Alot of the areas vary with class. Like, the Hand of Guldan is horrible to farm if you are a pet based class, since pets like to get aced by lava every 5 seconds.

The key to farming for me, is to go out prepared. Know several good spots to farm what you want, and know how many people can be there before you are competing for kills. Like elemental plateau. Anything more than 3 people at one specific elements node, and your kill rate will be pretty miserable.

While I don't approve of cutthroat tactics farming (SWD'ing mobs a lock has dotted, instant-cast pulling mobs as a melee is 2 steps away) I found I can get away with usually out pacing people with a few classes. Like an affliction lock, I could pull 4 fire elementals at a time, aoe fear them, start pulling more. Usually if I was facing 1 or 2 other people for spawns they would leave after 20-30 minutes because they really could not keep up to me killing 4-5for every one of theirs. I prefer to outfarm people rather than harass them, because I know I sure as hell hate it when priests start tagging mobs I just dotted, or another lock starts banishing my mobs/fearing them. Alot of people do it to dissuade you, others will do it just because they enjoy pissing people off. I prefer outpacing people rather than snaking taps, simply because well, you cant get filed for griefing.

Mostly it helps to know the limits to your toon. For instance, I know I can solo up to 8 fire elementals at pretty much the same time, but that I will have to eat/drink after. Versus pulling 4-5 and coming out with 70% life/mana. I only pull my max when competing, no point wasting food/water if you don't have to. Also knowing the respawn rate is nice, you can keep going in an infinite loop killing as they spawn. I usually pull at about as fast as they spawn, and when I start to get bored, I will see just how many I can kill at once just to stay amused. But Affliction locks are pretty much retarded with how well they can farm. With kill pacing you can stay above 70% life/mana without food/drink indefinatly.

For Aldor/Scyer drops I usually go to Netherstorm. The Forge camps north of Stormspire are pretty squishy, Wrathbringers die in several seconds. Spawns are weird though since Wrathbringers come out of the portal, and can come 1 to 6 at a time. I ended up fighting 16 mobs in chain succession one day because what I thought was a single freshly spawned mob, was really 4-5, plus a couple pathers, plus every fear lead to more aggro'd.

Scryer, I go to the first Manaforge, and kill the miners to the east of it, all really squishy, and quick to kill, just watch out for 68 elite that sometimes paths through, and the single Captain that can use Spellbreaker.

I tend to farm humanoids, since on my server every elemental area has 5-6 people at it at all times. Skettis is fairly empty at like 5 am server, and thats about it.

For me Mining > all other ways of making money

i can log in and and fly around pick up 2-300 ore in about 2 hours and sell it . ive made enuff gold to buy 3 epic lvl flying mounts

If you are a the kind of guy that doesn't mind 3-4 hours of solid farming per day, then you can really hit the jack-pot if you're an alchemist/ herber. Sometime during august over 2 weeks I'd go out for 4 hour herb farming sessions, collecting as much of each herb I could find - trying to keep the amount even, with the exception of felweed stacking (will come onto this in a minute).
I'd return from my farming session at 5 o'clock and make every kind of potion used in raiding, elixirs, mana pots, flasks (sometimes bought a load of fel lotus from AH). I'd have around 400g worth of pure herbs, make them into pots which are typically priced 15% higher than the equivalent herb price, and with a ~15-20% proc rate I'd easily rack up 600-720g a day using this method, and upwards of 1200g on Sundays, this being prime raid day.

However after Flasks of Pure Death/ Blinding Light were annouced, fel lotus prices rocketed and certain herb/ pots prices decreased alot, making the 4 hours of solid farming not really worth it any more, and I was recieving more herbs than I could sell pots worth. So I dropped herbing and kept alchemy because of having every discovery and the ability to buy off AH and still benefit from procs.

I took up JCing as my next profession, hearing that you could make money without farming if you had the gold to invest into ore/ designs (which I did), took my about 700g to level to 355 or so and I just went and bought 1 design of each, excluding living ruby where I bought +8agi and +18 healing and dawnstone where I bought +8crit and later +8 defence. Now I just log on for 15 minutes, buy 500-600g worth of ore, prospect, cut gems and sell them. I make between minus 100g and plus 250g every day, with the average being around 150g, without having my arse leave IF.

This is how I made my mount gold as well from around 600 to 5k -- it took three solid days of grinding; the only real special boost I got from it was a 300 gold Jewelcrafting recipe, but overall I think the gold per hour was absolutely consistent throughout.

I'm currently around 15k gold from professions alone, and since the expansion I've probably given a total of 5k to friends who needed it. I have farming alts for all gathering professions. But Jewelcrafting and Alchemy are definitely the best money per hour spent. Buy all the mats from the AH, craft, and relist at a profit. Elixir is the best spec and potion is second best for making money.

Here's the trick. Something doesn't have to BE good. Someone else has to THINK it's good. I've made money on every single dawnstone and talasite cut, for example, and I know most of them are bad. Even the +8 parry gem has made money, and no one in their right mind would ever want it. All you need to do is find something that's under-supplied on the AH and start listing it. In addition to the obvious flasks, potions, and gems, I've made money selling engineering scopes, silver/gold/etc rods, weapon chains, transmutes, and all kinds of other stuff.

Always do what makes the most money, even if it's not the easiest thing. Have too much runecloth? Don't sell it for 2g a stack when you could tailor runecloth belts and then disenchant them for an average of 3.5g per stack.

The problem is that you rapidly reach diminishing returns on auction house time. You can spend half an hour and make a couple hundred gold. But spending 8 hours won't make you a couple thousand gold. At this point if you still want more money (although I'm not sure what you'd use it for) you can just farm. For me, I just play alt.

That and netherweave stacks.

I should also mention I'm an enchanter and sold stacks of Arcane Dust. I got alot of Greater Planars and Large Prismatics, but I kept those to level enchanting. So I suppose I could have made a good deal more off those also.

I discovered the perfect gold making strategy this week so I will share with you all how I did it.

I dueled a warlock who I had never heard of outside of Orgrimmar for about 20 minutes on Wednesday. When I logged in on Thursday the same Warlock ran up to me, opened a trade, put 2800g in the trade window and hit accept. When asked why I was given the gold the only response I could obtain was "hawt secks".

There you have it: my gold making scheme. I hope you all find it as useful as I did!

Disenchanting:

Somewhat over looked now that you need high enchanting skill to DE the good stuff. There is still a lot of money to be made disenchanting. The best range I have found on my server is the 51-56 range for Eternal Essence, Illusion dust and Large Brilliant shards.

Like most AH based techniques you need to know what materials sell well and how much you can afford to pay for DE fodder. For me it is 3g for armor items and 8g for weapons to guarantee a consistent cash flow. takes about 15 minutes a day to scan the AH and disenchant the results for a steady cash flow. I make about 40g a day from this which while not massive money it isn't bad for something you can do in the down time just after you log in and are waiting for your BG/Dungeon/Raid etc.

My pally alt has pretty good success in Skettis and Terrokar. It's not HUGE amounts of ore, but it's easy to get and there usually isn't too much competition.

Does anyone have success with playing with AH stack sizes? For example, making Imbued Netherweave and weapon oils are probably two of the more common uses of Arcane Dust and they use 2 and 3, respectively. Have people gotten better profits on selling stacks of 2-3 for that reason? If so, is there a decent list for more profitable stack sizes? As a buyer, I'd probably pay a premium to not need to re-list or bank items, but I could be atypical.

You know you can take the free taxi between the two Skyguard camps, right?