Is pure gathering or pure crafting more reliable for money making?

Crafting carries more risk because you tend to hold more mats with unstable prices, and you have to spend gold to earn gold. Crafting has a higher earning ceiling but a lower floor. Gathering is more effort but less risk.

One thing people forget to mention is in the beginning with crafting you are going to be limited by the gold on hand. Even if your stuff auto sells you will be waiting an hour for the gold to hit your mailbox.

Gathering is almost always going to make more sense in the beginning when you are getting set up unless you drop a token or two to level professions and get yourself some starter gold.

It's been my experience that unless you can craft a very desirable item(lariat necklace, maybe some enchants) that gathering comes out way ahead.

I could either spend all day spamming trade chat and maybe get a few hits of people wanting high level weapons(I'm on a low population server group), or I could go out and instead spend that time gathering rousing orders, earth, fire, ire and dirt(which can drop shards of knowledge for professions),

I've made about 2 million gold with mining and dirt farming. Easily could've doubled that if I was mining/herbing instead. Maybe about 200k of that from blacksmithing.

Crafting things for people brings headaches because you've got to deal with people. Have to teach them how inspiration works and have to teach them how the crafting order system works. A lot of them get scared away when you tell them they need the overpriced quality 3 materials and that there's just a 35% chance to actually get a 405-418 item. That's on top of commission they'd have to pay for me to craft it for them.

I easily would have made more gold if I went into blacksmithing goods instead. Anything you can sell on on the auction house imo is better than spamming tradechat. So, if you're planning on going enchanting I'd invest heavily into actually making higher level weapon enchants, since they're still selling for 90k for the Q3 enchants.

Farming is more reliable but crafting scales better.

Looking at previous expansions when most crafted things were BoE you could make more money crafting.

However this expansion makes it very hard to get into the higher end crafting which is done through work orders. The main difference is that (most?) crafting professions hit a wall around 60-70 and need either a lot of materials or Sparks of Igenuity to skill-up.

If you by some miracle get past that wall without spending a ton of gold (ie have a huge alt army that can feed you sparks+primal chaos) you can potentially make gold making things for others a high item levels, but every server is different.

​

Gathering (mining/herbing) gives a lot of passive gold while you fly around doing WQs, waiting for your group to form etc etc. Just make sure you spec into being able to gather while mounted so you have less downtime due to getting attacked by mobs.

After that perception for mining (due to Khazgorite being expensive) and finesse for herbing (due to the "rare" stuff being cheap) should allow you to get a decent amount of gold with little to no extra invested time.

Herbing/mining is more reliable but you're not going to make a ton of money. You can probably just about cover a wow token a month from it with a very small amount of extra cash on top from a couple of hours spent gathering a day.

​

Crafting is really split into item crafting and commodity crafting.

Item crafting can make a huge amount of cash on Spark Day (I pulled in about a million in fees on Tuesday just from leatherworking; my guildie crafting Lariates made over 3.5 mil) but is then thin pickings for the rest of the week. You will also spend a LOT of time in trade chat and you're subject to the whims of Blizzard - they might dump a super bis item for a profession you don't have into the game which just dries up trade in every other slot.

​

Commodity crafting is making intermediate goods from raw materials - Earthshine scales or inscription milling and inks, for example. This is usually a higher income than gathering and a steadier income than item making but you're not going to turn around several million in a day. You're also somewhat dependent on RNG for it, with most profits being based on multicraft, inspiration and resourcefulness procs; remove those and basically almost all intermediate crafts currently trade at a loss.

Right now if you dont spend gold on high quality gear or consumables you can pretty much sustain your sub with anything. Tokens are low and almost everything is in high demand ingame . This will change after a few months thou. I suggest double gather for now and after that switch one for crafting that goes with your other gathering.

Gathering is, on average, more consistent gold but more time and effort.

Crafting is less consistent but also potentially much less time and effort, at least after you get through the initial investment. I mostly advertise in trade in another tab while working from home and casually pick up orders. I've made millions of gold doing this so far, and it's really not much work.

My own experience is that mining and herbing and some specialized items (like the rep tokens for Wrathion/Sabellian who used to go for 2k but are down to 300g) can net some spiffy amounts. I've had nice 250k+ results from selling.

Nowadays it's more like 70k+ about ish a week. Overall it pays for the sub and raiding mats but not much left to amass. With the super rares no longer worth farming for me and WQs being so few and on such long timers I'm no longer roaming the land as much and thus picking up herbs/ores passively while playing.

If I am to *actually* run in circles picking up herbs and ores then no, lol, 13€ is peanuts and not worth wasting my waking hours. But the 10.5 patch seems to promise a reason to keep going around the land so I'm sticking to foraging.

Every day I buy about 100k of mats then pop an incense and craft it all. I then list the crafts for about 200-250k then sell it over the day and will relist between dungeons. Altogether maybe a half hour a day goes into this (not counting the crafting time since I leave the computer for that). I don't think any gathering profession could get me this much money for the time spent.

Made 80k just selling the awakened elements while I sit in Que for solo shuffle for 30 minutes. Finish the match, Que again for another 30 and farm.

I haven't seen too many people address your question directly, so: you can easily make enough gold from gathering to keep your sub going. Conservatively right now ~5h of dedicated gathering will reliably get you a token. If you're efficient with it I'd guess you can do it in less than half that.

Your profit with crafting professions is easily calculated if you set up a spreadsheet. Then you can decide on your own if that’s what you wanna do.

crafting makes more gold if you know what you're doing.

If your too lazy to even do your own research then crafting is not for you this expac. Stick to mining & herbing.