u/Doredrin

The obvious choice is hunter because ranger/hunter/scout were a bow class. So hunters in the simplest way of thinking are the best choice. However, I have never felt like hunters were a good successor despite being an archer class:

-pets

-no true stealth (zero stealth in 04 when I started)

When it came down to it, the fact that hunters are a bow class really is just an aesthetic thing. You could rename the class as a caster class and change the look/name of a lot of abilities and it would feel exactly like a cloth caster. Because of that I picked a rogue at vanilla release. Which was a lot of fun and I had a lot of success, but I never felt like it was my old ranger.

Now that the game has evolved a bit since then, all things considered I think that druids may be the best approximation of the archer classes from daoc. Mainly because they are the best combination of stealth, ranged power, melee backup, and independence that the archer classes from daoc had.

I made this thread because I think answering the question of what a ranger is in daoc is actually kind of important thematically given that WoW is based a lot on arthurian legend/lotr and Aragorn was a ranger. I know hunters literally have a dark ranger talent tree now blah blah, but I've played a lot of hunter as I have with all the other classes and I have never felt like it really was a good representation of my ranger...Also, the most famous archers in WoW are females and the most famous druid is a male.

You used to be able to make decent gold with concentration crafting in engineer, that has long since died and probably won't be coming back.

HOWEVER

-one engineer is essentially required for a mass enchanting army to churn out dirt cheap blues (even cheaper than tailoring)

-it makes essential tools for a variety of professions

-you make basically no gold if you aren't mass crafting or selling tools BUT, since the materials are dirt cheap you can complete basically all the patron orders for a gold profit. The endless material bags, runes, moxie, and raw gold you get from them really starts to add up. Theoretically if you are feeding shards of dundun in the most efficient way to one profession it might make sense to have engineering as your second profession.

I grew up in the town Cena briefly attended high school in and my wife grew up in the town Cody Rhodes went to high school in.

(actually it was the town next over with Cena, but we had a rivalry with them and it's located like 2 miles away)

I'm a cg artist, creating 3d environments is literally what I do professionally and I've worked with 3dcg packages for 25 years.

After seeing a lot of examples here, experimenting with the housing system myself, and visiting a few other homes during the housewarming weeklies. People simply cannot truly create the type of environments I know they want to create in this game. It literally comes down to one simple thing about the entire housing system:

the extremely limited modular nature of the room sizes and shapes

I say extremely limited compared to the amount of square footage that is allowed at max rank, and the various types of decor in the catalogue. Everything about the housing system would indicate that you should be able to create medium to large unique interior spaces like small cathedrals, halls like the hall of mirrors at Versailles, or just unique looking warcraft spaces. There are work arounds to the limitations with room sizes, and people have successfully created all sorts of great things, but you have to basically break the system to get interior architecture that I know would not be too complicated to code and implement.

The only explanation is that Blizzard has literally nerfed their own system and for whatever reason doesn't want people to start creating medium/large or unique interior spaces. To put it simply, the decor catalogue and square footage indicate they want you to build a small palace but the interior modules indicate they want you to build a 4 bedroom house.

I play video games for many hours a day/week, mostly Diablo and WoW. In my essentially professional opinion, considering I am a 3dcg guy and video games are literally my industry, RNG in video games has undoubtedly stopped being anything resembling pure RNG and now creates intentional statistical events on an extremely consistent basis. The complexity of these events are too complex to attribute it to simple game parameters, and behaves similar to the way you would expect AI to behave. Examples:

-the game decides you've been playing too long and bricks your RNG, there are already game mechanics similar to this openly introduced in WoW

-consistently strange streaks of luck that go far beyond just RNG to the point where the only way things become beneficial is because of these streaks of luck. Meaning something has a 30% chance to multicraft and it will not multicraft for 10 crafts and then you'll get jackpot RNG on the last few crafts

-jackpot RNG on the first boss kill or immediately after login

-strange loot table generation

I played games like Diablo 10 years ago when youd fish around for a good RNG rift or whatever. Now it's like, a good rift has 0% chance to spawn in your first 45 minutes of play then around an hour in it will spawn a god rift and there will also be a bunch of coinciding parallel RNG systems that pop on that rift as well right near 90% completion. That is the kind of thing that would be a tall tale from battle back in 2015, now it's the norm.

Basically it feels like RNG for idiots. Instead of just normal RNG and people get to experience the subtle nature of a big or crazy hand every once in a while, RNG has been compressed into these insane events that seem to also coincide with it's estimation of your biometrics. Like did you just start playing, and is your playstyle indicating fatigue etc.

If you start stacking the deck against a pro poker or jackpot player they will eventually catch wind. They have an intuitive grasp of what fairly falling cards look like. I have a similar intuition with video games.

EXAMPLE:

I asked chatGPT- "give me a natural coin flip sequence heads/tails for 25 flips then create one with the same total heads tails but weird RNG that is suspect as synthetic"

H T H H T T H T H T H H T H T T H H T H T T H H T

vs

H H H H H H T T T T T T H H H H T T T H H T H T H

I strongly suggest there is something wrong with RNG in video games nowadays. I continually witness strange statistical events on an abnormally high rate. When I have discussions with a lot of people online, or in real life people like my literally Ivy League educated mother, they say things like "dem just the cards!".

If someone wins 2 large lottery jackpots back to back there will probably be some sort of investigation by an oversight committee.

If a roulette wheel lands on red 35 times in a row most likely the las vegas gaming commission will do some sort of investigation.

If a NFL team wins 100% of their coin tosses for 5 years the league will investigate.

No, highly improbably RNG events or a series of them do not conclusively prove anything, but they seriously call into question the legitimacy of the system producing the supposed random numbers.

Are you an idiot? Do you have a bunch of alts level 80+ and want to make some gold but not all of the gold?

Alchemy

Enchanting

or

Alchemy

Blacksmithing

For alchemy, just make potions on cooldown. Dump some concentration into a potion that uses all rank 1 materials and post it. Zero risk, maybe around 2 thousand gold profit each concentration dump.

For enchanting rank 2 phoenix oil with rank 2 dust and rank 1 vials.

For blacksmithing, just buy some rank 1 materials and make rank 2 sterling or gloaming bars with rank 1 materials+concentration.

I've been crafting since prepatch and those things always sell and there is no risk. Now that is the complete idiot's guide, the advanced build is you collect treasures, do profitable patron orders, weeklies, until you fill out the respective trees for those crafts...also remember to shatter a new mote every time you login for enchanting since the buff is lost on logout. If you feel fancy you can get blue/purple tools, but at this point you should be able to search the undermine journal or something similar and find some dirt cheap green tools on a server somewhere. Do not do not pay like 10,000 gold for some green tools this is not feburary.

There are tons of more profitable things to do, but those builds are essentially risk free, sell well, and are extremely simple. I don't know how well this will work in season 2, but it works fine for season 1.

I don't have time to decorate, there is oil to drill and the Cowboys kickoff at 1.

https://preview.redd.it/53t59z2fd99h1.jpg?width=1920&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dc3b118e2db39b1ff3a7717992805e580bb27fe7

I'm not an expert goblin, but I have a fair amount of experience and success making gold. There seems to be tons of questions here about the very basics of making gold in midnight, so I'll do my best to sum everything up. My golden rule is that make sure you are at least having some fun or what you are doing is very profitable. If you aren't having fun and what you are doing is not very profitable then it's probably better to do something else.

Basically making gold in this game comes down to several ways. An interesting thing about these farms that no one talks about is that you can level up a character doing most gold making activities. Be warned that using a non max level character may cut into profits significantly, so it's a tradeoff between purely making gold and leveling while making gold.

-Big ticket item farming

Zero initial investment

Low to high efficiency

Moderate to high learning curve

Potentially very risky slow returns, possibility of zero returns

You look at the loot tables for various mobs and they will often drop an item or items that sell for anywhere from a few thousand to literally millions. There are tons and tons of guides for these types of farms on youtube so if that sounds fun then go do it. The efficiency of these farms varies, and sometimes it's very difficult to sell things on the AH with all the undercutting and slow markets. So when a video promises a farm that has an item that sells for 100k or something, you may not be able to sell it for more than 20k or whatever unless you keep it posted for months or get lucky.

If you are a noob or even an expert, a gold per hour tracker can be very helpful because you don't want to slave away at a farm for 2,000 gold an hour or something. Keep in mind there are a ton of junk items that register for absurd amounts of gold that you probably won't sell for that much, or transmog registered for way more than you will be able to sell it for.

-Gathering and small ticket item farming

minimal initial investment

low to medium efficiency

low to medium learning curve

essentially guaranteed and instant returns

This is the most reliable way to make gold with basically zero risk. If you mine midnight ore/herbs for an hour you will at least make some profit on the AH for essentially no risk. That's why it's so popular. I'm lumping in farms where you collect items from drops in large amounts like essences because it works basically the same way. Unlike trying to sell big ticket transmog or items, you can get your gold from the AH almost instantly. As a result it's usually a low efficiency way to make gold. Keep in mind old expansion commodity farms often can sell much slower than midnight materials. Midnight materials sell basically instantly.

-Flipping AH items

often massive investment needed per resell

varied efficiency, but the ceiling to be the most efficient returns per hour spent by FAR

medium to very high learning curve

potential very large risk on your initial investments

profit can almost instantly disappear

potential to be BY FAR the most lucrative gold making method

The concept is simple: buy low sell high. Either predict the market for region wide commodities, or try to relist server based items. If you decide to go this route understand that it's like transmog farming with all the potential risk for no return, except you invested direct gold in it and can lose money unlike a transmog farm where you just lose your time if you can't find a buyer. Only do this if you understand the market well. Flipping is basically the graduation zone for true AH goblins, and I personally am not that good yet. If you need any explanation about how to flip, you probably aren't experienced enough to do it.

-Mass crafting

significant initial investment both in leveling up your craft and getting the best tools

reasonably high learning curve

potential risk that your mass crafts won't sell, and you often work with razor thin margins so even a small fluctuation in AH prices can cost you a lot of money

AFK crafting possible

very high theoretically ceiling with multiple accounts running simultaneously

Mass crafting is when you take raw materials and quickly turn them into things like alloys or pigments or enchanting dust etc. You make a tiny gold per craft, usually only a few gold, but spread out over thousands of crafts you can make decent gold per hour. Mass crafting is similar to flipping and you have to understand the markets well enough to know what will sell at a good profit and rate. The unqiue thing about this is that you can totally AFK it and make gold. So you can literally just watch TV or go for a 10 minute walk while your character makes usually a few thousand gold per hour for you, often more. You do need to make sure the game doesn't automatically log you out or you run out of materials. You could theoretically have dozens or more accounts/game subs all running at the same time mass crafting for very very good gold per hour. But that is highly advanced strategy and I suggest you don't do that unless you know what you are doing.

-Concentration armies

potential massive initial investment with leveling characters, skill up trees, and getting good tools

moderate to high learning curve

reasonably high efficiency in gold per hour

moderate risk that you will actually lose gold on your crafts

Concentration was introduced in dragonflight. Concentration allows you to use lower rank materials to make higher rank finished product in a timegated way. Basically every crafter has 1000 max concentration on dragonflight and later expansions profession. It is a glorified alchemy daily cooldown, except unlike a traditional daily alchemy cooldown it accumlates at the rate of about 250 concentration per day. Meaning you can login a character every 4 days and "dump" the 1000 concentration that has accumulated instead of logging in every day for a daily cooldown. It does require some understanding of the markets because you can often buy raw materials and end up selling the finished product for less than you paid for the materials. The best part is that it's scalable per character, meaning you can set up dozens if not hundreds of different characters, log into them once every few days and make a few thousand gold for often a minute or less of work. There are also NPC patron orders that you can do that can add a lot of gold per login.

-Selling Decor

varied investment need on items

initial startup costs of leveling a profession on your decor crafter

unless you are flipping the decor you need to farm the lumber yourself

moderate to high learning curve

can be as risky and slow as selling transmog

potential very high profits

This is the new feature added in midnight. Player housing has introduced decor items which use both lumber and crafting materials. Lumber cannot be sold directly and you have to farm it yourself if you want to craft decor items. As a result, the essential price of a single piece of lumber can be anywhere from 100-500 gold each. Don't go down this path without some basic research. Decor can slow as slow as transmog and you may need to undercut and babysit your sales. With that being said, gathering lumber can be indirectly very very profitable if you make decor items with it and they sell.

-Basic character play

the initial investment is having a high level character, but that may be something you have already done

This can be very profitable if you are a higher level or geared character than the masses. There are tons of gold world quests, currency flips, loot from bosses/dungeons/delves that can add up to a lot if you play a lot.

-Selling Carries

potentially very high revenue

If you need instructions on how to sell a carry you are probably not capable of doing it. There are tons of communities that do this. What you do is carry someone through pvp/raids/dungeons in exchange for often very large amounts of gold. You need to be skilled at the game and have good gear for this to work at all.

-Weapon/armor crafting

Don't really know much about this, it's a very old school way of crafting. Advertise in trade chat for your services and sell them. Theoretically that's what the public work order was supposed to be for I think, but I think that is an abandoned feature because I rarely see anything posted except for people looking for free alchemy transmutes.

-MISC gold making methods

There are a bunch of other ways to make gold, like selling tools especially during the initial launch. But I tried to just cover the basic most popular categories.

https://preview.redd.it/n25b3ogssj8h1.jpg?width=786&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=56d7b0b4efe345cf16f2681deb2e46b1506fe872

A lot of great stuff from the 90s was stuff from the 60s and 70s that we still enjoyed. Remember 1975 was as far from 1995 as 2005 was from 2025