So you are interested World of Warcraft farming, for either experience, items to sell or use, or items to power your skill building (eg: leather for leatherworking.)

This really is a very important subject since most players are going to be doing some farming at some point in their carreers. Of course, WoW farming, if you're doing it at a suitable level, allows you to gain experience, loot to sell (or help creat other stuff) to earn gold, and is even rumored to, on rare occasions, drop a useful rare, or better yet, epic item.

Naturally, if everything is grey to you then the farming will be a lot faster.

Still, just running about blindly attempting to find farmable monsters is a recipe for disaster; that would be why you are reading this article right now.

Actually, efficient farming is happy farming, if a little dull. Otherwise it can be about as interesting as watching paint dry. With that in mind, here are a few tips to increase your farming efficiency and income. For the purpose of this guide farming and grinding are the same thing, though farmers are usually looking for stuff while grinders are usually looking for xp.

A few things first, don't even head out of town before you've gathered a few essential materials & items. Basically you're looking for items to eliminate your
downtime and increase your efficiency. Depending on how much spare cash you have you might be able to do without some equipment/items, and just straight farming is still possible with minimal supplies, especially with some specific classes that I'll mention later.

The Mule: Before you start any serious grind or farming or question you should make an auction house mule. This is simply a low level character that lives at the mailbox and auction house. You send all your sell loot to this character and then head back to the grind. Shipping sell-loot and stuff back and forth will eliminate a lot of back and forth trips on your main character. When you're in some little town in the middle of nowhere and you need an item log into your mule, buy it, and ship it to your main.

Potions: First, see if you can grab a stack of trolls blood potions. These greatly increase your regen speed and can eliminate a lot of bandage and food use. Beyond that a few spellpower or agility/strength/health boosting potions can be very useful, if not lifesavers.

Got space? Make sure you have as many sacks as you can carry. Buy the biggest sacks you can afford and buy them from the auction house, the prices there are far less than what the bag vendors charge. The 10 slot small silk pack is probably the best value for your coin, when you don't have much of it yet.

If you're an enchanter keep the junk magic items you find to practice your disenchanting, then sell the resulting components, otherwise ship everything off to your mule. This lets you get back to grinding/farming ASAP.

Once you are properly equipped and have your mule set up you need to find a suitable farming spot; not just any little group of monsters will do. Two key things to look for are: 1- high rate of respawn and 2- high rate of XP per kill. You have to be careful, though, if the rate of respawn is too high you will get adds every fight, which is deadly.

A high level of downtime, licking your wounds, will slow down your farming and kill your enjoyment. You're not questing here, you're looking for an area where you can efficiently destroy a ton of loot bearing monsters.

With a little experimentation you'll be able to find areas and groups of mobs that work best for your level, particular class, play styles, and equipment level. Determine the XP per kill based upon how long each kill takes and how much health/mana you lose and how long it take to recover enough for the next fight. Even if a monster seems to give a nice amount of XP, taking all those other factors into account, it may actually be slowing you down.

Many people find the most efficient way to farm is to kill things 1 to 3 levels below their own. It's less of a challenge, but there's a lot less risk and a lot less down time and a much faster kill rate. It also makes life a little less dangerous if you're on a PvP server...

Additionally, some areas possess multiple types of the same monster. Depending on your class/build one of these may be very easy to kill while another is quite annoying and/or slow to kill. So you make sure to keep notes of your gains and losses. Either that or get one of the many WoW addons that provide easy measurement of XP per hour, such as Titan panel

As a general rule, areas with green and/or yellow monsters are great AoE spots for mages and warlocks, whereas I'd hit pure yellow spots for the single/two mob grinders, like warriors, hunters, and such.

As the comment below states, grinding humanoids is generally better than grinding beasts, especially for Rogues (who can pickpocket first,) but there are a couple of exceptions. Grinding elementals can produce interesting results, and certain beasts, especially in Outlands, drop valuable parts and hides. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Mages can use their AoE spells to gather groups of mobs and kill them, while staying out of attack range. It takes practice, but can be very productive.

Finally, and probably one of the most important things really: if you happen to be on a PvP server (like I am) you are going to want to watch out for PKer's, other gold farmers, and a whole slew of different types of people who can interfere. Especially if they know you're farming. They'll take joy in ruining your efficiency.

Really, if the spot doesn't possess enough of a spawn for two people it's probably better just to leave rather than enter into a war over the zone. Leaving is probably better XP overall and it also doesn't earn you any enemies.

Good luck in your farming endeavors. May many epic items drop in your path.

You know you want one of those epic mounts, a flying mount, or perhaps you're ready for an epic flying mount! That takes a real chunk of change, so maybe you need more in-depth help with your gold farming.

Dante Valentino has been earning gold in WoW for years to outfit his multiple level 70 characters with epic ground mounts and flying mounts. Come and check out Dante's favorite gold guide here.