Group Farming Pays Less Than Solo Farming
Two characters on one camp do not earn twice as much, and often they do not earn as much as they would apart. This is what a party actually divides in Forever, which of those divisions you can plan around, and the handful of cases where grouping pays for itself outright.
What a party actually divides
Three things change the moment you accept an invite, and only one of them is in your favour. Coin from a body is split between the members present, so the same kill pays each of you a fraction of what it paid alone. Items go to a roll rather than straight into your bags, which means a drop worth listing lands with you some of the time instead of every time. The tag is shared, so a mob you did not hit first is still yours to loot, and that is the part worth having.
Nodes are where people misread the trade. Grouping does nothing to a herb or a vein: both go to whoever reaches and clicks first, party or not, and no party setting changes it. Two gatherers on one loop are not pooling the route, they are halving it, and the second rider arrives at an empty spot rather than a shared one. The loop that fed a single character comfortably feeds a pair badly, before you count other gatherers sharing your copy who never joined the group at all.
None of that destroys gold. A divided coin split moves the same money between 2 bags instead of 1, which is a transfer rather than a drain, and the world total is unchanged either way. What it changes is your own hourly figure, and that is the number every method on this site is competing for. The useful way to read a party is as a cost on the income side bought with a benefit on the speed side, and the whole question is whether the speed is real.
The bottleneck decides the answer
Ask what is actually limiting the camp before you ask who to bring. If the mobs are the limit, a party removes it: a spot dense enough that one character cannot hold it, elites that take a long attempt alone, or a contested area where you keep losing the first hit to somebody else. In all 3 the group clears what a solo character cannot reach, and the division of coin and drops is paid for by the kills that would otherwise never have happened.
If the respawn rate is the limit, the party is a straight loss. Mobs do not come back faster because 2 people are standing there, so you are dividing a fixed supply and adding a second person's waiting time to it. The arithmetic to run in your head is simple enough: for the split to break even, the pair has to kill more than twice as fast as either of you alone. Travel, drinking and downtime are usually what decides that, not damage.
There is a repair side as well, and it runs the other way. A character who takes fewer hits because somebody else is holding the mob pays a smaller bill at the end of the evening, which is real money even when the coin per kill drops. Weigh all of it against a gathering loop rather than against sitting still, because a route pays per node and scales with ground covered, which converts more predictably into the cost of riding training than any camp does.
Where a group pays for itself outright
Quest collection steps are the clearest case. Done alone, a step that asks for items off mobs either closes in a few pulls or outlasts the rest of the zone, and you cannot plan an evening around that spread. 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 while the other is still near the start. The step costs roughly what it should for each member.
Hides were the other exception for a stretch of the beta, when every skinner on a kill took 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: one corpse, one skinner, first click wins. If it returns, it is the only gathering line where company raises your yield instead of lowering it, and shared skinning on one corpse is worth re-checking on your own character before you plan a farm around it.
Dungeons sit outside the comparison entirely, because the content requires the group and the question is only whether the hour beats a route. Treat the clear the way the brackets treat it elsewhere: the coin covers the repair, the saleable drops and the cloth are the income, and quest rewards you equip are purchases you never make. The same hour against what a dungeon run returns is the comparison, not solo grinding against party grinding.
What nobody has published
We are describing behaviour, not rates. Blizzard has published nothing about how coin is divided in a Forever party, how quest item distribution works, or whether any of it differs from earlier versions, so everything above is read from how the game has behaved before and from what testers describe on the beta client. Any of it can be adjusted before launch, and a rule that held in one build has already been rolled back in another on the skinning side. Check the loot options on your own party before you build an evening around them.
There are no gold-per-hour figures here and there will not be. Nobody has measured a camp in Forever under conditions anyone else can reproduce, and a number from a 2004 realm is describing a different density, a different drop table and a different market. What you can measure yourself is narrower and more useful: run the same loop solo and then with a partner, compare what each of you carries home, and repeat it once more when how busy your copy is has changed.
The last unknown is the one that moves the most money. How much supply a pair of gatherers adds to the market depends on how many people level in groups at all, and no figure for that has been published by anyone. It belongs with the rest of the supply question in the plan by level bracket, which assumes a first character working alone for the simple reason that most of them are.
Questions
Do 2 players on the same route gather twice as much?
No. Herbs and veins go to whoever reaches and clicks first, and being in a party does not change that, so 2 gatherers on one loop are dividing the same nodes rather than adding to them. The only thing grouping changes on a gathering route is that you can see each other on the map and take different halves of it, which is a coordination benefit rather than a yield one. If you want more materials per hour from a partner, split the zone between you and run separate loops.
When is grouping clearly worth the divided coin?
When the mobs are the limit rather than the respawn rate. A camp you cannot hold alone, an elite that takes a long solo attempt, or a contested area where you keep losing the first hit are all cases where the party unlocks kills that would not otherwise happen, and the division is paid for by the extra clears. If both of you are standing around waiting on the same spawns, the party is making each of you poorer than a separate route would.
Do quest items split the same way as coin?
They behave differently in earlier versions of the game: collection items off mobs are handed out in turn to party members rather than always to whoever tagged, which flattens the feast-or-famine spread a solo character gets. Nothing about quest drop handling has been published for Forever, so treat that as the old behaviour until you have watched it on your own party. The gold argument does not depend on the detail, because the saving is in hours rather than in the items themselves.
Does skinning in a group still give everyone a full share?
Not in the current build. For a stretch of the beta every skinner on a kill took their own hides from the same corpse, which made Skinning the one gathering trade that grew with party size. Testers report that reverted, so a corpse is back to one skinner and first click wins. If it changes again it is worth re-checking, because it is the only rule that would make a farming group better than the same players split up.
Sources
- Profession changes, the free gathering quest and the camping objects that shape what a route yields — Wowhead's professions breakdown.
- Riding training costs, the target most of this farming is aimed at — Sportskeeda interview with the developers.
What changed on this page
- 2026-10-05First version: what a party divides, when the split is paid for, and which rules are still unpublished.