How I Made 40k Gold in 2 Weeks Starting at Level 1

So here it is, the official breakdown of our competition! In the past 2 weeks Selltacular and I were in a competition to see who could make the most gold on a single faction on a 1:1 Alliance to Horde ratio server, starting with only level 1s. I was representing the Horde and Selltacular the puny Alliance. You can read some of my previous posts about it for some more information if you're curious. Chronologically: Announcement Post, Review 1, Review 2. Also Selltacular joined GoblinRaset and me on our most recent episode of the Drunken Musings Podcast #8 for some competition roundup, be sure to check that out!

For the record, the Final Tally was Selltacular: 28,325g Phat: 39,650g. Lok'tar Ogar! All of the gold made has been donated to Wowprofitz's 1.4 Million+ Gold Stream Giveaway, read more about that here.

Humble Beginnings
Rolling Horde, and being limited to level 1's, I chose to roll a Blood Elf female, because they have the best character model IMO to test out transmog that I was interested in flipping. I rolled a Disc Priest, just because they're fun and mostly because DKs were not allowed.

In order to make gold in WoW you simply cannot just start at level 1 and materialize wealth out of thin air, you really need to level, at least a little bit. I started leveling, up to 8 or 9, and soon got bored of the grinding (one of the multitude of reasons I don't farm on my main server). Prior to even starting the competition I knew that the Darkmoon Faire was in town, so I decided to take a trip out to Darkmoon Island to fish the Wreckage pools around the island for the crates that contain MoP items. This worked okay considering I had to walk to each pool, but on the beach by the pools are level 10 crabs, which I was dotting as I ran from pool to pool for XP. I actually ended up getting roughly 2 levels doing this! I also picked up a Darkmoon Adventurers Guide so that when I hit 15 and hopped in dungeons, I could try to get DMF item drops from bosses. Here's a look at one of the returns from 14 Crates I fished up:

14 Crates

Results from the 14 Crates

Moving On
After fishing at the Faire for a while, without a mount, I decided my time would be better spent getting to 15 to get into dungeons, followed by 20 as fast as possible so I could get my slow ground mount for Darkmoon Island. I begrudgingly picked up Herbalism and Mining, and headed to the Barrens to get to 15. I grinded for an hour or two, picking some flowers along the way, stopping to say hi to Mankrik, and before ya knew it I was on my way to dungeon finder, selling some Copper Ore/Bars and Peacebloom/Silverleaf/Mageroyal. Once I hit 15 I dropped Herbalism like a bad habbit (because it is) and picked up Enchanting to make some quick gold from DEing items during my dungeon runs.

Awkward Teenage Stage
I queued up for my first dungeon, RFC, and started Atonement healing on my Disc Priest. There was one problem with this strategy, which is that (apparently) Disc Priests don't get Atonement healing until level 38! Needless to say our tank actually died because I didn't have any healing addons on, and did not realize he was going down! I am not used to not paying attention on a Disc Priest in dungeons, I more or less play them as mages that passively heal. Whoops. After that I healed by hand, and we got through pretty well before turning on a healing addon. I ran more dungeons through 20, and actually picked up a Mysterious Grimoire, which I sold overnight for 300g! My first big sale! Now it was time to start building up some inventory.

Chronicles of Noobia: Phat's Weekly Lewt Review

So as I mentioned yesterday I'm in a heated competition with Selltacular from Copper to Gold, and I thought my weekly review would be a good time to go over what I've been doing in game to make gold.

Humble Beginnings

I started off the competition with a Belf Disc Priest. The reasons are numerous, but the main being Belfs are good models for transmog using Mogit and Atonement healing is amazing/mindless/like having a 4th dps in the dungeon. Anyway I quickly got bored at level 6, and wanted out of Silvermoon, so I decided to head to org to scope out the Auction House. Here I am greeting some of the local denizens of the Undercity Zeppelin Tower (I just missed the Zeppelin because I went to the wrong tower).

Upon reaching Org and realizing I had almost no gold, I did a few more quests and got Mining/Herbalism, actually picked a few herbs before deciding that I hated myself and got to level 8. That's when it hit me! The DMF was in town! I quickly picked up fishing and took the portal out to DMF to fish up the Floating Debris pools. A great strategy for some startup capital as they have mats like Windwool Cloth, Trillium Ores, and many other MoP level mats. Also since I did not have a mount yet, I spent time in between pools killing the level 10 crabs that surround the island for some extra XP/vendor greys. Here I am jamming out with the Tauren Cheiftans and not being productive.

So I got a good amount of crates crates, as well as a DM Adventurer's Guide so I could collect DMF items from dungeons and I ended up getting a Mysterious Grimore and an Ornate weapon on the first day (was really grinding because the DMF was ending soon and I wanted to capitalize ASAP. I spent the following 3 days grabbing crates in my down time as well as well as leveling with Mining/Enchanting.