World of Warcraft players have one last job ahead of them before Shadowlands comes out, and that’s the ongoing quest for “Longboi,” the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur. Here’s how to raise 5 million gold before patch 9.0 drops.

World of Warcraft: The Quest for “Longboi” Farming Guide

Battle for Azeroth is in its closing months, which means it’s officially time for the pre-expansion doldrums. It’s up to dedicated players to find their own goals for a while, and for many, that’s the grind for the Mighty Caravan Brutosaur, nicknamed the “Longboi” by the fans. It’s an enormous ground mount that’s sold in-game for a cool 5 million gold, and comes factory standard with two Tortollan sidekicks. One’s a vendor, but the other is an auctioneer, which means Longboi is also the only mobile auction house in the game. At time of writing, if you tried to simply buy enough gold through WoW Tokens to pick up the Brutosaur, it’d set you back around US$880. I think we can all agree that’s a little much to drop on a fictional dinosaur. We’re forced to pursue other methods.

Our goal. Our hero.

The traditional way of the millionaire in World of Warcraft is to play the auction house. Depending on the size of your server, you can often find a market or two, even now, that’s just waiting for you to exploit it. Players will often drop thousands of gold on rare pieces of armor for the sake of transmogrification, or you can farm up crafting recipes and try to sell high-ticket items like mounts and bags. You can also try to seize upon openings in the market; due to the Impressive Influence buff, for example, many players are making slow but significant bank right now off of selling reputation contracts.

There are a lot of tools online for investigating your server’s current economy without forcing you to log in. The Undermine Journal is a long-running database that tracks every server’s auction house and can keep you informed of potential deals. If someone puts up an item for much less than it’s worth, you can swoop in, buy it, and relist it for its actual value. You also shouldn’t hesitate to consult the “goblins” at the WoW Economy subreddit, who are full of tricks and tips to help you earn more gold faster.

One useful trick I picked up from that subreddit, in fact, is from Warlords of Draenor. Your garrison is still back there churning out herbs once a day, and you can turn those herbs into Cards of Omens with the help of a scribe. When used, they turn into a vendor item, a Blood Card, that’s worth a random amount of cash. Most are only worth spare change, ranging from 1 copper to 5 gold, but every so often, one of your Blood Cards can turn out to be worth several thousand gold. It’s rare, but it averages out to a decent chance daily at a big payout, and it’s still making more money for me than the herbs were sitting in my bank. The moral of the story is that you should pay careful attention to what you happen to still have lying around, because you’d be surprised what you can turn into a profit.

Depending on the market for enchanting materials on your server, you can get a lot of relatively easy money out of a particular shuffle I first heard about from YouTuber Kraken Latte. Simply put: once you don’t have anything left to do with Prismatic Manapearls, a currency you earn through questing and other activities in Nazjatar, use them to buy Benthic gear. If you have an enchanter, you can send the Benthic tokens to them through the mail, then disenchant the Benthic gear for guaranteed Veiled Crystals and an occasional Umbra Shard. Depending on your server’s market, you can either sell the materials directly for a high profit, or turn them into valuable enchanting scrolls. Either way, you’re turning a useless currency directly into gold.

Along a similar vein, if you played World of Warcraft during the Legion expansion, don’t neglect your old bodyguards. There were easy-to-get items in Legion, usually from your mission table, that you could equip on your NPC bodyguard to provide passive bonuses whenever you finished a world quest. While the bodyguard gear that provided extra gold for each quest has been substantially nerfed in Battle for Azeroth, that just means it’s worth less, not nothing. You can still clear an easy 10 to 30 gold every time you finish a world quest with an appropriately-equipped bodyguard. If you just need a little seed money to break into the auction house game, that’s an easy way to earn it. Just go back to the Broken Isles and/or Argus and burn through every convenient world quest you can find. At 120, none of them should take more than a few seconds, and Legion vendor trash can be worth a surprising amount of gold.

If you set up your bodyguards right back during Legion, they’re still a potential gold mine now.

If you’d rather spend more time playing the game than the auction house, or if your server’s too small to usefully support it, that’s what “raw gold” farming is for. The idea behind “raw gold” is that you focus on the highest-yield activities in-game, most of which are old raids. As far as a raw gold starting point goes, you can’t do much better than Shoogen’s Brutosaur Calculator, hosted by Data for Azeroth. While it doesn’t seem to have been updated for version 8.3 of the retail game, it provides a useful list of old instances and quests that you can farm at level 120 for easy gold, as well as a widget that totals up the amount of gold you should be shooting for per week. You just walk into an old raid by yourself, mow down everything inside, and sell all the drops at the closest vendor. You don’t even have to worry too much about your bag space, as all the boss drops left on corpses will be automatically mailed to your character if you leave the instance.

Right now, the best old instance for raw gold farming is Blackrock Foundry. You can run it three times a week, on normal, heroic, and mythic difficulties, and it doesn’t have a lot of trash or dialogue to slow you down. There are a couple of annoying fights, such as the Blast Furnace, but in general BRF is a solid 20-minute errand that can net you a relatively painless 3 to 8 thousand gold per week. If you’ve got more than one character at level 120 or higher, then even a poorly-geared, freshly-leveled character ought to be able to murder their way through all three difficulties of BRF. With the current Winds of Wisdom buff, it’s surprisingly fast and easy to level up a few extra characters, and each one can be turned into a cash generator.

Since the Calculator was made, Blizzard also made the decision to turn on its legacy loot rules for older raids in Legion content. Any 120th-level character at around 440 item level or higher should be able to cruise through Legion raids and dungeons, although they do tend to have a lot of trash and downtime between bosses, which makes their gold-per-hour rate a bit low. The exception, however, is the Seal of the Triumvirate. For some reason, it’s one of the only Legion dungeons where, when you run it solo, all the mobs inside it can still be looted individually. It’s also got dozens of trash mobs inside it, particularly in the area between the first and second bosses. You can easily clear a solid 7 to 8 hundred gold per run by clearing the instance out on heroic mode, especially considering some of the weirdly high-value vendor trash from Legion.

Sure, one of these is no big deal, but when you get them by the dozen…

Finally, be sure to run through the major and minor Black Empire invasions from patch 8.3 when you have the chance. These invasions rotate between Uldum and the Vale of Eternal Blossoms every week, and each major invasion is worth a guaranteed piece of armor that scales up to item level 445. More importantly, it also rewards you with a cache that can contain 2,000 gold.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’re starting from next to nothing, or brand new to the game, getting five million gold in World of Warcraft before the debut of patch 9.0, whenever that happens to be, can seem impossible. (You’ve probably got until October 1st or so.) With some judicious farming, playing your server’s market, and scooping up whatever bonuses you can find, though, it’s well within a dedicated player’s reach. And hey, even if you fail, you’ve got a leg up on buying whatever ridiculous gold sinks Blizzard puts into future content.

Yes, we’re still playing World of Warcraft. Check out some of our tips and tricks on the game, as we warm up to head into the Shadowlands:

• Blizzard is currently working on adding controller support for disabled players
• Check out this awesome Rule-63 cosplay of Illidan Stormrage
• How to level up fast in WoW Classic

Gold in World of Warcraft was a lot easier to come by during Legion, when you could just sit back and let your mission table bring in thousands for you. If I’d known about Longboi back then, I’d have saved some of my treasure hoard, instead of blowing it all on six months’ worth of WoW tokens. Come commiserate with me about my lack of financial foresight via our official Twitter, @PrimaGames.