Money Making Guide ~made by someone else but still has great tips.

The Following is posted on the darkfall forums at: http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=272117

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Long thread incoming. For many of you this will not be useful in the slightest. This thread isn't meant for you.

Preface: This is not rocket science. And there are way better ways to get rich, I'm sure. Plus, I'm not rich in gold. People think that and I like to let them think that because when I was trying to get houses it didn't hurt if they thought they wouldn't win a bidding war with me. I made a decent chunk of change but all, and I mean all, of that money went into self-funding crafting skills or houses. Those are my two passions in this game. People think as a crafter that your bank is loaded with badass weapons but for me, and I suspect most, you immediately sell those weapons and armors at a huge loss to try to keep the grind going. Factor in that I was vendoring most of the weapons I made on EU-1 before xferring over a year ago (the weapon market was terrible at the time) and my bank I think has 5 justice bringers and 10 dawnrazors in it total.

So now I'm sorta done with crafting skills, I've only got shipbuilding and warhulk construction left to do and I'm taking my time on shipbuilding, I'm not killing myself like I used to. I'm also done playing the real estate game, more or less. I still dream of owning a house @ Rhyhandel but for now I'm getting rid of 1 or 2 houses because I'd rather get some gold.

Again, most of this stuff no longer applies - but the concept behind it is as alive as ever.

The concept: Maximizing your gold per hour by utilizing as many different revenue streams as possible simultaneously.

I pay for 6 accounts. I get a lot of gibberish from people who can't seem to grasp how this isn't an extreme waste of money. Let me break it down for anyone whose eyes are rolling in the back of their heads right now: I'm 35. I've been a senior network engineer for a decade. I own a house. My wife works as well. We're not rich. But 6 characters a year is a ridiculously low entertainment budget. You're talking $700 a year. Most people spend that in a few months time going out once or twice a week to a bar. My other hobbies (theater, music and sports) are even cheaper.

You don't need alts to do what I did, but it certainly made it easier.

The top money-maker for me was Village Capping before the Hellfreeze Expansion. I put all of my alts in an alt guild and bound them at strategic locations where I was in fast travel time to a Village Control Point. Then I would use a macro that I wrote and would attend to cap the village. I'd need ~40 durability on a siege hammer and 4 pieces of bread. That's it. So few people were capping villages that most days I got 4-5 VCPs around the center alone. This doesn't work anymore because people are much more active when it comes to capping villages now that they get a cut of the gold.

I always captured villages on one of my multiple older computers. I use InputDirector to let me control the mouse and keyboard of these other systems over the network. Most people don't get how awesome this is when I say it but if you have more than one computer and you are ever lifting your hands off of your main mouse/keyboard to control ALL OF THEM, you are doing it wrong. With input director you can assign hotkeys, macros the whole gambit. It's a fantastic and free product that makes dual-boxing a dream.

Anyways so while I would have 1-2 alts capping a village I would also be farming. This is before Hellfreeze, I haven't really farmed since Hellfreeze came out but the concepts were simple:

1 - Dungeons reduce risk and therefore loss.
2 - Dungeons have mobs that are profitable enough.
3 - Dungeons have chests.

The ways that dungeons reduce risk should be obvious. You aren't in the open world making a ton of noise or leaving a trail of tombstones, you're in a dungeon. Silent to anyone but those few people who actually take the time to enter the dungeon - which wasn't many. Secondly I always farmed the last rooms. If the dungeon didn't have a chest at the last room I didn't farm there. The reasons are obvious - even without load lag you WILL hear people entering the dungeon if you pay attention because they're going to aggro mobs.

Nobody liked Veilron or Neithal keys but I loved them. I bought them for 1k off their turn-in price. I'd buy them by the 100s.

Once a week I'd go to one of 2 dungeons:

-The Svartdegir dungeon in Dwarflands with a big room and a Veilron Chest by the exit
-The Grey Ork Dungeon with Chieftains and a Neithal chest.

I'd always bring an alt. And I'd farm. While I was farming I would keep a web-based Egg Timer running alerting me every 8 minutes that it was time to prepare to turn in another key at the 10 minute mark. Since I make gratuitous use of alts I would typically have an alt acting as a 'bank' but I would also turn in keys on that alt as well as on my main, meaning 12 keys an hour which, as I had paid 1k less than what I was getting for them (at least) meant 12k an hour right off the bat. On top of this I was earning a lot of gold from the mobs I was farming.

For farming I used a pretty straightforward method: .75ish Alfar Daggers. They cost roughly 5k + a Q4 keen. I'd drop a piercing debuff, undeath, Slow and lastly a Vampiric Touch right before engaging in melee with those daggers. With this method and a dagger mastery over 100 I could stand toe to toe with a Menhir Stoneguard while in Studded Armor and kill it without having to heal. I'd be under 20% health when done so it was hardly advisable but still an impressive display of how much damage you can do with daggers.

When you add in all the enchanting materials, R50s, Leenspar keys and other crap I was getting I was making 30k an hour easily from just what I was doing in the dungeon.

Then when you factor in that I was also capping VCPs on alts it meant that on a good day (where I had gotten 6 of the better villages) I was making in excess of 110k for 3 hours of work.

I always put my money into either crafting skills or rare items. My definition of rare is something you cannot control acquiring. Houses and chaos chest drops. If you want gold - you can go get all the gold you need. If you want rare ores - you can get all the rare ores you need. I cannot choose to go get a house tomorrow and get it, I needed someone to be selling it. So instead of having gold sitting in my bank I invested it in houses. Put those houses on alts and had additional village control points I can cap now.

Bottom line - you should always, ALWAYS be accomplishing multiple goals simultaneously. Take crafting - When I was working up enchanting I also skilled up Shadecrafting because I could then enchant the shadecrafted pieces I made and sell them.

If you're skilling up magic make sure you are hitting yourself with your own debuffs. I have 67 willpower from skilling up magic with debuffs making sure I got my own AoE off of the target I was casting on. I doubt it's the highest on the server but most people aren't even in sniffing distance of 67 Willpower. Same with the int grind - don't just cast mana missile on a target, get some of the AoE on yourself and skill up fortitude. People miss these opportunities for combining skilling activities all the time.

My hardcore gold earning days seem to be behind me. I'm not done with Darkfall but I'm a little disheartened lately by several factors which are outside of the scope of this thread. I haven't farmed seriously in about 3-4 months now and with work and theater picking up I probably won't be anytime soon so I don't have any particular tips to share with people about how they can earn more gold today. But the concept I still believe in is that if you are doing just one thing at a time you aren't doing it right.