Or, how to show your friends you have way too much WOW money!
This list could be really long, or really short. It’s entirely subjective. Someone else’s list might be entirely different. I might overlook something entirely.
First I want to mention a whole category of items: mounts. You can spend a lot of gold on mounts. Some of them offer special features most mounts don’t – like vendors (The Reins of the Traveler’s Tundra Mammoth, at a mere 20,000 gold), or a passenger’s seat (See that last link, or the Mechano-hog which will cost at least 15,000 gold to build). Some give you an achievement when you buy them. Some are just cool. For a while, the drake that the Wyrmrest Accord will sell you (for a mere 2000 gold) was one of the easiest to acquire dragons in Northrend. These days it seems like everyone’s riding dragons so it’s not so special any more.
But leaving your ride aside, there’s some substantial bling you can drop a lot of gold on. Take the Band of the Kirin Tor. For 8,500 gold you can buy a purple ring that will transport you to Dalaran once every thirty minutes. It does award an achievement, as well, and if you pay more gold you can upgrade it to a slightly shinier ring. The transport is useful, I guess, but for that price you can just buy your own mage and get a portal to anywhere.
The infamous Haris Pilton sells her wares in Shattrath. Everyone knows about her Portable Hole and perhaps 3,000 gold for a 24 slot bag and an achievement is a good price. Maybe not. But she also sells a Gold Eternium Band for the same 3k gold, a white ring that does absolutely nothing. Has anyone ever bought it? Hopefully not. That ring has the distinction of being tied for the most expensive non-epic item that a vendor sells anywhere in the game. The other item, Salvaged Iron Golem Parts is a component to the Mechano Hog and Mekgineer’s Chopper, so it’s not completely useless like the ring.
Mage trash: Two of our best gold sinks are mage specific. There’s the Tome of Polymorph: Black Cat and the Dalaran Brilliance. The base polymorph is a sheep, i can see you might want to spice things up. But with a Glyph that lets you make penguins, a quest that awards a pig polymorph, and the Noblegarden rabbit spell that required a few extra eggs, spending 2500 gold to make black cats is a bit… ostentatious, no? More or less so than buying Dalaran Brilliance, which is exactly the same as Arcane Brilliance, only with a snazzy icon and the different title, for 500g?
The last gold sink, the one I think really takes the cake, isn’t an item. Its cost is lower than most of the other items I’ve mentioned, but still, a thousand gold is not to be sneezed at – even less so in Burning Crusade when this was around. Once you’re Exalted with the Shattered Sun, they will offer you the chance to donate 1,000 gold to their war effort. Their reward? A title, “Of the Shattered Sun”.
Yeah, that seems like a good way to spend my gold. Or… I could go buy cold weather flying for more alts. Hmm. Let me think about this.
Mages can also buy the Tome of Polymorph: Turtle. It is a BoE which drops off a boss in Zul’Gurub. You can usually find one or two available in the AH for 1,000 – 1,500 gold but I expect the price to crash or skurocket in Cataclysm depending whether it is available as a loot item.
You can spend a whole lot of gold on pets. Parrot Cage (Hyacinth Macaw) for example, is typically listed at 14k or more in the AH. The funny thing is the two most hardcore collectors I know would rather farm it themselves and returned the item when I tried to give it to them. Oh well, there are worst things than to be stuck with one of those cages… I will give one to one of my wife’s alts after she acquires her own cage on her main pet collector.
A gold sink which is becoming quite common these days: paying to see content. You can easily spend 50-100k for such a run. A rational decision? I would say yes in most cases as the buyers typically enough gold left over to be in a good position when Cataclysm is released.
Yup, that’s a good one. I was avoiding any player-created or BOE gold sinks in this post since they are not directly priced by Blizzard, but by the player-driven economy.
In strick game economy terms a ‘sink’ has to be taking money out of circulation. So player sold items don’t count.
There are also a LOT of other mounts costing between hundreds and thousands of gold. They make it seem like less by requiring a rep grind to earn the right to buy it.
Of course that is what I am mostly working on these days. heh.