Any good WoW Cataclysm gold guide will teach you what you want to do to earn gold and also what to avoid when trying to earn gold in Cataclysm. First of all, I’ll talk about the number one pitfall that many players will fall into when playing Cataclysm.
If you want to earn gold in Cataclysm, don’t waste time mining Elementium or harvesting Heartblossom after the first few weeks of the expansion’s release. The truth is that there is an immense amount of these two items in Cataclysm. Unlike Outlands and Northrend, the mineral and herb spawns in Cataclysm are extremely dense.
In an hour of playing the beta, I was able to gather several hundred Elementium Ore and several hundred Heartblossom on the same character! This may seem great at first, but the possibility of oversupply will be very real. Since there are so many mineral and herb spawns in Cataclysm, the market will be completely saturated with minerals within a few weeks of Cataclysm. There are too many ore points, and as a result, the supply will exceed the demand.
Every time the supply of an item exceeds the demand for that item, prices go down. In this case, the supply is so dominant that prices will plummet and you will barely be able to earn gold by mining and farming the new materials. One way around this pitfall is to mine Obsidian (the Tier 1 ore), since it doesn’t have as many spawn points as Elementium. Furthermore, the Veil of Azshara herb is also much rarer than the other Cataclysm herbs.
Two other ways to make gold in Cataclysm are by skinning and farming. Skinning can be profitable because many recipes call for the new Black Dragonscales. There are a variety of different locations where you can farm Black Dragonscales in the game, but the bottom right corner of the Twilight Highlands contains a dense forest with only Black Dragonkin, making it the perfect place to farm these items.
In addition to black dragons, players will find a variety of elemental beings in the Twilight Highlands. Players can farm these elementals to produce tons of the new volatile elementals. Volatile elemental material will sell for a premium on the auction house. In particular, I suspect that Volatile Fire and Volatile Air will fetch the highest prices, just because they are in such high demand.
To wrap up this WoW Cataclysm guide, just remember that farming for Elementium is a bad idea in Cataclysm and that you should stick to lower levels of ore if you want to get gold from mining.