How to Farm Raw Gold from Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder Raids

If you’re just getting started in your gold making journey in World of Warcraft and need some starting capital, or you just want a little bit of quick gold to pay for repairs, you’ve probably thought about raw gold farming. You might be wondering though, where is the most efficient location to farm raw gold?

Warlords of Draenor raids are one of the best methods of raw gold farming. Running the Warlords of Draenor instances listed below will net you about 2.5k gold in 5 instance lockouts, which makes it one of the most efficient raw gold farms in World of Warcraft. Let’s explore why lockouts per hour matter, how to queue for Warlords of Draenor raidfinder instances, which instances you’ll want to run, and a recommended addon to make it more efficient!

Some Important Notes About Lockouts

Before we can dive into actually queuing for the instances and getting that sweet raw gold, we need to talk about instance lockouts, and why they matter in order to be efficient, because as goblins are so apt to remind you, “Time is money, friend!” There are two types of lockouts: the hourly instance lockouts, and the weekly lockouts.

What Are Hourly Instance Lockouts?

You can only enter 10 instances per hour, on a cooldown that is shared between your characters. If you enter 10 instances on one toon, you won’t be able to enter any more on another until the hour is up.

Because of this, it is important to make sure you’re making the most of every instance you enter. Other guides to Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder gold farming will tell you to simply run them all or to only kill the first one or two bosses per instance for time’s sake, but with this guide, we’ll be killing all of the bosses in 4 instances and only one of the bosses in one instance for a total of 5 instance lockouts.

You could run the other instances, but I don’t think they are worth it for the time invested compared to re-running the route a second time on another toon to fill up your 10 instance lockouts for the hour, or flying to the Iron Docks, killing everything up to the first boss, and then vendoring everything you loot 5 times.

Other guides recommend that you travel to Pandaria and then do Pandaria Raidfinder to fill up the other instance lockouts for the hour, but I prefer to do all of the lockouts I can in Draenor that hour and then do Pandaria because of the travel time it takes to get from Draenor to the MoP Raidfinder NPC. That being said, Mists of Pandaria instances are still really good raw gold, and I highly recommend running them.

What Are Weekly Instance Lockouts?

There are also weekly lockouts. This type of lockout works differently than hourly instance lockouts, because it does not prevent you from entering instances. The weekly lockout prevents you from looting the same boss more than once per week. This is why we can’t just keep running the most efficient raidfinder wing over and over again on the same character. The weekly reset expires on server reset day, which varies depending on your region (for example, NA servers reset on Tuesdays, and EU servers reset on Wednesdays).

How to Queue for Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder Instances

In order to queue for Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder instances, you must have a Level 2 or Level 3 Garrison. There will be an NPC in your garrison that you can talk to queue for instances. For both Alliance and Horde players, you’ll find Seer Kazal outside your Garrison’s keep. If you speak to him, you’ll be able to select Raidfinder instances to run. Once you select an instance, you’ll wait a few seconds, and then the popup to enter the instance will appear.

Which Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder Instances to Run for Raw Gold

The route I personally like to take will have you enter 5 instances and take about 15 minutes total to run. This will net you an easy 2,500 gold on each character you run it on by selling the epic gear that drops off of the bosses. Because you’re entering 5 instances, that means you can hop onto another character and repeat for an additional 2,500 gold before waiting for the lockout to expire, or run other instances on the same toon.

Instance 1: Archimonde’s fall at the Black Gate

• Archimonde

This instance is pretty self-explanatory and is easily the fastest on the list. Run up to Archimonde and kill him, loot, then leave the instance. You don’t have to kill the other mobs in front of Archimonde. Just running past them works.

Instance 2: Destructor’s Rise atop Hellfire Citadel

• Fel Lord Zakuun
• Xhul’horac
• Mannoroth

Destructor’s Rise has three bosses for you to kill. They are all pretty close together, so it should be pretty fast. In order to be able to get past the gate to get to Fel Lord Zakuun, you’ll need to kill the two mobs outside the gate. There will be some RP, and then Zakuun will become targetable. You don’t need to kill the mob that is in the boss area with Zakuun, but its something to do while you wait for the RP.

After killing Fel Lord Zakuun, you’ll want to go up the ramp of rubble to get to the next boss. Going through the door you spawn at will take you to the Bastion of Shadows area of the raid, which will not have anything to kill because you aren’t in that wing. Taking the rubble ramp will lead you to Xhul’horac’s boss room, where you’ll have to kill two mobs before you can attack the boss.

After killing Xhul’horac, there will be a portal to take that will bring you up to the platform you fight Mannoroth on. On the platform, you’ll need to kill all three of the mobs there in order to get the boss to spawn. Once you kill Mannoroth, you can leave the instance.

Instance 3: Hellfire Citadel’s Bastion of Shadows

• Shadow-Lord Iskar
• Socrethar the Eternal
• Tyrant Velhari

Bastion of Shadows has three bosses, the first of which is Shadow-Lord Iskar. Once you attack him, it is likely that you’ll immediately activate Phase Two of the fight. During this phase, he will use Focused Blast and summon adds for you to fight. Even if his HP reaches zero, he will not die during this phase. As soon as he lands back on the platform, you’ll want to make sure you hit him and that he dies before he starts Phase Two again.

Once you defeat Shadow-Lord Iskar, you’ll go through the door you spawned at and head towards Socrethar the Eternal. There will be four mobs in the boss room you’ll have to kill to be able to attack him. Once you kill this boss, the loot will be in a chest on the right side of the room. Don’t forget to grab it before moving on.

In the next room, you’ll need to kill mobs that are channeling summoning portals in each corner of the room. After you kill all of them, you’ll be able to target the mini boss in the center of the room. Once you kill the mini boss, a door will open that leads to Tyrant Velhari.

There isn’t anything terribly special to note with the Tyrant Velhari fight. There are a ton of mobs in the room, but you can ignore them and head straight to the boss. Once you kill her, you can leave the instance.

Instance 4: Hellfire Citadel’s Halls of Blood

• Hellfire High Council
• Kilrogg Deadeye
• Gorefiend

Halls of Blood is the next instance on the list and will have three bosses for you to kill. The Hellfire High Council is the first and is a three boss fight. There isn’t much to the fight when doing it on a max level toon, so burn them all down, loot, and run through the door that opens to the right of the platform the bosses were on.

That will lead you through some hallways and eventually to Kilrogg Deadeye. With this one again, there isn’t anything important really to note. Kill him and go through the door that opens behind him.

The door will lead you through some more hallways and up some stairs. You’ll then be in a room with a half-destroyed spiral staircase going down it. Once you reach the bottom of the staircase, kill the mobs in the back of the room to spawn Gorefiend. Again, this is really just a kill and loot kind of fight with no special mechanics you really need to be aware of.

This concludes the Hellfire Citadel portion of the run. If you’re intent on doing all of the Warlords of Draenor instances, you could continue on to the Hellbreach instance, but the first part of Hellbreach is rather time-consuming and makes it really not worth the effort in my opinion.

Instance 5: Blackrock Foundry’s Iron Assembly (Do only 1st boss)

• Beastlord Darmac

The next instance we’ll be running is the Iron Assembly in Blackrock Foundry. This Raidfinder wing offers three bosses, but we’ll only be killing one. You’ll want to take a right when you get into the instance to head towards Beastlord Darmac. This will be a two-phase fight. You’ll hit Beastlord Darmac a couple of times and likely knock him down to zero health. Then, he’ll hop on the back of one of his beasts. Kill the beast, and once he hops off, hit him one more time to finish the fight.

At this point, the run is done. There are two more bosses in this instance — Operator Thogar and the Iron Maidens. I usually skip these bosses as they take a while, but you can do them if you really want to maximize your lockouts.

Be More Efficient With the Scrap Addon

The most useful addon for running old raids for raw gold is definitely Scrap. This addon will let you mark items to be automatically vendored. The addon will remember the items you’ve marked for next time as well. After a few weeks of running a raid, you’ll have marked almost everything to be auto-vendored. You can download it on the Twitch client here.

This addon is also insanely useful when doing any type of farming that involves mob grinding, as you’ll usually pick up a bunch of trash items. Being able to auto vendor them and keep farming instead of clicking on them in your bags one by one means you’ll make more gold by wasting less time.

If you’re using the bag addon Bagnon, you’ll also want to download Bagnon Scrap. This will allow the little coin indicators that will tell you an item will be vendored to display properly. You can grab that one on the Twitch client here.

Closing Thoughts

Warlords of Draenor Raidfinder instances are definitely an easy and quick way to make some raw gold every week to pay for your repairs and some food for raiding or Mythic keys. Raw gold farming will definitely never be more efficient than the majority of material farms, but if you need some starting capital or just don’t want to deal with the auction house, its a great way to bring in some extra coins.