I consider myself a casual and lazy player. But not lazy as in “I just want to sit on my ass and be handed stuff while sleeping and eating pizza simultaneously.” Lazy as in “I want to play smart with doing minimal effort but maximizing what I can do with my time.” Sometimes, I feel that just banging your head needlessly against a boss or situation is not good use of your time. The whole idea of this post is how to play “smart lazy.”
Easy Key to the Palace of Lei Shen
The treasure room is one of my favorite areas since patch 5.2. Free gold and items. But how can you get a quick key? By far the easiest way to obtain a key is to find a rare mob on the Isle of Thunder. And the two easiest rares to locate are Goda and Lu-Ban. Goda is a turtle sitting in its shell inside a tree hollow close to the entrance of the palace of Lei Shen while Lu-Ban is a mogu type of humanoid forging items near one of the daily quest mini bosses. Because of their spawn points, you pretty much can check one or the other with relative ease. If one isn’t up, you can hop on over to check if the other one is up. There might be a few other rares that are simple to find, but these are pretty accessible.
Usually, once I find a rare, I’ll announce it in chat to try to get others to lend me a hand. Since these mobs can be looted by both alliance and horde, both can participate without worry of faction tagging. If you run multiple alts like myself, you can even just camp them. In my case, for my alts that haven’t completed the scenarios that unlock the entrance to the island (because my alts might be a little weak), I’ll have them camp right on the rocks near Goda. Then throughout the day, I’ll check up on them. Sometimes a chest spawns inside of the little tree hollow, which can also contain a Key to the Palace of Lei Shen.
Pet Battles for Lesser Charms of Good Fortune
Do you hate dailies but can’t figure out an easy method for Lesser Charms of Good Fortune? Do you want to pass time quickly and yet accomplish something? Are you sitting in an 20+ minute queue just reading trade chat in the Shrines? Well, you’re the primary target for Pet Battles!
Pet Battles have a chance to grant your level 90 Lesser Charms of Good Fortune, which these days can be pretty tedious to come by. If you’ve pretty much become sick of dailies and want a stress free method for getting these Charms, then Pet Battles are one of the easiest and fun ways to obtain them. The great thing about Pet Battles is that you can level up tons of pets, find new pets, especially rares and do it all over again. It might sound grindy, but it’s pretty easy.
For myself, I like building up a variety of pets so that I can plan to eventually handle most pet encounters. One of the better resources, I’ve found on the subject is from warcraftpets. Probably, the most handy resource from the site is their cheat sheet when it comes to the advantages/disadvantages of pets.
By having a variety of pets handy, you can ensure that you will have a constant stream of lesser tokens available as well as some other activity outside of grinding dailies. Also, try aiming for collecting rares while you’re at this. The idea again is a low stress activity to get a few low hanging fruit type of items while you’re waiting for something else.
Dailies for Easy Gold, Valor and Lesser Charms of Good Fortune
If you aren’t too burnt out from dailies, then they are probably the best method for earning gold in the game. Even if you have maximized your reputation, you can look at dailies as ways to earn gold, valor points and lesser charms. In the case of the Sunreavers, Golden Lotus and Tillers, you can get a few more rewards from completing your dailies. The trick is determining which dailies to do and which ones to avoid.
For instance, there’s a Tillers daily that requires you to speak with four people in town which takes approximately a minute. At most, you’ll have to burn 2 gold in return for roughly 18 gold (after the transaction). How much easier can that get? Imagine if you have 10-11 level 90 alts all parked at the farm. That’s a little over 180 gold just for talking to people for roughly 10 minutes!
The main thing for me is focusing on easy daily hubs that take little time but give a decent amount of rewards for your effort. The ones that fit this criteria are the Tillers (most of them), August Celestials (especially the ones at the Jade Temple and the Temple of the White Tiger), the Anglers and the Order of the Cloud Serpent. I find that you can do each of these hubs in roughly 10-20 minutes max. The others like the Golden Lotus, Klaxxi, Shado-Pan, Isle of Thunder and Dominance Offensive really depend on what the quest of the day is. Isle of Thunder, in my opinion, is mostly a waste of time because the work-to-reward ratio is horrible. Half of the Golden Lotus dailies are pretty much garbage and wastes of time. The first part is worth doing but the follow ups can either be frustratingly bad (like the little village) or pretty easy (such as the lake). Dominance Offensive are 75% decent and only the cave is practically useless. Finally, the Shado Pan is at most worthless except maybe 1 or 2. But most are pretty bad and a horrible waste of time.
That said, you still can earn around 800-1000+ gold/day for maximizing all of this. But if you have a good route that eliminates the time wasting ones, you probably can still get anywhere between 400-500 gold/day for an hour or two worth’s of work (with the most time consuming issue being the flight travel). That’s not that bad, especially if you’re having gold issues. And this is all guaranteed gold beyond the Charms and Valor rewards.
Maximizing Your Farm
I’m on my 8th alt with a maxed out farm. If I manage to gear up my guys and have more time, I would probably spend most of my time focused on the farm and maybe some dailies for gold. But once you have maxed out your farm on several level 90 toons, you can easily become an industrial powerhouse. Some things you can do are:
- Planting all herb farms and focusing on obtaining golden lotus. I haven’t really checked golden lotus cost on the AH, but I found that even with one toon dedicating their farm to herbs, I’ll get around 5-6 golden lotus. So imagine having 8-10 toons just with all herbs. You can then do things like focusing on transmutation for all your green gems then selling that on the AH. Or even just selling the Golden Lotus on your AH straight out. But I wouldn’t use the herbs for inscription. If you have a druid, you’re far better off just running around the Jade Forest and Valley of the Four Winds finding herbs.
- Planting all enchanting materials. This would probably be my #1 focus down the road. If you have an enchanter with the weapons and bracer enchants, you will realize just how much money you can make selling those on the AH. The problem is that coming up with enough materials (most notably Sha Crystals) can be a very difficult task. So the only way to compensate is through dedicating as much materials to hand off to your enchanter so that they can upgrade the materials back into Sha Crystals. If you have a lot of toons, you should be able to get enough materials for this purpose.
- Planting all leather crafting materials. I really wouldn’t go this far. You really just need one dedicated resource if you have a leatherworker and you no longer are killing mobs and skinning them. Generally, I find that one farm provides enough materials to allow my leatherworker to do his daily. My suggestion as a strategy for a leatherworker is to focus on Spirits of Harmony and having a separate toon be dedicated for a leather crafting materials farm. That way, you can craft epics then sell them on the AH.
- Planting ore crafting materials. This is something I wouldn’t do and I think it’s a complete waste of a farm. Valley of the Four Winds and Townlong Steppes provide a lot of mining spots. If you do have a blacksmith, you’re better off setting him up with Spirits of Harmony and mining.
- Planting Windwool. I think just one farm is more than enough. You won’t need Spirits of Harmony for the most part since Imperial Silk is sufficient. You mostly just want to have enough materials to craft your daily. So this isn’t a good one to mass produce.
- Banquet materials. This would be great for leveling up your cooking but beyond that, your only bet is to sell off excess materials on the AH. But I feel you’re far better off using your farm once your cooking is maxed out for other crafting materials.
My overall ideas here are to maximize on your toons proficiencies and future profits by getting enough materials to craft and produce anything you want. From there you can try selling the materials and/or crafted goods for a nice chunk of change.
Easy(ier) Sha Crystals
If you do not have the luxury of numerous alts who have maxed out farms and can help dedicate enchanting materials to your enchanter, then you can still obtain Sha Crystals through running older LFRs. Let’s say you have a fairly geared up toon with enchanting and you’re trying to get more gear from Throne of Thunder. Doing older LFRs will allow you to get more Valor Points, some gold and potentially help garner you epics. Now, although I do think that the drop rates get reduced for people who have decent gear, you still have the possibility of using Elder Charms of Good Fortune. So that makes getting the Key to the Palace of Lei Shen still relevant. From there, you can just reroll on each boss and use the epic you find for Sha Crystals.
At any rate, you might be asking yourself, “Hey none of this sounds particularly easy!” Yes, it does involve some degree of labor and time. But you can’t just sit around Orgrimmar waiting for things to drop in your lap. The vast majority of things that I’m proposing here is how to streamline your game play a little easier and hopefully drop some hints on ways to get items in a guaranteed manner once you hit 90 and possibly have numerous alts. BTW the pay off ultimately is pretty big so give it a shot.