The Queue: A barn full of cash

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I have a mighty long response to today's first question!

Morte asked:

You say "there are more than enough ways to make gold", could you give us a few ideas? I'm having a tough time keeping enough gold on my alts with all the garrison building expences.

You directed this question at Anne. I'm not Anne, but I'll try to answer this anyway as far as how I make my gold. First, the garrison is the #1 gold sink in this expansion. It's also an investment. The garrison can be a good source of gold, but you need to dump a lot into it before you have a chance of making a profit. You're probably not going to see your gold numbers go up while you're sinking thousands into construction.

First, I have the Inn in my garrison. The daily dungeon quests help, but that isn't the reason I have it -- I have it for the treasure hunting follower missions. You'll receive a few garrison missions each day that give a flat pile of gold. You'll get a few hundred gold each day this way -- which isn't an enormous number, but they cost you nothing but garrison resources which generate themselves. They don't even require much time investment, so if there's a day you can't play very much, you can log in just long enough in the morning to send your followers off to pick up your free gold.

Second, I sell everything I don't use on the auction house. All of those free crafting reagents from the garrison? Sell them. They don't sell for very much, mind -- and prices going to depend entirely on your server/server cluster. On my server, herbs and ores sell for roughly 1g per item which means a stack of 200 will sell for 200 gold. If you have a barn, Raw Beast Hides and Sumptuous Fur sell for far more than that. In general, it's a matter of volume. No, these things don't sell for much, but you're getting a ton of it for little to no time investment. Even if it sells low, it's free to you (after the initial investment) and you have a ton of it.

I mentioned the barn in that last point. What I discovered after building up my barn is Savage Blood is only "rare" because not many people choose to build the Barn, and of those that did built it, many don't bother with trapping the elite beasts. If you have a barn and you trap the elite beasts, you'll have more Savage Blood in a couple weeks than you could ever hope to use. The stuff is not rare at all if you're actually producing it. Given how many of them I have sitting in my bank, I suspect the people producing it are holding back some of their product to keep prices up. I bet I could tank the prices on it for a week by myself if I flooded the market. On my server, it sells for about 1,000g each. To generate Savage Blood, I don't trap the mobs that give meat. Meat is useless. I have more feasts than I know what to do with. I aim for the animals that give fur and leather, because that's what makes money.

Now that I've mentioned the lack-of-rarity for Savage Blood, the market is probably going to tank anyway!

I make more gold in this expansion than I've ever made in previous expansions -- keeping in mind I've never been focused on generating gold, just keeping myself afloat. With the garrison, I aim for things that will trickle gold into my pocket while putting in minimal effort. I pick buildings that will let me passively generate gold, or generate gold as a byproduct of what I actually want to do. I built a barn to upgrade my epics. While doing that, I had an influx of fur and leather, which went straight to the auction house. Now that I have my epics, the Savage Blood gets sold off, too. But yes, while you're actually building up your garrison, you'll take a significant loss. Especially if you're building more than one at a time.

Netlive asked:

Is something wrong with my salvage yard? I opened 4 big boxes and all I got was 1 Grey item in each. Is this just bad luck?

It's just a run of bad luck. Keep at it. What you can receive from the salvage yard has such huge variation that you'll inevitably hit streaks. You can get anything from a single piece of vendor trash all the way up to ilevel 665 epics. I've never received one of those epics myself, but I know people who've received multiple. That's the way the RNG crumbles.

Razwick92 asked:

Do you have a specific formula that you tend to follow with the way your characters look? If you do, do you know why/have a reason?

I've got two styles of character, one seems to be just because I like it, the other has direct inspiration. The first series of novels I can remember falling in love with is by Tamora Pierce (the Alanna series) and it features a heroine with red hair and purple eyes. If I have the option, most of my characters will be redheads with purple eyes (didn't see that one coming did you?). Alternatively, I go for tall, darked and horned, but those characters are occasionally also redheads.

I've always preferred creating female characters in games, but my usual roster of of characters in an MMO or RPG comes from the characters I made in WoW. I'll always make a blonde warrior first because of my paladin. The blonde holy warrior that will smash your face in is a favorite of mine. After that, an unassuming redheaded rogue that will shank you when you're not looking. Both of those characters are humans. Almost all of my characters are humans.

I try not to base my game characters off of someone from a book I read because I always end up with a feeling of that character not being "mine."

Jimmy asked:

I may be wrong but dont we usually (as in every expansion before) have had more than one riad before n.1 releases? I though we were supposed to have two raids at the begging of this expansion.

What we've had in prior expansions doesn't necessarily matter -- Blizzard does whatever it wants regardless of what has been done before. But in this case, there is a second raid: Blackrock Foundry. It hasn't opened yet because Blizzard is staggering the release. Highmaul opened first and Blackrock Foundry will open in February. It isn't patch 6.1 content, it's patch 6.0 content that we can't access yet.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!