Gold Farming – Tailor Your Gear to What You’re Doing

An often overlooked factor that can majorly impact your gold farming bottom line is the gear that you’re wearing.  In many respects you may not have a lot of control over your gear – of course wearing all top end raid gear would help you earn gold faster, but if you’re sporting blues it will be hard to do that.  There are some decisions that you can make which might significantly improve your hourly earn rate.
 
The first easy possibility for tailoring your gear choice involves mobs that cast elemental or other spells.  If you are taking a lot of damage, that means you’re either also taking a lot of down time to bandage, eat or heal, or you’re burning up consumables (or both).  Either way, it’s not helping your gold farming rate at all.  If you have gear available, you may be better off sacrificing a little bit of DPS in exchange for some protection from damage.
 
Another situation arises where you need to trade off healing gear for DPS gear, DPS gear for stamina, or healing gear for regeneration.  The point is that when you’re off trying to earn gold, your gear that’s highly optimized for raiding, PVPing, instances, or whatever it is that you normally do might not be the best possible combination.  You need to be aware of what the situation calls for, and customize your gear to match.
 
There are also certain situations where you need a specific piece of gear.  For fisherman, this would take the form of fishing gear, which specifically boosts your skill.  Or for engineers, a belt or hat that makes resource clouds visible on the map.  Putting those pieces of gear on may be obvious, but don’t forget that you might need to swap other gear to match.  If your meta gem gets deactivated, for instance, or if you fall below a hit cap.  You might need to change other pieces of gear that depend on the ones that you had to remove.
 
When tweaking up the rate at which you earn gold, every little bit counts.  Don’t overlook any details, including the possibility of optimizing the gear you’re wearing for your situation.  Put away your generic gear and go for the best outfit you can manage for whatever you’re doing.  You’ll make more money in less time, and you can get on to something other than gold farming all the sooner.