Monday, September 10, 2012

Blackrock Depths Treasure Run - WoW Gold Guide

This method was extremely profitable in the early stages of wow, when Jewelcrafting didn't exist, but also much harder. Now when instances like BRD can be soloed with 1-2 pulls only, how does this old, but excellent gold making tip fare these days? Let's find out!

blackrock depths farming
Blackrock Depths
One run takes about 10 minutes and offers lots of loot!


Looting the bank
The goal of this gold making tip is to loot the vault in Blackrock Depths. There's 12 locked vault doors in the treasure room that is located in the middle of the instance, each having loot in them. However, most of the gold that you're getting from this run does not come from these vaults.

Because these vault doors are locked, you need keys. These are the Relic Coffer Keys that drop all around the instance.

Be careful when collecting these, though, as they are bound to Blackrock Depths. If you leave this zone, the keys disappear from your bags. This is a huge nuisance, as sometimes you do not find enough keys to open all 12 doors.

In short:
  • Follow the provided route, killing everything that moves.
  • Once you have 12 keys, proceed to the treasure room.
  • Have Tailoring, Enchanting and Jewelcrafting on an alt.
blackrock depths location map
Follow this route, killing everything in your path.
Decent chance of getting epics
Each dwarf in this zone has roughly a 14% chance of dropping a Relic Coffer Key. This means you can kill 50 and not see a key drop. In this case you have to venture further than what the path above shows, or just reset the instance after you have used the keys you found. However, most of the time you have plenty of keys by the time you reach the vault.

Because this instance is full of elite monsters, there's a decent chance of obtaining valuable loot, such as epics or even über rare recipes. These will be your main source for gold, so it's not a bad idea to clear the instance fully. Vault contains junk when compared to these. Wowhead is down currently, so I cannot give any examples.

Kuja's Protip: A level 70+ character can make HUGE pulls here, making use of the new AOE loot feature. A level 85 tank specced character can make the whole route in one pull, allowing you to loot more than a hundred mobs with one click.

A single relic coffer gives a grey, and usually multiple sacks of coins or a sack of gems. Out of these the Sack of Gems is the most valuable. It contains multiple low level Pearls or Gems

Once all 12 doors are open, Watchman Doomgrip spawns next to you. When he's dead, a secret safe opens that contains a blue quality item.

Keep in mind that blues from lower part of Blackrock Depths disenchant into Small Brilliant Shards, which are usually worthless. It's better to sell these to a vendor instead for extra golds.

Once you've looted the vault, it's a good idea to continue following the path towards The Domicile, and through it towards Pyromancer Loregrain (who drops the Fiery Weapon enchant), through the arena and eventually back to entrance to sell your loots, and repeat if you enjoyed the run.

wow aoe looting location
If you like big pulls, AOE looting saves many minutes!

Loot from one run - 10 minutes - To Vault and back:
  • Dream Dust x 21
  • Greater Eternal Essence x 1
  • Large Brilliant Shard x 3
  • Small Brilliant Shard x 4
  • Runecloth x 169
  • Aquamarine x 1
  • Iridescent Pearl x 1
  • Lesser Moonstone x 1
  • Black Pearl x 1
  • Shadowgem x 1
  • Tigerseye x 1
  • Citrine x 1
  • Core of Earth x 1
  • Plans: Heavy Mithril Helm x 1
  • Black Diamond x 7
  • Freezing Band x 1
  • 39 gold
Total value according to MY realm prices (Epic excluded): 308 gold 80 silver.

If I repeat this 5 times so I get to the instance cap, and the loot is close to 270g in the following runs too, I can make about 1500 gold in less than a hour. However, read on if you want to triple that gold.

I did not have Mining with my toon, so the list does not include Dark Iron Bars, which are VERY valuable.

The Vault
Each of the doors hide a Relic Coffer. It may contain gold or gems.


Don't sell the loot as it is, use professions!
To make even more gold, I put the loot to use by professions. Some craftables required me to buy some addidional reagents. Here's what I did with the loot I obtained from 50 minutes of farming.

Prices are from my realm

Runecloth
  1. Created Runecloth Headbands with Tailoring.
  2. Disenchanted them.
Total amount of Runecloth Headbands: 38
Disenchanted into: 1480g

Large Brilliant Shards & Major Health Pots
  1. Created Enchant Chest - Exceptional Health scrolls.
Total amount of Scrolls: 4
Total value: 780g

Gems
  1. Created various jewelry, including rings and amulets, depending on what gems I had at hand.
Total amount of jewelry: 18
Total value: 400-500g

Transmog/useful greenies
  1. If an item looked cool, had good stats or it's AH value is 200+ gold, I would sell it in the AH.
Total amount of excellent greenies: 7
Total value: 1600g

Rest of the items I sold in the AH.

Total amount of gold I obtained from these five runs is almost 5000 gold, in less than a hour.

Keep in mind that every realm has different prices for every item, and selling all of the loot takes weeks sometimes.

Extra loot for Miners
This instance contains many Dark Iron Ore deposits. Once smelted, these can give tremendous profit for you. For more info about mining and smelting Dark Iron Ore, visit the Dark Iron Ore Farming Gold Tip.

how to make gold
Use the Elite Gold Making tips for the best gold making results
Was this tip too hard for you? Give the Level 1 Gold Guide a swing!
Do you want more gold tips? Don't forget to share!

2 comments :

Dru said...

I did this tonight and the blues I picked up were DEing into Large Brilliant Shards. I don't recommend vendoring them.

Also, my runs were nowhere near as profitable as yours, but it sure was fun. (Prot pally.) Can't do it in one big pull because the bosses are leashed and some of the guards are, as well. :(

Kuja said...

The lower part bosses' loot disenchant into small shards from my experience.

The upper bosses, like the vault bosses give Large Shards. Enchantrix addon helps, as it tells what a item disenchants into.

Realm prices do indeed change a lot. Currently a Greater Eternal Essence sells for 80g each here and I received a ton of them. On my second realm they sell for 20g instead. :(