This post was submitted by Jens. Leave a comment and let Jens know what you thought of the article!
Subject: Goldmaking
Requirements: One extra account, at least vanilla.
Time required: 1 minute per gaming session.
Professions needed: Fishing, skill level 1.
Expected gold: 500g per hour. Calculated from 1 account fishing and a Volatile Fire price at 5g each.
I recently read a study on how you could characterize the typical gamer. I’m only going to mention
select parts of it here, most certainly taken out of context, so don’t get stuck on the validity or
reliability of these factoids. But I found at least parts of it fitting myself.
According to these scientists, your typical MMO gamer is:
- Above average intelligence.
- Highly adaptable to new intellectual situations.
- Able to keep a high level of concentration for extended periods of time.
- Very good at multitasking.
- Dexterous and with fast reactions.
Whether these things are a prerequisite for success in gaming or a result of the intellectual stimuli
you get while playing, I don’t know. The thing I do know and care about is this:
We can use it to make gold.
What really caught my eye here was the Very good at multitasking part. Most of us here play quite
a lot, doing very different things. I’d say the only common part of them all is the waiting. Waiting for
Arena/BG queue, waiting for the pull in an instance, flying/running while questing, you name it.
For myself the majority of the waiting is while raiding, waiting for the pulls, even waiting for energy
for my next ability. Here’s where the multitasking comes in, you can almost always spare a second
here and there. But how do you make gold with one second once every twelve (minutes/seconds)?
You guessed it, fishing! What we’ll be fishing is Volatile Fire. You can fish this from a Pool of Fire,
just a normal fishing pool except it only gives Volatile Fire. Four of these spawn in Mount Hyjal and
Twilight Highlands. Each pool yields 1-8 volatile fire and has a 12 minute respawn time. That means
20 – 160 per area every hour.
I used this extensively during the progress of the first raid tier in Cataclysm. I have two monitors
and three accounts, so I set my main screen as my raid screen and on my off screen I had two small
windows with one character in Hyjal and one in Highlands. This way I fished on average 800 Volatile
Fire each raidnight, which sold at 15-20 gold each in those days. It’s still very profitable, especially
with 4.2 around the corner where the demand for Volatile Fire is expected to rise, as is the time
spent raiding.
Now I understand that most people might not have 2 monitors and 3 accounts with an 85 on each,
nor a computer that can handle that while raiding at the same time. But that’s really not needed.
The only thing you need is one extra account, doesn’t even have to be upgraded beyond vanilla (you
could make sure to buy when Blizzard are offering promotionals, something which happens from
time to time).
You will need to make a few changes to the in game settings before you start.
- First, set your Display Mode to Windowed (Fullscreen). Options -> Graphics -> Display Mode. This lets you tab between your games faster.
- Then raise Ambience volume to max while lowering all other sounds to 0. Options -> Sound -> volume. This makes the fishing sound loud and clear.
- Then check the box that says Sound in Background in the same menu. Now you should be able to hear your bobber sound even while dodging Shadowcutters of Doom on Sinestra.
- If your computer needs it, you can also lower Max Background FPS, so that your fishing account doesn’t strain your computer as much. Options -> Advanced -> Max Background FPS.
Now you should be ready. Log in to both accounts, make a level 10 character and get fishing on
him, pools luckily ignore fishing skill. Summon him to Hyjal (it’s better than Highlands for low level
characters since there are no mobs around there) and place him by the poolspawns. If you have a
character with a flying mount, you can fly in the middle of the lava lake and you can catch any pool
spawns with only a glance. When you raid, tab over once in a while until you catch a spawn. Start
fishing and tab back and keep playing until you hear the fishing bobber. Start a long cast/drain your
energy, tab over and loot the fire and cast your line again, then tab back. Repeat until the pools are
fished out, stick to your main account for 12 minutes, and then start checking for new pool spawns.
You will pretty soon get in to it and find that you can keep fishing and still keep a full DPS rotation
without missing any pool spawns. I know, I did.
While doing this you will get competition by other players, but most of them will fly past looking for
pools and fly away if they can’t find any. Thanks to this, you can keep the area for yourself as long as
you make sure you fish the pools as soon as they spawn, thus not letting anyone else get their hopes
up.
If you do this, you get yourself a new account, which is good for several reasons. You get the Recruit
a Friend leveling bonus, mount and free month of game time. You also get a great chance to start
an Alchemy Army. Not to mention a pretty large sum of gold every raid night, without spending any
extra time.
The only downside I’ve found is that you can’t really browse www.kuvaton.com while raiding
anymore…
Feel free to share any other gold making activities that suit raid multitasking!
Do you want to write for JMTC? Send in a post to Markco and if it makes it past the initial screening process then I will publish your submission on the blog. JMTC pays 50% commission to writers on the day that their post goes live.
