Garrisons, Gold, and the WoW Token


Been a little quiet around here lately! It might possibly be because in addition to writing for Blizzard Watch and doing From Draenor With Love, I'm also in two Storium games, two D&D campaigns, still raid-leading TTGF's raids twice a week and working. If only these things weren't just so fun! (Well, maybe not the last one.)

Anyway, I was logging in to do my garrison missions and it occurred to me that making gold has never been easier. I'm no gold tycoon, but I'm also always pretty flush, despite always cutting my own gems, doing my own enchants, paying for my own repairs, etc. Did you ever see the FDWL strip about Nomi and his daily food gift? That's 100% true. Every day when he'd give me his bowl of shitty noodles, I wouldn't carry it over to the vendor and make 20 silver or whatever it was worth, I'd destroy it right in front of him because 20 silver wasn't worth my time.

And my riches are not because I do a lot of auction house stuff. On the contrary, I HATE doing auctions! I know one of the first pieces of "How to Make Gold" tips is "SELL EVERYTHING!" but ugh, I do not have the patience for this.

People always complain that it's impossible to make a dent into already-established economies, but while I play primarily on Drenden, I have relatively high-level alts on Moonrunner and Medivh, and whenever I've set my mind to making some cash on those servers I've never had a problem. I've given most of my funds away on those servers to friends who main there, but on both servers I had easily at least 100k, 150k. How? By finding an area of the market that was relatively untapped with good profit potential. In Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor, you could make serious cash by crafting/selling the cheap max-level enchants, the ones that took like 2 dust and a pile of sticks to make. Those would sell for 100+ gold, easy. I'd toss a few scrolls up every week or so and it was more than enough to build up some nice gold reserves.

However, it seems this is a little more difficult in Warlords. But who cares! WE'VE GOT GARRISONS NOW. Or more specifically, Treasure Hunters.

That picture at the top of this post is from the missions I started a few minutes ago. I'm super lazy, so my version of Master Plan is out-of-date, but those gold totals are actually double or triple what the screenshot says. That's 819 gold from 10 seconds of throwing followers into missions and hitting okay.

And those are low-reward missions. Sometimes you hit it big.


That's 2000 gold on an alt character. What, you're not using your alts with Garrisons as gold factories? Why not??

I only have one level 100 alt, and a level 93 alt, and they're steadily at work inflating my wallet each week, with minimal effort/time investment. And Fabulor's followers are doing the same, of course - they're just also bringing me home raid gear and bonus roll tokens and whatever else, too.

I admit, I only really started recruiting Treasure Hunters once the WoW Token went live. Backstory: when I tried Wildstar last year, their CREDD system was extremely appealing to me. And since the game was new, I had little difficulty dominating the early economy with easily-produced crafted items, and didn't end up paying for any subscription fees.

So, when the WoW Token was introduced, I was so excited to actually have something to spend my gold on! And I may have gone a little overboard.


I've forced myself to not even LOOK at the WoW Token prices now. I'm by no means poor, but I'm definitely not quite as well-off as I once was.

But Treasure Hunters are such a perfect solution. Three weeks ago, I started keeping track of how much gold Fabulor and my two alts with garrisons were bringing in each week, with zero auction house activity and after deducting random costs like repair bills or the occasional transmog fee or building upgrade. So far it's been 14,000g, 17,500g and 16,000g! And the best part is, this is an entirely sustainable source of revenue, at least while Warlords is still current (I expect Blizzard will kill the gold-making potential when the next expansion hits). No relying on auction house sales, no relying on finding a rare BoE and selling it, nothing like that!

Sure, you can make more by farming mobs for hours on end, or running old raids over and over again on a litany of characters. To me, these seem grueling, tedious chores. If you enjoy doing it, then power to you. Me, I'm quite happy just enlisting a bunch of Treasure Hunters (Fabulor and Sans each have 7, while Morgion has none), sitting back, and letting the profits roll in.

2 Responses Subscribe to comments

  1. gravatar
    Dahakha

    Yep, I can't believe that Blizz set the Token price so low, precisely because of Garrisons. Are those gold amounts you listed per week, or total for 3 weeks? Even if it's the latter, anyone with a couple of alts can "play the Garrison" to pay for their sub. And as it becomes more obvious, more people will do so. If that doesn't put the Token price up to a reasonable point, Blizz is going to lose a hell of a lot of money. I expected the Tokens to cost at least 50-60k initially, so imagine my incredulity when they debuted at around 30k.

    May 19, 2015 at 11:47 PM

  2. gravatar
    Mittenz

    Buh. So you're saying, if I buy a month's time and get to max level, I could be playing WoW for free O_o

    May 20, 2015 at 1:29 PM