Just a heads up that this is an independent review, and if you’re looking for the official Gold Secrets website then click here.

WoW Gold Secrets by Luke Brown

My review of Luke Brown’s Gold Secrets guide

WoW Gold Secrets is a comprehensive and detailed guide to making gold in World of Warcraft.  With 325 pages of content, 3 bonus guides, a profit chart, and free lifetime updates, the guide totally over-delivers.  The presentation is great, too.  The author clearly put some work into the WoW-themed design, making it feel like a perfect companion to the game.

The table of contents is huge, and covers pretty much every niche you could think of and some that you probably haven’t.  The writing is done in a first person style, and holds your hand all the way through.  The individual sections are really well written and informative, and the author makes it clear that some techniques may be more effective than others depending on your server.

I obviously can’t go over every method in the book, so I’ll just say this much.  As you probably guessed by my earlier post, I HATE farming gold.  I’d rather do pretty much anything else in game, but as someone who likes to keep my gear up to date and have the best gems and enchants available, I spend a LOT of it.

Usually when I logged in, I spent 2-3 hours on daily quests and grinding, and on some days I would spend another hour or two mining.  That’s almost a part time job, just to keep my characters in decent shape.  It got to the point where I was seriously thinking about just buying gold, risk of getting banned and all.

Trying this guide was my last ditch effort before risking a ban just so I could stop farming.  I read through the guide, found the techniques that I thought would take the least amount of time, and started using them.  And guess what?

I spent less time farming, and actually made MORE gold!

Click here to discover the secrets I used.

I cut my dailies down to just the ones I needed for rep grinds.  I only mined while waiting for random heroic groups.

I’m going to be totally straight up with you guys here.  I am a pretty lazy guy.  I wanted to take the work out of making gold in WoW.  I work 40 – 50 hours a week at my day job, I don’t need to turn World of Warcraft into a second job.

I ended up using mostly auction house techniques to earn my gold.  Combine that with the auctioneer mod and the bonus guide to using it that comes along with the guide, and I had myself a cash cow that could be milked on short notice for 10 minutes of my time.  I used the Profit Chart that was included with Gold Secrets, and did less of the stuff that didn’t work and more of the stuff that did.

Now to be fair, I’m not making the author’s listed 497 gold per hour.  You might be able to get there depending on your server’s economy, but mine is trash.  I’m not doing too bad for myself though.

My current average is 426 gold per hour of play time, and yes, that includes the time that I’m PVPing and waiting for instance groups.  Pretty good, especially when you consider that I only really spend about 20 – 25 minutes a day playing the auction house.

The guide also claims to offer gold-making solutions for characters of all levels.  Last time I started a new character on a new server, I didn’t have the gold at 20 for my mount, so I decided to test this theory out.  I started a Night Elf priest on a new server,  and by the time I bought my Nightsaber at 20, I had almost 300g to spare.  Now, when I first leveled my Undead Rogue to 60, he barely had 100g when he dinged.  It’s pretty clear that the lowbie strategies work too.

If you have ever had issues with keeping your characters in decent gear for leveling, getting upgrades enchanted and gemmed, or earning the gold to get your epic flying mount, this guide WILL change how you play WoW.  If you’re anything like me, you’ll find that your play time just got a LOT more fun.

Click here to discover WoW Gold Secrets.

Today’s tip (and, to be honest, a lot of the future ones as well) will be centered around exploiting the twink market.  The twink market is easily one of the most lucrative in the game.  The items are easily acquired through trivial content and are in high demand, which is pretty much a recipe for success.  This particular tip will take you to Old Hillsbrad via the Caverns of Time.

Take a flight to Tanaris, ride to the Caverns of Time, and jog through until you get to the Old Hillsbrad instance.  Once inside, you’ll want to mount up and ride to Southshore.  Head in to the Inn, and speak with the barkeep.  Ask to see what he’s got for sale.  See that Rumsey Rum Black Label?  Buy as much of it as you have bag space for.  When you’re out of bag space, go ahead and hit your hearthstone.

When you get back to your main city, do a quick search on the auction house.  If you have competition, undercut them slightly, otherwise list it in stacks of 5 for 1-3g per stack.  Considering your cost per group of 5 is 10 silver, that’s a pretty hefty return.

Don’t forget to check back next Wednesday for a new Gold Secret of the week!

When I hit 70, I had made enough gold to cover the cost of my normal flying mount, but I knew that the next 5000 gold was not going to come as easy.  Psychologically, the only reason that first 1000 gold had been so effortless was because my focus was on power leveling to 70.  When you’re paying attention to a leveling guide, you don’t really notice your gold per hour ratio.  I figured if I wanted to actually keep enjoying the game, I had to figure out some way to minimize the amount of time I spent on Elemental Plateau killing Storming Wind-Rippers for primals while still getting a steady amount of gold flowing in.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I picked up that WoW Gold Secrets guide, and one of the techniques I found in there involved auction house arbitrage.  I implemented a few of the tips in there, made some purchases and relisted them, and then went to do some Arathi Basin.  A few games later, I was capping the Lumber Mill when my screen started to fill with “A buyer has been found for your auction of _________”

I worked it out and it turns out while I was killing Alliance in AB, I was making around 40 gold per hour.  Nothing amazing, but considering it took me about 20 minutes of auction house browsing, I was pretty happy.  Since then, I’ve gotten about 75% of my gold from auctioneering, with the rest divided between doing a few dailies, finishing quest chains that interest me, running heroics, and mining (or herbing, depending on which of my toons I’m playing) while I explore Northrend on my epic flier.

Anyone else have a favorite way of keeping the gold rolling in without actively farming?

I was impressed, but skeptical.  I mean seriously, this guy was claiming 297 gold per hour, and I was struggling to maintain a consistent 75.  On top of that, he was trying to tell me I could do it without facerolling daily quests or grinding elementals.  I was pretty sure he was lying outright, and that this would just be a fancy, well-packaged gold farming guide.

I checked over the refund policy meticulously and decided to pull the trigger on it.  When I opened it up, I was a little bit overwhelmed.  This dude wrote almost 300 pages on earning WoW gold! I took a quick skim through it, and found that there was actually a lot of stuff that I didn’t know.  Definitely a good sign, since I’ve spent a good amount of time researching this stuff.

To be fair, there is a decent amount of stuff in here that is pretty common knowledge.  I wouldn’t say that “Gold Secrets”  is filler-free.  What I would say is that the vast majority of the featured techniques are far more effective than what I was doing before, and I decided not to ask for a refund.  It’s pretty much exactly what it says it is, a no-nonsense gold guide that gives you some new techniques to apply to increase the amount of gold you make.  If you want the WoW equivalent of a get rich quick scheme, go buy gold and take your chances with getting banned.  If you’re looking for some fresh techniques so you can spend less time farming gold and more time actually enjoying the game, you might want to check out WoW Gold Secrets.