We have not tested it, and nothing has been published about which addon interfaces Forever exposes, so take the name as a pointer and not as a recommendation.

Used properly it answers questions the guides cannot. One loop walked with a log running tells you where the nodes actually sit rather than where a 2004 route map says they sat, which spots came back empty on the second pass, and whether a detour off the quest path paid for the riding time. In older clients that record is kept in a file on your own machine rather than on the character, so notes taken during a test run are still readable afterwards, but whether Forever's client keeps saved data through the wipe is something to confirm before you rely on it. The same marks are worth keeping for a gathering profession's node list as your skill climbs, since a vein you could not touch at skill 20 becomes a stop on the route 100 points later.

The plan, by bracket

This is the part to follow in order. It assumes your first character and no seed gold.

One assumption runs under every bracket below: a mob belongs to whoever tags it first. Loot and the coin on the body go to the character or group that landed the opening hit, and nothing has been published for Forever that changes that. It is easy to overlook when you are reading a farm spot by density alone. A camp with mobs packed tightly is only worth what you can reach before somebody else does, so the spots that look best on a map are usually the ones where your real yield is set by respawn timers and by how many players share your copy rather than by how fast you kill. A thinner camp nobody is working often pays better per hour than a famous one with 3 people circling it.

Grouping solves the contest and creates a different cost. Inside a party the tag is shared, so you stop losing pulls, but the coin is divided and the drops are rolled for.

The full version of that trade, camp by camp, is worked through in splitting a camp with a partner.

Whether that trade is worth it depends on how much faster the group clears: if 2 characters kill more than twice as fast, or the camp is dense enough that neither could hold it alone, the split is paid for. If they are mostly standing around waiting for the same respawns, both would earn more on separate routes. The practical rule while levelling is to group when the mobs are the bottleneck and go solo when the spawn rate is.

Hides are the exception to that split, because skinning hides as a group gives every skinner on the kill a full share instead of a divided one.

Testers report that rule reverted in the current build, which puts leather supply after the rollback back on the same footing as ore and herbs.

Quest items that drop off mobs are the case where a group pays for itself outright. Collection steps are what wreck the timing of a levelling session done alone: the same step can close in a few pulls on a good run of drops or outlast the rest of the zone when the drops do not come. In a party the kills land faster because everyone is working the same pull, and the items are handed out in turn rather than always to whoever tagged first, so one character does not finish the step while the other is still near the start of it. That is the feast-or-famine spread flattened out — the step costs roughly what it should for each member, which is the only version of it you can plan an evening around.

Treat the distribution rule as the behaviour from earlier versions until you have seen it yourself, since nothing about loot handling on quest drops has been published for Forever. The gold argument does not depend on the detail either way: time is the input every method on this page competes for, and a quest chain that finishes on schedule frees the hours you would otherwise spend grinding the same camp. The same caution about competition for the same spawns applies here too, because a collection step in a worked-over area is slow for a group as well as for a solo character.

The drop rate on those collection steps is the part that quietly costs money. One beta report puts a figure on it: 64 mobs killed to finish a step that asked for 12 items. Nothing has been published on quest drop rates in Forever, so treat that as a single player's count rather than a measured rate, but it matches the common complaint that collection steps run long. The kills themselves are not wasted, since the greys, cloth and coin from them are the same income any grind produces. What is lost is the quest turn-in you expected to have finished by then, and with it the experience and the reward item that would have closed a gear slot.

For the low brackets this is one more reason the early income lines read thinner than the plan suggests. An evening that was meant to cover several quests covers fewer, the character sits at the same level longer, and the materials coming back are still the cheap ones that everybody else is also listing. Weigh it the way you weigh any route: if a step is clearly running past what the item count suggests, leave it, bank the kills you already made, and come back when the mobs are grey and the step closes in a few minutes. That is time taken straight off the climb toward the first riding tier price, which is the only thing the early brackets are really buying.

Grinding packs of mobs for their drops is a method in its own right, and it is the one this page splits by level least well. The argument for it is simple: no node competition, no quest timing, just a camp and a kill rate. The argument against it starts with the tools. Testers report that the mage kit in the current build is thinner than the Classic version people plan around — there is no Living Bomb, and Cone of Cold is learned at 26, so the levels where a mage would be gathering packs arrive before the spells that make gathering them survivable. Druids working the same camps in bear form describe rage arriving too slowly to hold several mobs at once, which turns an area pull into a long single-target fight with extra damage coming in. Nothing has been published on ability levels or on rage generation values for Forever, so treat both as what players describe on the beta rather than as settled behaviour, and check your own trainer list before you build an evening around either.

Even where the pull works, the income side is the weaker half of the comparison. A grind pays in vendor greys, cloth and the coin on the body, and all 3 are capped by respawn timers rather than by how fast you clear, so the ceiling on a camp is set by how many players share your copy and by the first-hit rule on every mob in it. Damage taken comes back as a repair bill, which a gathering loop largely does not carry. A route pays per node and scales with how much ground you cover, so the hours convert more predictably into the climb toward

The full version of that cost, including the minutes a corpse run takes off the hour, sits with repair bills and corpse runs.

the cost of riding training. The sensible use of a grind is targeted: cloth you need, a drop you are after, or a stretch where your gathering profession's node list has nothing you can pick yet.

If the mage kit arrives late, the pack grinding does not stop — it changes hands. Testers on the beta describe 2 pairings doing the work instead. A hunter sends the pet in to hold the group, keeps the damage going from range and only steps in when something breaks off, which means the fight is survivable without the burst spells a mage is waiting on. A shaman drops a fire totem into the middle of a pull and lets the pack take damage while the character fights whatever is in front of it, with a shield up to cover the hits that land. Neither is fast in the way an area pull is supposed to be fast, and both depend on ability levels nobody has published for Forever, so check your own trainer list before you assume the combination is available at the level you are grinding.

The consequence for the market is about who is listing, not about how much arrives. Vendor greys and cloth come off grey mobs in bulk regardless of which class kills them, so if hunters and shamans are the ones holding the camps in the opening weeks, they are the characters stocking cloth reaching the auction house while mages level past the gap. Nothing about the ceiling moves: respawn timers still cap a camp, the first-hit rule still decides who gets the body, and how many players share your copy still decides whether the spot is yours at all. A pet pulling means fewer hits on the character and a smaller repair bill; a shaman standing in the pack means a larger one. Weigh both against the same hour on a route, because a gathering profession's node list converts more predictably into the cost of riding training than any camp does.

An hour of gathering does not move the experience bar. Picking a herb or working a vein pays in materials only; the level you are is the level you stay at for as long as the loop runs. Skinning is the one exception worth naming, and only in a narrow sense: the corpse exists because something was killed, so the experience was already paid for by the fight and the hide arrives on top of it. Every other gathering line on this page takes its hours out of levelling rather than running alongside it, and that cost does not show up anywhere in the coin you bring home.

It bites hardest in the low brackets, where the stacks coming back are the cheap ones everybody else is also listing and the character is still well short of the levels where a route is worth more per node. An evening of dedicated farming down there buys stock at the worst price and leaves the character behind where it would otherwise have been, which pushes back every later income line as well as the cost of riding training. The version that costs nothing is gathering on the way: take the nodes that sit on the quest path, skin what you were going to kill anyway, and let a gathering profession's node list climb while the level does. Farming loops run for their own sake are worth the hours later, once both the level and the skill have caught up.

Levels 1 to 20 — cost nothing, collect everything

• Take the free gathering quest as soon as it appears. Around level 3 or 4, and it teaches the profession outright if you have a slot open.
• Set up the 2 addons that matter before you start. An auction tool changes the price you get on every listing, and a quest helper decides how much of an evening goes on finding things. Which addons touch your gold is a shorter list than any general addon guide will tell you.
• Expect company on your route. Forever has no realms, and nodes respawn per copy of the world rather than per player, so your yield per hour depends on how many other gatherers share your copy. What layers do to a route is worth reading before you plan one.
• Take a second gathering profession too. Herbalism plus Mining on the same character is the classic pure-gold opener and it still is. Skinning is the lowest-friction third choice because you are already killing beasts.
• Do not take a crafting profession yet. You will want the slot later and the materials are worth more sold than burned. More on this below.
• Sell raw, in stacks, and do not agonise over pricing. Week one has no established prices; anything you list into a market with no history is a guess by both sides.
• Keep quest rewards you can vendor and check the rest. The 4 launch zones and 9 dungeons are new content, so the Bind-on-Equip lists you remember from 2004 do not cover any of it. Look at what drops rather than at an old guide.
• Run Hall of Thanes as soon as it opens. The new dungeon under Old Ironforge sits at 13–18, which is the first instance most Alliance characters will see and it lands exactly where you are scraping together the first 100 gold. Gear you loot there is gear you do not buy, and its quest rewards arrive at the same time. Nobody has published what drops or whether any of it is saleable, so treat it as a way to spend less rather than a way to earn more.

The 13 to 18 stretch is where the dungeon pays for itself. By that point most characters are wearing a patchwork of starter gear and quest hand-outs, and the empty slots — weapon, chest, boots — are the ones players normally close by buying something off the auction house. Hall of Thanes sits inside that window, and its quest rewards arrive at the same levels as those gaps. A reward you can actually equip is a listing you never pay for, and at this stage of the run that is the same thing as income

The slot that is hardest to close without spending is worked through in the caster weapon slot.

, since the first 100 gold is built far more by not spending than by selling.

Library books are the same trade made without a group. Books are picked up as world objects and handed in as a collection: 10 of them give a neck piece usable at level 20 at item level 25, and 20 of them give a ring that only a rogue can equip. The route that covers the books runs through 8 zones, which makes it a background job rather than an evening's work — you close it while questing through areas you were crossing anyway, and the reward lands in the same bracket as the dungeon hand-outs above.

Judge it the way you judge a farm spot, because the input is identical. The hours go in and an item comes out instead of coin, so the comparison is not with a gathering route's takings but with what you would otherwise pay to fill the slot. The neck piece is the part worth planning for, since most characters reach 20 with that slot empty. The ring is narrower and only pays on one class. Nothing has been published about whether either reward binds when picked up, or whether the 8 zones can be covered without detours off a normal levelling path, so treat the second half of the collection as a personal reward rather than as stock. Against the first riding tier price neither item moves the balance; they remove 2 purchases from the list, which in this bracket counts the same as a sale.

The book chain was cut back in a later beta build, and the trade no longer comes out the same way. The hand-in rewards now sit at Uncommon quality and item level 35, which is a reduction from what the collection paid before the change. The items still fill a slot, but they are closer to what an ordinary quest reward in the same bracket hands you, and that is the whole argument gone: the reason to walk the books was that the reward beat what you would otherwise equip or buy.

Run the same comparison again with the new values and the route across 8 zones does not pay for the hours it takes. Picking up a book that happens to lie on a path you are already questing through still costs nothing worth counting, so there is no reason to skip one. Planning detours around the collection, or holding the last few books as a target for an evening, is time better spent on a gathering loop or on what dungeon runs actually pay at the same levels. Nobody has published the pre-change values, so we are not quoting what the rewards used to be; the point is that a guide written before the cut is describing a reward that is no longer there.

One beta report gives the bracket a scale worth keeping. A player describes 2 characters at level 17, both with Fishing above 50, both with their profession slots taken and worked while levelling, and 2 gold on hand between them. Nothing in that account sounds like a mistake: the professions were raised, the time was spent, the coin simply did not pile up, because at those levels the drops vendor for silver and the materials sell in small stacks at whatever the opening market will pay.

Hold that next to the first riding tier price and the shape of the plan becomes clear. The gap is not closed in this bracket and it is not meant to be. What levels 1 to 20 produce is skill points, a filled profession slot and gear you did not buy; the gold itself arrives later, when the same route yields materials with a buyer behind them and a campsite removes the trips to town. If you are at 17 with a couple of gold and a working gathering skill, you are where that report was, and the useful question is how fast the skill is climbing rather than how the balance looks.

A second beta account puts an hourly figure on the same bracket. A player running quests in Redridge Mountains and vendoring what came off the mobs describes the evening averaging 20 to 50 silver an hour, with the spread depending on whether the quests in hand paid coin or handed over an item. That is 1 player's count on 1 route rather than a measured rate, and nothing has been published on vendor values or quest coin rewards in Forever, so treat it as an order of magnitude and not as a target to hit.

It is still the most useful number in this bracket, because it sets the scale for everything else you might do with the same hour. Against the first riding tier price an income line of that size is not the thing that gets you there, which is why the advice above is to keep levelling and to let a gathering profession's node list climb alongside the character rather than stopping to farm. Measure your own first few hours against it: if a route is coming back well under that, the zone is probably worked over by other players sharing your copy, and the fix is a quieter area rather than a longer evening.

In that bracket the vendor is the first buyer you have, not the auction house. Greys off every mob, quest rewards for a class you are not playing, and the duplicate weapon you already replaced all turn into coin at a counter with no listing fee, no deposit and no wait. That is the whole early income line: it arrives the same evening you earn it, which is what a character with no seed gold actually needs. Keep the sorting simple — cloth and meat go in stacks for later, anything grey goes to the counter on the trip you were making anyway, and nothing is carried around on the chance that a buyer turns up for it.

The inventory on the other side of that counter is a different matter. Starting vendors stock the basics a fresh character is assumed to lack — cheap white gear, the first bags, reagents and food — and most of it is overtaken by a quest reward or a drop within a couple of levels. Buying it converts the coin you just made into an item you were about to be given, and the margin on carrying it to a listing is not there either, which is the same arithmetic set out in reselling vendor stock at auction. The 2 exceptions worth the silver are bag slots and whatever your trainer actually requires, because both pay back across every hour you spend on a gathering profession's node list afterwards.

One drop from the beta is worth naming, because it sets a scale for what the counter pays. A tester reports picking up an item called Peace Tea on a level 8 character and vendoring it for 18 silver 75 copper. That is a single item on a single character rather than a rate, and nothing has been published on vendor values in Forever, so do not plan a route around it. What makes it worth writing down is the size: at level 8 the rest of the bag is greys worth a few copper each, and one drop of that value covers a stack of cheap trade bags on its own.

The open question is whether that is an outlier or the shape of early vendor income here. If items of that value turn up regularly in the first 10 levels, the bracket is less thin than the reports further up this section describe, and the sensible move is to keep killing and vendoring rather than stopping to farm materials nobody is buying yet. If it is a one-off, the arithmetic stays as written: the early brackets build skill and gear, not coin, and the climb toward the first riding tier price starts later. Either way the test is yours to run, since the only way to tell them apart is to watch what your own first few hours of drops actually vendor for.

Inside that bracket, levels 10 to 20 are the thinnest part of it. The complaint repeated most often on the beta is simply that there is no money at this stage: the starting zone quests have run out, mob coin is still counted in silver, and the greens that arrive as quest rewards are worth more equipped than listed. Gathering is working by then, but the stacks coming back are the cheap end of the list, and in the opening weeks everybody else is selling the same ones. Nothing has been published on vendor values or drop rates, so take all of this as what testers describe rather than as a measured figure.

Cooking is the craft that looks like the answer here and usually is not, because the reagents do not arrive on schedule. Testers report beast meat dropping inconsistently on the low-level routes, so a recipe that needs a stack sits unfinished while the character keeps killing for it, and fish is the fallback rather than the plan. The useful move is to treat meat as something you collect in passing and cook when enough of it has piled up, not as a production line you plan an evening around. How often a camp is already stripped depends on players sharing your copy of the world, which is the same limit every route in this bracket runs into.

Bag space is the part of that report nobody writes down. A gatherer with a full pack stops gathering, and at low level the pack fills with ore, herbs, cloth, meat and the quest items you are carrying at the same time. The cheap trade bags on the starting-area vendors cost about 1 silver each, which is inside the first hour of vendoring greys, and every slot they add is another node you can pick before the route ends.

Slots also go to things that never reach a listing, including waylaid crates carried home for a counter that pays in something other than coin.

Buy them in the first town rather than waiting for a drop, because the alternative is walking back with half a loop left.

The saving is in trips, not in the bags themselves. A short run home to the mailbox or the bank costs the same minutes whether you carried 20 items or 60, so the character who leaves town with more free slots simply makes fewer of those runs per evening. That stacks with a campsite later, which removes the vendor and repair reasons for the same walk. Until then, treat capacity as part of the route plan: decide what you are keeping before you set out, mail or vendor the rest, and do not fill slots with items you are holding only because they might be worth something. The same arithmetic applies once a gathering profession's node list opens up and the stacks start coming back heavier.

2 capacity rules decide how long a loop can run before it ends. The first is how deep a reagent stacks: the same number of free slots carries far more ore, herbs or cloth when a stack holds a lot of them than when it holds a few, so stack size sets the real size of your pack rather than the bag count does. The second is the dedicated reagent bag slot, which sits apart from the ordinary bags and holds crafting materials without competing with quest items, greys and the spare gear you are hauling. Nothing has been published for Forever about which materials that slot accepts, or what the stack sizes are on the inputs the new recipes use, so confirm both on your own character before you plan a route around them.

The effect is on the shape of the evening rather than on what a single node pays. Deeper stacks and a reagent slot that is not shared with the rest of your inventory mean more nodes between returns to town, and every return costs the same minutes whether the pack came back full or half empty. Shallow stacks work the other way: the loop ends early, the ride back is the same length, and the hour produces less for reasons that have nothing to do with how dense the zone is. That is the same saving a campsite makes later by removing the vendor and repair reasons for the walk, and it is worth counting next to how many gatherers share your copy when you decide which route is worth an evening.

One starting zone breaks the gathering plan outright. In the new elf zone, the only herb growing on the ground is earthroot, and earthroot cannot be picked until Herbalism 15. A character who takes the free gathering quest at 3 or 4 therefore walks past every plant in the zone until the skill has been raised somewhere else, which on a first character usually means it is not raised at all. The profession slot is filled, the route is planted with nodes, and the income from it for that whole stretch is nothing.

Plan the first bracket around this rather than being surprised by it. If you start there, treat levels 1 to 15 as a questing and vendoring stretch, keep quest rewards you can sell, and expect gathering income to begin only once you leave for a zone with a second herb in it. We have not seen a node list published for the zone's ore, so whether Mining covers the same gap is untested, and nothing has been said about whether the other launch zones have the same single-herb problem. If you want the profession working from the first hour, raising a gathering skill early matters more than which skill you pick.

Node density in the starting zones changed with the 1 October build. Gatherers working those routes since then report far fewer herbs and veins on the ground than before: loops that used to fill a pack come back part-empty, and a second pass over the same ground turns up less than the first. Nobody has published spawn rates, and nothing has been said about whether the reduction was intended or is a side effect of other changes, so take it as what testers describe rather than as a measured figure.

For this page the consequence is narrow but worth stating plainly: gathering income across levels 1 to 15 should be treated as unstable, not as a baseline you can plan an evening around. The bracket was already thin, and thinner spawns push it further toward questing, vendoring greys and keeping rewards you would otherwise buy. Competition makes it uneven rather than uniformly bad, since how many gatherers share your copy decides whether a reduced route is stripped or merely slow. Check the density on your own first loop before deciding how much of the climb toward the first riding tier price you expect gathering to cover.

2 caveats before you plan around it. Nobody has published which slots the rewards cover, how many there are, or whether they bind when picked up, so this cannot be mapped out slot by slot in advance. And the run costs an hour you could have spent on a gathering route, which is the same trade-off as what dungeon runs actually pay at every later bracket. The practical version: pick up the quests before the first pull, finish them in the same visit, and judge each reward against the item you would otherwise have bought.

What the bosses themselves are worth is a separate question from the quest rewards. At this level a dungeon boss pays in the ordinary mix — vendor greys, cloth, the occasional bind-on-equip — and the coin from a clear is small next to training the first riding tier. Hall of Thanes is new content, so there is no published loot table and no boss list to plan a route around; anyone quoting one is guessing. Loot it, vendor what is grey, keep the cloth in stacks, and decide on anything else after you have seen what it is.

One practical advantage over most instances in this bracket: the entrance sits under Ironforge, so the vendor, the repair and the bank are a short walk from where you zone out rather than a journey.

The same hour can be sold to somebody else instead of spent on your own character, which is the subject of the player service market.

Paying somebody else to walk you through the same instance is a different trade, and it is taken apart in selling boosted dungeon runs.

That matters more than it sounds, because the thing that costs a levelling character time is not the run, it is the travel either side of it and the wait to fill a group. If the group comes together quickly, the visit is cheap. If it does not, the hour is better spent on a gathering loop and the dungeon can wait until 17 or 18, when the quest rewards still apply and you clear it faster.

That comparison changes again during an auction house outage, when a route produces stock with nowhere to list it.

Levels 20 to 40 — the first real income

• Profession objects unlock at skill 20. Place a campfire on your route. Fewer trips to town is the single largest change to how much a route yields.
• Push tradeskills past 150. That is the first Legacy point, and the points are account-wide — earned once, useful on every character you ever make.
• Spend early Legacy points in the professions tree. Bountiful Harvest gives up to a fifth more scarce materials from the 3 gathering skills. On the same route, in the same hour.
• Bank the 100 gold for the first riding tier before you spend on anything else. Bags can wait; walking cannot.
• Run dungeons for what can be sold, not for the coin. The silver covers the repair; the bind-on-equip drops and the cloth are the income. The silver covers the repair; the bind-on-equip drops and the cloth are the income, and the training bill is what eats it.
• Kill the named rares on your levelling route. Forever has put set pieces on them — Blessing of Kalimdor in Mulgore and the Barrens is the one people have found so far, and 2 of its 3 pieces give movement speed in those zones. Whether the pieces can be sold at all depends on whether they bind when picked up, and nobody has established that yet. If they do not bind, a rare on a route you were walking anyway is free inventory; if they do, it is still speed you did not pay for.

Levels 40 to 60 — where the money is

• Run the levelling dungeons for blueprints. Better camping objects come from blueprints dropped by dungeon bosses. This is the first time a Classic recipe list has had real scarcity in it, and scarcity is where margin lives.
• Now consider a craft, and pick it from what you have found. Not from habit. A recipe nobody else has beats a recipe everybody trains.
• Cooking is no longer a joke profession. Food that grants stats and an experience bonus has permanent demand from everyone still levelling, and that is most of the server for the first month.
• Build toward 1,000 gold. The top riding tier is the last big personal purchase before raiding costs start.

Well Fed food is the one consumable a levelling character rebuys forever. A flask is bought for a raid night and a potion is bought for a hard pull, but food with stats and an experience bonus attached is eaten between every fight, by every player who is still climbing.

Which other sources hand out the same percentage for nothing, and what that does to the price of a stack, is set out in free and paid experience bonuses.

That makes it the rarest thing in a new economy: a sale that repeats on the same buyer rather than a one-off. The exact stats and the size of the experience bonus have not been published, so nobody can tell you yet which dish is the one worth stacking — that is a number to read off the tooltip yourself, and it is on our list of things to check before the beta closes.

Which raid nights, battlegrounds and tournament brackets that same food is bought for is set out in the weekly consumable bill.

The supply side of it is the part most people skip. Cooked food needs meat and fish, and both arrive as a by-product of routes you are already walking: beasts drop meat whether or not you skin them, and Fishing pulls its inputs out of water that costs nothing to stand beside. Neither competes with a gathering profession for a slot, which is why meat and fish as crafting inputs tend to be underpriced in the opening weeks — sellers list them as clutter rather than as a raw material with a buyer attached. Two cautions before you build stockpiles. Fishing pools sit in the world like nodes do, so how many players share your copy decides how many you get to work. And meat is only worth holding if you know which recipe consumes it; buying up stacks before the recipe list is settled is speculation, not supply.

The fish half of that supply has a tackle bill and a faction quirk of its own, set out in what fishing earns in Forever.

Whether those hours pay better at a pool or at a camp station is taken apart in fishing as an income line.

Not every income line is an item. Warlocks sell summons. The ritual needs the warlock and 2 other players standing at the destination, and what it saves the buyer is the ride across a continent to a dungeon door or a raid entrance.

The fee arrives the way every player payment does, and paying another player in trade has rules of its own about who can hand what to whom.

That is the whole product: somebody else's travel time, sold by the character who happens to be standing in the right place with a group willing to click. On the beta it shows up as the usual chat offers outside instance entrances, paid as a hand-over after the portal goes up.

The other player-run income line worth understanding before you pay into one is prize pools at duel tournaments, where the entry fee is farmed gold and the return is a result rather than a sale.

Treat it as a side line rather than a plan. It only pays while people are moving in volume, it needs 2 helpers who are also giving up their minutes, and the rate is whatever the buyer agrees to in the moment — we have seen no published figures from the beta on what a summon actually goes for, so anyone quoting one is guessing. The comparison worth running is the same one used everywhere else on this page: an hour spent waiting for summon requests against an hour on a gathering loop, measured against the cost of riding training. Where it clearly wins is dead time — sitting at a meeting stone while a group forms costs nothing you were using, and it pairs naturally with what dungeon runs actually pay on the same evening.

The service is not free to provide, and on the warlock side the cost is soul shards. In earlier versions the ritual consumes 1 shard per summon, and shards are farmed kill by kill and then carried in bag slots that would otherwise hold ore, herbs or cloth. Nothing has been published for Forever about whether the ritual still takes a shard, or how many slots a warlock is expected to give up to stock them, so treat the shard cost as the behaviour from earlier versions until you have seen the tooltip yourself. Either way the arithmetic is the same one used for a craft: count the shard and the bag slot on the cost side, and the trip you saved the buyer on the other.

Mage portals sell on the same logic with a narrower reach, because a portal lands in a city rather than at a dungeon door, so what the buyer gets is the ride home instead of the ride out. That points at what the product really is in both cases: a hole in the travel network. A destination with no flight point close to it, a boat crossing with a long wait, a continent change in the middle of a quest chain — those are the places people pay to skip. Where flight paths are dense and the walk is short, nobody pays at all, and a campsite that removes the trips to town for repairs closes off part of the same demand. The volume side depends on how many players share your copy, since a quiet copy has nobody asking. We have seen no figures from the beta on what any of this is worth per hour, so treat transport as something you sell while standing still rather than a route you plan an evening around.

The 2 helpers are the part of the summon trade that does not scale. A ritual needs 3 characters standing at the destination, and a buyer waiting outside an instance does not care which account they are logged in from. Some players close that gap by paying for extra subscriptions and supplying the helpers themselves, which turns an occasional side line into a service with a fixed monthly bill behind it. The bill arrives whether or not anybody asks for a summon that week, and the income it is meant to cover has no published rate: what a summon goes for is whatever the buyer agrees to in the moment. Nothing has been published about how Forever handles several accounts in the same group, so confirm the setup works before paying for it.

Where the service pays is decided by geography and by population rather than by effort. Demand collects at dungeon doors and raid entrances that sit far from a flight point, which means the warlock has to be parked on the route buyers are actually travelling; a stone nobody passes produces no requests however long you sit beside it. The second half is how many players share your copy, since a quiet copy has nobody to ask and the same spot on a busy one can keep a warlock working through an evening. Both move around across the day, so read this as uneven income rather than an hourly rate, and keep measuring it against a gathering loop and the cost of riding training the way every other line on this page is measured.

At 60 — December 9 is the date to aim at

3 raids open on the same day: Barrow Deeps, Hyjal Summit and Onyxia's Lair. Every guild on the server needs consumables in the same week, and with no attunements more people reach them sooner than in any previous version.

Our reading: the fortnight before December 9 is the best selling window of the first season for anyone holding alchemy inputs, cooking materials or enchanting reagents. Stock rather than sell through late November, if you can stand to.

Choosing professions by what you want from them

Organised by goal rather than by profession, because the usual table tells you what each one does and not which to pick.

The one calculation that decides craft or sell

Every time you are about to craft something, run these 4 lines. It takes 10 seconds and it is the difference between a profession that pays and one that quietly eats your riding fund.

The same 4 lines applied to a whole skill range instead of a single item give you the bill for raising a craft.

• What would the raw materials fetch right now — including the ones you gathered yourself, which are not free just because you did not pay cash for them?
• What is the finished item going for — and, more to the point, are those listings selling or just sitting there?
• Subtract the auction cut and any deposit you lose if it does not sell. Neither percentage has been published for Forever, so check them in game before you scale up.
• Is what is left worth the crafting time, against simply listing the materials and going back out?

If the craft does not clearly beat the raw sale after fees, list the materials. Forever's recipe flood makes “level a craft because you always do” the most common way to arrive at 40 with no mount.

The one craft where that test is settled in a trade window instead of a listing is covered in pricing an enchant in trade.

Rod crafting for vendor value is a closed path, not a slow one. The route older guides keep repeating is an enchanter gathering copper, making rods in bulk and selling them to a vendor for more than the inputs cost. In the current build that spread is gone: the vendor value on the crafted rods was cut, and the craft no longer returns what the bars and the time put into it are worth. Nobody has published the before and after values, so we are not going to quote a figure for what the method paid before the change — the point is that the gap it relied on is no longer there, and a guide written on the old numbers will send you through a loss.

Run it through the 4 lines above and it fails on the first one. The copper is worth more listed than melted, which puts rods in the same group as every other craft levelled out of habit: materials that would sell raw are spent to produce an item with a single buyer paying a fixed price. If you took Enchanting for disenchanting greens and for the recipes, keep it and raise it on items you were going to break anyway. If you took it to vendor rods, that plan does not reach the cost of riding training, and the same hours on a gathering loop will.

What a failed listing costs before the materials come back to you is covered in deposits on unsold listings.

The rod cut is one entry in a longer pattern, which we set out separately as crafting goods for vendor sale.

The reverse trade, buying from a counter at a fixed price and listing what you carried away, is worked through in reselling vendor stock at auction.

5 things not to do

When farming beats buying, and when it does not

Here is the part no other gold-making guide can write, because nobody else publishes both sides.

We list gold sellers and earn a commission when somebody buys. That is a reason to distrust us on this question, so we will not answer it — we will hand you the arithmetic instead. The tracker shows what 1,000 gold costs today, read from the open market rather than quoted from memory. Divide that by the hours you would spend farming it, and compare the result with what an hour of your evening is worth to you.

The other side of that comparison sits on the account, and what the trade warning says is shorter than most summaries of it.

2 honest observations about the timing. Supply is at its absolute lowest on launch day and rises every week after, so buying early is the worst exchange rate of the year.

The agreement that trade sits under, and the measures described against it, are set out in the licence terms behind RMT.

And whatever the number says today, it has been moving fast: the market has already halved inside a single day this month.

The cost sitting on the other side of that arithmetic, and the parts of it nobody has published, is covered in what a penalty reaches.

The other half of that comparison sits on the account side, and the published enforcement policy is shorter than most summaries of it suggest.

What could break this plan

What to test on the beta before it closes

The beta ends November 4, 2026 and everything on it is deleted — but what you learn is not. Worth half an evening:

• How dense the nodes are in the new zones, and which routes actually loop.
• What cooked food gives, in numbers, so you know what you are selling in November.
• Whether the auction house is per ruleset. This one question changes more of the above than anything else on the list.
• Where the camping objects sit at skill 20, and how long a campsite lasts.

Questions

What is the fastest way to make gold in WoW Forever?

On a fresh character, gathering 2 professions and selling the raw materials. It needs no starting gold, it works from the first zone, and Forever hands you the first gathering profession free in a quest at around level 3.

Anyone quoting you gold per hour for Forever is guessing. Nobody has played this game at level 60, the auction house has never had a price on it, and the only honest thing to say is which methods need capital and which do not.

How much gold do I actually need?

The number to plan around is riding: 100 gold for the first tier and 1,000 for the top one, with the mount included. Everything else — bags, trainers, reagents — is small beside what riding costs.

Should I level a crafting profession at launch?

Not on your first character, unless you already know a recipe that clears a margin. Crafting burns materials that sell perfectly well raw, and Forever added over 600 recipes, so the competition on the obvious ones will be heavy from week one.

Is gathering still worth it if everyone is doing it?

Prices per stack will be lower than in Classic, yes. But demand is higher too: cooking food now carries an experience bonus, camping objects consume materials, and there are 600-plus recipes looking for inputs. Thin margins on high volume, rather than fat margins on low.

Does the Legacy system really matter for gold?

More than it looks. Bountiful Harvest runs 5 ranks for up to 20% more scarce materials from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning, and the points are earned account-wide. A fifth more on every route, forever, compounds.

The catch is where the points come from. Blizzard's own description is specific: a tradeskill point lands at 150, 225 and 300 in each non-gathering primary profession. Mining, Herbalism and Skinning earn none. So the perk that makes gathering better is paid for by something that is not gathering — a crafting profession, levelling a class, or PvP.

Worth the arithmetic before you plan around it. 65 points exist on the account, but a single character realistically reaches about 29 of them, and may spend only 16. Tradeskills are worth up to 6 of that, at 150, 225 and 300 skill in a non-gathering profession.

Is it cheaper to farm or to buy?

Depends entirely on what your evening is worth to you, and we are the wrong people to answer it — we earn when you buy. What we can do is show the price honestly and let you do the arithmetic.