I have not done a specific WoW AH-related post in quite some time, but allow me a moment to make one now: get Herbalism and make bank while you still can.

As of the time of this post, TheUndermineJournal shows the following prices on Sargeras-US:

• Fjarnskaggl = 105g
• Starlight Rose = 191g
• Foxflower = 153g

Even on the backwater Auchindoun-US server, it shows up as:

• Fjarnskaggl = 54g
• Starlight Rose = 187g
• Foxflower = 106g

These prices are per herb. Starlight Rose is only collected 1 at a time unless a bonus mob spawns, and sometimes that 1 herb attempt actually fails and you get vendor trash. Thus, it might be better to simply farm herbs in Stormheim or Highmountain, as each herb node will get you 3-6 herbs and the fox spawn from Foxflower will give you 20-30 herbs for free. All of these herbs can be gathered at skill level 1, and the only thing that matters skill-wise is getting to 100 Herbalism to unlock the occasional Felwort WQ. Farming routes can be found below:

• http://www.wow-professions.com/farming/fjarnskaggl-farming
• http://www.wow-professions.com/farming/foxflower-farming
• http://www.wow-professions.com/farming/starlight-rose-farming

If you want to get fancy with all the farming, there are three approaches, which can be combined.

First, you can speed up your actual farming of herbs via enhancements. If you are mounted in either the Sky Golem or the Mechanized Lumber Extractor, you can herb while remaining mounted. The former has seen it’s price more than double over the last week however (from around 64k to 150k), and making your own is a minimum 30-day affair due to relying on daily Engineering cooldowns. That said, if you can both snag a Sky Golem and then the Legion Herbalism glove enchant, you can saunter up to herbs and zip away nearly instantly.

Second, there are technically addons out there that will allow you to server hop, and either get a fresh set of spawns or avoid someone that is already farming the area on your server (herb nodes are mult-tap, but only for ~10 seconds). In my experience though, farming routes are almost not even necessary. Just collect all the herbs you see while completing WQs in the area. That will generally be enough for 5k-10k gold in sales by the time you hearth back to an AH.

Finally, if you really want to get super fancy, you can follow the advice of this Reddit thread and create a level 101 twink. That’s right, with level scaling mobs, twinks are back. The idea is to get a character to 101 so that you can equip all of those ilevel 835 BoE epics, then lock your XP gains. Bonus points for actually equipping the Brewfest Tankards instead of your artifact weapon, since the former is ilevel 810. Since all the mobs in Stormheim and Highmountain scale to your actual level, as opposed to your ilevel, you should be able to both herb and close to one-shot any mobs that might be in your way. Using a Demon Hunter for this makes it both trivial to create and likely better than any alternative class, what with the gliding and double jumps.

The reason I say “start now” is because A) it is still wildly profitable right now, and B) prices will likely crash in 7.1. As shown on MMO-Champ last week, there is a Blood of Sargeras trader coming in the next patch:

If accurate, this will change everything.

While a lot of people are praying saying that the conversion rates are placeholder values, the fact remains that any kind of conversion is going to reduce prices across the board. If we take the current AH prices for example, the value of a single Blood at this trader is between 955g-3060g. If you only get 10 Foxflower per Blood, that is still… 955g-1530g. Blizzard isn’t going to make it 1 Blood for 1 herb, so I find it actually incredibly likely that the 20 herb conversion stays at 20 herbs.

Now, I do think it’s possible Herbalism will remain profitable even after the Trader appears. Traditionally, this has not been the case because of bots. There have been more recent reports from players seeing teleporting bots again this expansion, but I think we can all agree that Blizzard seems to be getting better at keeping them under control. I mean, with where prices are at currently, I would have expected a flood of botting already. Since that is not necessarily the case, I have hopes that the “floor” of the herb market will remain acceptably high.

Because I’ll be damned trying to transition to crafting professions when the AH is still throttled.