As a new player to World of Warcraft, or even as an old one whose re-rolled onto a new server with no other characters, gold is important. One of the classic mistakes is to spend too much as your levelling and not having the money to even buy your class skills. This short guide is designed to help you avoid going flat broke early in the game.

1) Gathering Professions are your friends.

Skinning, Herbalism and Mining are the 3 Gathering professions of World of Warcraft. They allow you to collect raw materials out in the world for use in Crafting Professions. Whilst levelling however, there is very little reason to use gear made by professions as quest rewards should always be more than enough to keep your character combat capable.

My personal advice would be to pick Herbalism and Mining. Make sure to always keep the levels maintained as you level up as the Flowers and Veins that you click on to get Herbs and Ore will now give experience points as well! Your making gold and shaving a bit of time off your levelling time! Once your bags are full, finish your round of quests and head to a capital city and put them on the Auction House.

2) Pricing on the Auction House.

Auctioning Items is reletively simple right now. Simply find an Auctioneer in a Capital City and right click on him to bring up the Auction House screen. There is a search bar at the top of this that you can type in the names of items to search for, and refine that search to only certain catagories by clicking the various tabs on the left (Like "Gems"). You can also open your bags and Shift + Left Click any item in your bags to put it's name in the search bar.

Always look for the items your about to sell, and make a note of their prices. Low level Ore, Herbs and Skins will seem quite expensive and this is true. They are mostly purchased by high level players levelling up their professions, and it is from these players that you will earn your first few gold. Sell your items on the Auction House for just a little cheaper than the cheapest ones, unless it looks suspciously cheaper than the rest. So if there is a lot of Copper Ore on the Auction house for 2 Gold for a stack of 20 Ore, you would sell for 1 gold 95 silver for a stack of 20 Ore.

Preserverance is required in the Auction House. It may take a while for someone to buy your items or they may not be bought at all. Some days are good and some are bad, so keep at it.

3) No, you don't need to buy that gear!

One of my earliest memories was furiously selling everything I had to buy a BoE sword called The Black Knight. Not only was this a small upgrade of a weapon, it wasn't even that good for my character! I spent all my gold on nothing and was rather skint for a long time afterward!

While at the Auction House, avoid looking at pages containing any kind of gear. It is always too expensive to be worth it, you get plenty of decent workable equipment from quests and the dungeon finder and you'll only end up wasting gold like I did. Resist the urge to splurge on gear until you hit the level cap (85).

4) Need more bagspace!

Bags are important to the new player. While those with main characters can afford to give our other ones lots of big bags, you don't have that luxury. The Auction House may be able to supply you with some, but this can be very pricey depending on the server. Thankfully, there is a method of obtaining some bags if your lucky and polite.

Netherweave Cloth is the cloth that drops from enemies in Outland, a world where characters level from 60 to 70. This cloth drops in abundance and only 24 of this cloth is needed to make a Netherweave bag, which holds 16 Slots. Check the auction house first, 24 Neatherweave Cloth tends to be a lot cheaper than the actual bags. If it's only a few gold for a stack, splurge out and then ask in Trade Chat ( /2 by default ) for a Tailor to make Netherweave Bags.

If your flat broke already, you can always use the /who command to look for any high level people in an Outland zone. Level 85's in either Hellfire Peninsula, Zangarmarsh, Terokkar Forest, Nagrand, Blade's Edge Mountains, Shadowmoon Valley or Netherstorm are almost always not there to get the cloth for themselves. Be polite and use proper grammar when whispering these people about whether you can have their Netherweave Cloth to make bags. If your nice enough, and there not in a foul mood, they may mail you some cloth to help you out. Always ask them once and once only, silence from them typically means "No"

5) Be Polite, Don't Beg.

As a final note to finish this off, never ask for gold. You will only irk the player on the recieving end. Politeness gets you everywhere, make yourself endearing to others.