One of my informal resolutions regarding World of Warcraft was to get my house in order and really start looking at making more gold. It’s not an area that I’ve thought about much this past year, but once I started viewing the game as an economic simulator of sorts, I felt the fires of my enthusiasm blaze up. It was a different objective and an interesting goal: To make enough gold to (at the very least) pay my sub each month.
The last time I was buying WoW Tokens was back at the end of Draenor, back when everyone was getting all their gold from garrison missions and the price was a lot cheaper. Remember the days of 35K tokens? Pepperidge Farm remembers. It’s something I stopped thinking about after Legion came along and token prices shot way up. I’d been paying for a subscription ever since then while I was in the game.
But turning my attention to revving up a gold making machine, I knew that I had to keep it reasonable. I have other games to play and limited time. I had to maximize my current resources and keep any daily efforts to a reasonable duration. So I did a lot of poking around, mostly regarding lazy gold generation, and I started to develop a strategy that would pull together several low-effort, low-stress methods to bringing in that gold.
Once I got these into place, I started to focus on getting my three level 110s up to spec — gear, through Argus, etc. — and coming up with a daily rotation. It’s been going well, with a daily haul netting me between 10,000 and 20,000 gold without too much trouble, and with token prices hovering around 170K, covering my sub should be no problem.
World quests
Right now I don’t have the time to really learn TSM and settle into the whole auction house flipping scene, so I decided to latch on to an activity I was doing every day anyway: world quests. Besides gunning for emissary chests (which can hold a chunk of gold), I’ve been doing a sweep of the Broken Isles for any WQ that pays out in purple gear, rare herbs, bacon (which is surprisingly lucrative), and gold payouts north of 150g.
The focus here is on chaos crystals. The more purples I can disenchant, the more crystals I get, and the more I can sell them on the auction house. At around 250 gold per, four shards is a cool 1,000. A sweep with all three characters can get me quite a few of these, which I turn around and sell right away.
I also am trying to equip each character with one follower who has that ability that adds a free 50 gold per world quest completed when tagging along. 50 might not sound like much, but every bit adds up!
Invasions
After the initial flurry of invasions passed, I stopped paying attention to them. Now I’ve changed my mind — invasions are awesome! An invasion zone gets packed with world quests that are usually very easy to complete and pay out double in rewards, with the second part of that reward being nethershards. I take those nethershards, go to the Broken Shore, buy some purple gear from the vendor, DE, and boom. More chaos crystals. Plus, invasions have a higher number of gold reward missions too.
Garrisons
This one surprised me, because I think a lot of people — myself included — wrote garrisons off back when they switched off the gold missions prior to Legion. But no, there’s still money to be made here, just in a slightly more roundabout way.
Basically, I farm Gorgrond Flytraps from the herb garden every day and use my garrison resources to purchase Sumptuous Furs when the price is down to 16 at the trader. Then I trot over to the tailoring shack and start working on hexweave cloth and hexweave bags. It’s slow, but it’s a guaranteed chunk of gold every so often. Right now I have two of my three characters tailoring through this (I want to leave herbalism on my DK).
Order hall missions
Finally, I wised up about order hall missions, especially since I wasn’t seeing as many gold missions. I didn’t realize that these were tied to the level of your champions, so it became imperative to level up those champions ASAP and then be more diligent about keeping an eye on the mission board through my phone app. Doing world quests and invasions took care of any order hall resource shortages I might have had, so I am good there.
I’m still perusing the woweconomy subreddit and am keeping my eyes open for any more simple but effective techniques to gold making. Ideally once I get everything into place I don’t want to be spending more than a half-hour a day on this. But as for right now, it’s a blast playing the game from an economic angle. Sometimes all it takes is a new goal to refresh your interest and perspective.
Bio Break 
I’ve been making most of my money in Legion via Felwort. Last I played, one Felwort was worth around 150-200G, and you get about five every time you do the world quest. You also have a chance for a Felwort seed, which is worth 2-3K. The world quest only pops about every 3 days, but you can do it on every character that has herbalism. With my small army of alts, that adds up to a massive amount of gold for an incredibly small amount of effort.
I’m also leaning heavily on order hall missions, and I’m just auctioning off any crafting materials or anything else remotely valuable I get. I don’t much bother doing world quests — too time-consuming — except for on the classes that have the order hall passive to instantly complete one world quest per day. Usually pick a gold mission, or a gear mission on my enchanter.
This was enough for at least 1-2 Tokens per month, and Token prices have actually gone down since then.
I used to make a rather obscene amount of gold playing the AH. I’d log in a few times a day, buy out some orders, craft some things, post it back up. Maybe an hour per day. But it was always looking at spreadsheets and AH screens.
Warlords was the last time I did this, as the garrison bases were (are) gold making machines. I realized at some point that I wasn’t actually playing the game, I was instead playing a sub-game in order to subsidize the main game. More of a competition to see how much more I could make in a day. Ehh.
Once Legion came about I still had TSM installed. I have 3 groups listed in there. One for herbs/ore/crafting mats that stack very high (50). One for things that stack but in smaller amounts (5). One for individual items. Every so often I’d update the groups with stuff from my bags, head to the AH, click “sell all” and be done with it. It was more than enough to keep me afloat my 6 months of playtime. I never actively tried to make money, just played the game. Weird feeling, truth be told.
I think you’ll find out what parts of gold-hunting fit your playstyle best soon enough. And more than enough to fill your army of alts.