A good way to figure out what to farm, outside of the typical pure merchant plat cash camps like nybright sisters or giants, is to go on the wiki to a zone you're in (or could be in), look at the 'unique items' list, and look at the prices for each (the wiki has a built-in auction tracker now; this answers your question about fluctuating item values). You can figure out which of the items are worthwhile, and to what extent they're viable for you to get yourself. I used this method to discover a relatively unknown camp, the erudite madman in Erud's Crossing, which I ended up farming for 40k or so before people started finding out about it (mostly from my own updates to the wiki about it, I think!) and it became not worthwhile for me anymore (although for a low level character it remains a good camp, I think).
Also, if you're level 50ish or higher, you should start thinking in terms of platinum per hour. Powerleveling goes for something like 1.5k-2.5k per hour, which means that enough people do camps that give that much or more per hour that they can justify spending that much on someone else's time. People will recommend things like porting or giant farming for druids, for instance, but that's never going to be consistently anywhere near 1k per hour (not saying you can't have a good hour porting, but taking the average, it won't add up).
So if you're high level, think about what your options are and how much plat per hour they net you. Monks, necros, and bards are all excellent PLers, so that's a great option for them. Druids aren't bad either, if you're PLing lower level players. Clerics can run around rezzing people - people will often offer 200-300pp for a rez in a faraway zone, so if you do four or five of those per hour, you're not doing too badly. Any class that's needed for AE Chardok runs (e.g. wizard, enchanter, cleric, anyone factioned with the sarnaks that can act as puller) can make good money there because of the sheer volume of monsters going down per hour, and the fact that some of them will drop valuable loot (e.g. stave of shielding, sarnak battle shield), or nice consistent gems/jewelry. Any class that's useful for groups (e.g. rogue, tank, enchanter, shaman) can join a group to camp something like the fungi tunic, i.e. a camp that drops extremely valuable items and can't be soloed. Classes that are good solo farmers (shamans, enchanters, necromancers) also have a vast array of options (though there will be competition), and classes that can quad-kite or otherwise take down a lot of monsters in a short amount of time (druids, wizards, magicians, necromancers) may find seafury island worthwhile, although I've never bothered with it because of the amount of competition there.
All of your plat options have the added dimension of having varying levels of competition and intensity; there are low-competition, low-intensity camps where you can be AFK for most of the time but may not make a ton of money, and there are high-competition, high-intensity camps where you have to be there to kill the various useful monsters and a lot of other people will want the camp as well, so you might have a hard time finding it open. This is another factor to consider, then. To what extent are you comfortable or able to compete for camps? How much free time in a row do you have to wait for a camp to open or to hold down a lot of monsters at once? That kind of thing.
It also depends on what you're aiming for. If you just want 10k or so to outfit an alt with some basic stuff, then it doesn't really matter that much if you make that 10k doing something inefficient (giants, porting). But if you're aiming for something big like a fungi tunic or the Torpor spell for shamans, then the difference between making 500pp an hour and making 2k an hour is a vast amount of time saved farming that plat.
|
