Ualaa and his Amazing Alchemy Guide

[Ualaa]

Well.. boxing, there's only so much you can do.

For me, I want to play as a team, not take one toon from a team and raid one-boxed. Even if I could do five raids, and gear the entire group that way. Heroics, are probably the most challenging I'll regularly run, since I'm not into leading raids like I used to (ran a semi-serious raiding guild in Everquest), and unless you're leading the raid... boxers aren't exactly welcome in most pugs.

Which leaves PvP... hence the melee Feral team on alliance side, and the Warlocks/Priest team on horde side. One caster based team, and one melee based team, to mix things up. Along with a PvE team, that covers a lot of the bases.

Gold as an end has no point.

Having enough gold to purchase whatever you want, and enough left over to do the same at any point in the future, is nice. You can be sure Blizzard will introduce cash sinks in each expansion, be they epic flying, cold flying or whatever. Also, having enough to purchase herbs, to power the alchemists to whatever the new cap is... fairly fast, will be nice. Every raid tier, there are a few BoE drops, which would be nice for the teams I care about. And its nice to be able to buy friends their mounts for alts or whatever. On my server, there are lots of people who will sell you 1800 ratings, which is nice for PvP; basically do 2's Arena with someone on a 2400 rated 5's team, and do your best but be pulled through.

But you're right.. in end-game, you quickly reach a point where there aren't upgrades, at least upgrades which you can purchase with gold. Aside from having a buffer, to allow for the next purchase, the gold won't do much.

[Bubba]

I imagine there are teams/guilds that will escort you through higher level raids to get equip for ingame gold also, I know some will do it for hard RL cash.

[Ualaa]

Yeah, they have some on my server, GDKP raids... although I have no idea what that stands for.

Basically take a raid guild which has no more ups from the zone. Or random players who are in that boat. Then they take several (5-8 toons) who want upgrades. Generally you need to have 20-50k to bid with. They try to have 2-3 toons who can use each potential drop. And then you bid, whatever amount against the other toons, with the winner owing every non-winner their bid amount. So, you might "win/buy" 4 pieces for 20k and lose/not bid on 10-12 pieces which makes you 8-10k. So you get the four pieces for 20k - 10k, 10,000 gold. The others who have no upgrades, each end up with 500g-1k per piece that dropped.