Easy Ways to Make Gold in Elder Scrolls Online

As with any other MMORPG making gold is important for improving your characters and ensuring they are competitive at endgame or PvP combat, and The Elder Scrolls Online certainly has plenty of ways to spend it. Since some of the best gear in the game is player-crafted and not dropped, you can easily spend rather large amounts just purchasing proper equipment for your character. Crafting items isn’t overly expensive though, but upgrading their quality to Epic (purple) and subsequently Legendary (gold) can get extremely expensive — with current market prices it would take nearly 50,000g just to upgrade one item to Legendary quality.

And there’s always the gold sinks such as repairing equipment, purchasing and feeding horses, and also important increasing your character’s inventory and bank space. Bottomline is gold is easily spent and there will always be a demand to earn more of it, so I hope some of my tips and experiences can help you out in earning more gold in ESO. Most of them include using Guild Stores to trade more conveniently, so being part of several large trading guilds with active members is certainly helpful.

5. Sell traits

With research times lasting months of real time, players are often looking to maximize their trait research times and will often gladly pay for certain traits on items. Some can be quite difficult to find and getting 500g-1,000g for selling a simple level 1 item with the required trait is very common. You can pay attention to zone chats and you’ll frequently see players purchasing traits, so if you have them be sure to contact them as this is one of the easiest ways to make gold with very little effort.

Tip: use Research Assistant addon to quickly check which traits you have!

You can also utilize guild stores to sell traits, though from my experiences not as many people are searching there. Some of the most sought after traits are:

• Light and medium armor: Impenetrable on gloves, head, shoulders, belt
• Heavy armor: Divines and Infused on boots (and pretty much all other item slots)
• Staves: Weighted on Inferno Staff, Precise on Lightning Staff

Also Training and Exploration are surprisingly sought after frequently as well for all items: most players research these last and with 12/24 day research timers are easily prepared to pay 1,000g just to do it as soon as possible. This is by no means an extensive list of traits you can sell, but guild stores have limited slots for putting items up for sale so don’t overdo it and keep it down to just a few best-selling traits I listed.

4. Buy and resell Monumental Glyphs from vendors

Not the best nor most profitable way to make gold, but this easily nets me 1,000-2,000 gold a day. You’d be surprised how many Veteran players don’t know you can purchase Monumental (currently highest) level glyphs from vendors for mere 255 gold a piece, meaning you can resell them to other players for twice the amount of not more. These glyphs don’t add much Inspiration for deconstruction but there’s always gear to be enchanted and not many players have thousands to spend on Legendary glyphs.

I’m guessing if so many players haven’t figured this out yet chances are this will be a decent money-making tip for awhile. Check your favorite enchanter in Veteran zones: I play Ebonheart Pact, so I shop from the one in Rawl’Kha in Reaper’s March. I typically put them up on my guild stores for 600g each which doubles my investment in a very short time. Health and Magicka glyphs sell best!

3. Refine raw materials

Though the recent patch 1.2.3 slightly decreased the chances of gaining higher quality tannins, resins, and tempers for improving equipment’s quality, the principle still works. More often than not players will be prepared to sell you a stack of 100 raw materials for far less than 1,000g, even 600g per stack. From my observations there’s about 2-3% chance to gain a Legendary improvement material when refining 10 raw materials, giving you roughly a 25% chance to get one per stack. Since legendary mats can be sold for 5,000g each, even paying 1,200g for a stack of raw materials is worth it.

Don’t forget, you also get Elegant Linings, Grain Solvents and Mastics worth about 1,000g each at an even greater chance. The chances I mentioned for gaining Improvement mats are based on having 3/3 skill points in Metal Extraction, Unraveling and Wood Extraction, which all greatly increase the odds of gaining them.

2. Use Hirelings

Spending skill points into Hirelings for Clothing, Blacksmithing and Woodworking is immensely profitable, particularly if you invest full skill points into them. With 3/3 in Hirelings you have roughly a 20% chance to gain one or even two Legendary crafting materials twice a day. If you include Epic ones into the equation and raw materials you can further use for refining, this means you can get 5,000g per day on average without lifting a finger!

Best of all, you can do this on 8 characters. Though leveling professions takes time and essentially gold, even basic hirelings with 1 skill point invested will on occasion send you Legendary mats. If you make a new character, you start with level 3 with equal amount of skill points to spend: just enough to put them into hirelings without even having to do any quests, gain any levels or hunt for skyshards. You will need to level your Woodworking, Blacksmithing and Clothing to level 3 though, but that only takes 2-3 Veteran item deconstructions. Easy, cheap and highly profitable, and all you have to do is log in with each character once a day and pick up the profits.

1. Deconstruct items

Though the prices may change, currently you can sell Superior (blue) improvement materials such as Dwarven Oil, Turpen and Embroidery for 500g a piece. If you invested skill points into Extraction passives as mentioned in the “Refine raw materials” tip above, you will have about  85% chance to gain a blue mat when deconstructing blue items. Being a part of 4 trading guilds I can purchase at least 20-30 blue items on guild stores for less than 200g a piece every day, and simply resell all those improvement materials for higher prices. You also get a ton of refined materials which you can further sell for higher profits, or just vendor them for 400g/stack.

Even higher profits though can be made by purchasing and deconstructing purple quality items. Again I can easily purchase up to 10 purple items for less than 500g each, deconstruct them for a 75% chance to gain a purple improvement item, and resell them for 1,200g or more. There’s still a really good profit margin here, but if you dread selling so many things all the time at the very least you can get improvement materials for half the price this way.

In closing

These are right now one of my favorite things for making gold in ESO. Combining all of these does take some time and effort but easily nets me at least 10,000 gold every day, and it sure as heck beats grinding! Trading and crafting isn’t everyone’s cup of tea though, but there are plenty of other ways to make gold in Elder Scrolls Online:

• Farm raw materials and sell them to other players, or refine them yourself. For selling refined stacks of cloth, iron and wood level 30-45 is best, and VR1-VR3 mats usually sell faster than highest Veteran Rank ones.
• Do public group dungeons, sell items with Intricate (increased Inspiration gained when deconstructing) trait to other players for 100-200g a piece.
• Do public group dungeons and sell dropped Glyphs to enchanters for up to 300g a piece.
• Buy empty Soul Gems from vendors, fill them and resell for 10-20% more.
• Grind bosses in delves, deconstruct blue items, and sell gems and potions (very profitable when done right!).
• Farm herbs, sell for 100g-150g a piece. Mountain Flower is often bought for up to 200g a piece.
• Grind for racial motifs (extremely boring and repetitive, nevertheless profitable). Good places are Altmer Embassy in Grahtwood, Daggerfall Castle in town of Daggerfall, Inn in Rawl’Kha town in Reaper’s March.

I do hope this article helped you a bit and gave you ideas on earning and farming gold in Elder Scrolls Online. Unless you took advantage of some bugs or high racial motif drop rates early on in the game, you will inevitably find yourself looking for more gold constantly and I hope you will refer to this post for some inspiration. If you have any of your own gold making tips, tricks or strategies be sure to contribute in the comments just below. What’s your tip?