Gold per Hour - Introduction

The road to farming
A few weeks ago I found myself with a small problem. I had decided even before the launch of cataclysm to have a dedicated farming character. To this end I had started to level a Druid with Mining and Herbalism. Once the expansion launched I only levelled by gathering and doing the daily quests in Orgrimmar, as a result I had not upgraded my gear until I reached the low thirties. Dustwallow Marsh proved to be something of a gear check, I only went there because of the Love is in the Air daily quest.

Checking the Auction House I found no suitable gear for a Feral (Cat) druid so it was time to level leatherworking on one of my alts. However another check on the auction house for materials found no light leather, medium leather or even ruined leather scraps. While there was some heavy leather it was in short supply and priced at 6g for each piece (120g/stack). As the day wore on I kept checking the auction house but it seemed nobody was listing leather, I even saw someone spamming trade chat offering to buy all light and medium leather.

Time to start farming leather, fortunately I had a level 58 Hunter with skinning so it was just a case of finding the best places to farm it. I am not a big fan of farming, as a general rule I have always bought my materials on the auction house where possible. I want to give my thanks to the contributors to WoWHead (http://www.wowhead.com/) this is an excellent source of information as to the best places to look for materials particularly if you read the comments section. It guided me to the best places to farm all the leather I needed. As I was farming I started to wonder how much gold per hour I could earn if I was selling this leather on the auction house, selling it at the normal price.

I want to share my findings with others in a way that can be applied to any realm so that people can more easily make gold out of farming. I started with skinning before applying the same model to mining and then moving on to herbalism.