ElonCS Farms WoW Gold in a Scandinavian Heat Wave

Somewhere in Scandinavia, a man is fishing for deviate fish in the Barrens while his room turns into a sauna. This is the content. And honestly? It slaps.

ElonCS streamed his zero-to-a-token challenge in WoW Classic over the weekend, and what looked on paper like "guy does gold farm" turned into something way more interesting — a live, sweaty, stream-of-consciousness breakdown of how gold actually gets made in this game right now, filtered through the chaos of a European summer that CBS News confirmed has been shattering records across Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark. Chat was reporting Germany at 41 degrees Celsius during the stream. ElonCS didn't dispute it. He was too busy trying not to melt.

That's the context you need. This wasn't a clean tutorial. It was a guy problem-solving in real time with 200 people in chat, a portable AC he never fixed the window seal on, and a Rogue spec that had zero AoE until he figured out he should switch to Assassination.

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The Challenge Setup

The rules are simple and deliberately punishing: level 35 Rogue, vanilla zones only, no heirlooms, no outside gold injection. The goal is to earn enough for a WoW Token purely through Classic-era content. On this stream, ElonCS was sitting at 23,000 gold — real money in Classic terms, still a long way from a token.

What struck me watching this wasn't any single farm. It was the methodology. ElonCS doesn't lock in on one thing and grind it into the ground. He's rotating — Wailing Caverns runs for gear upgrades and flippable BOEs, cooking up Savory Deviate Delight for the cosmetic premium it commands on the AH, fishing deviate fish pools in the Barrens, posting everything that moves. The challenge constraint forces creative play. You can't just go run Mythic+ for twenty minutes and cash out. You have to actually think.

The Wailing Caverns run early in the stream is a good example. ElonCS goes in as Outlaw because he likes the mobility from Grappling Hook, immediately realizes he has no real AoE, argues with himself about it, swaps to Assassination mid-stream to get Fan of Knives, and then — "Holy sh**, now we can farm. Easy mode." That's the loop. Adapt, iterate, keep moving.

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The Deviate Fish Situation

Here's where it got genuinely wild.

ElonCS pulled up price history on stream and showed that deviate fish — a fish you catch in a specific swamp area of the Barrens — had climbed from a few gold per fish to around 50 gold each, according to the data visible on his screen. He admitted he'd thought they were worth about eight gold. He was wrong by a factor of six.

The reason they're valuable isn't because they're good food. It's because cooking them into Savory Deviate Delight turns your character into a ninja or a pirate for an hour. It's a cosmetic food. People will pay a premium for cosmetic anything in this game, and ElonCS understood immediately that cooking and selling the processed version was smarter than selling the raw fish.

"Imagine this is the way to get rich in Midnight, guys," he said to chat. "Fishing deviate. We go back to the roots in this game."

He was joking. But also not really joking. He tracked 20 minutes of active fishing and landed roughly 10,000 gold per hour under decent conditions without any addons to track fish pools. The farm is real. Is it the best farm in the game? No. But for a no-heirlooms Classic challenge character? It's legitimately competitive, and the chill factor — you can fish while watching something, while talking, while slowly dying of heat exhaustion — is worth something.

One thing that's real: those deviate fish prices will take a hit when Classic Timewalking comes back around and players can buy them with badges. ElonCS called this out himself. The window matters.

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The Alt Army Reality Nobody Talks About

The most underrated part of this stream had nothing to do with the Classic challenge. Partway through, the conversation shifted to raw gold farming in Midnight — current retail — and ElonCS made a point that I think a lot of players genuinely haven't internalized.

World quests in Midnight are printing gold. Not at the level where you notice it on one character. But if you have an alt army and you're doing the weekly cache quest out of Silvermoon on every level-90 character you own? ElonCS said he estimates it at something like 80,000 raw gold per hour when you account for how fast the quest completes. Chat was corroborating 18,000 gold procs from the cache. Someone floated 60,000. ElonCS treated that one with visible skepticism — "I think that's a troll, it has to be a troll" — but even anchored to the conservative numbers, the math is stupid good.

"World quest is insane in Midnight. Way better than people think," he said. "Like, it's probably the best raw gold farm that you can do is just alts playing right now in Midnight. Like literally it's so good. It's almost too good."

The caveat is real: you need the alt setup. You need multiple level-90 characters, ideally across multiple accounts. That's a time investment that not everyone has made. But if you're already sitting on alts you leveled for other reasons, you might be leaving thousands of gold per week on the table without knowing it. Five world quests. Done in minutes. Repeat across your roster. It's the most boring sentence in gold-making and also somehow the most accurate one.

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The Classic Plus Conversation

This is the part that actually got me thinking.

Chat kept circling back to Classic Plus — the rumored re-release of vanilla WoW with changes and new content built on top of it. ElonCS has a clear, specific take: he'll try it, but only if it's permanent. Not seasonal. Not something that resets every two years and makes you start over.

"If they say if you create your character, it's there forever. We're not going to be re-releasing it again. We're not going to be doing weird stuff. This is what you're going to be playing now... Cuz if they do that, I'm not even going to bother with it. It has to be a forever thing for me to be interested."

That's a clean position, and honestly I'm with him. The seasonal reset model in Classic has always felt like Blizzard trying to extract engagement by erasing progress rather than building on it. RuneScape Old School figured this out — you release it, you maintain it, you build on it slowly, you let people live there. That's what creates the attachment that keeps people subbed for years. Seasonal servers create hype, then exodus. The engagement numbers look good on a quarterly report and then fall off a cliff.

Where I'd push back on ElonCS slightly: he says he'll never fully leave retail, that Classic Plus will probably be something he plays for a bit and drifts away from. Maybe. But the reason he's doing this challenge at all — making zero-to-a-token work inside vanilla constraints, fishing deviate fish in a dungeon nobody runs — is because the constraint-based creativity of Classic is doing something for him that retail's current systems don't. He's engaged in a way that feels different. Whether Classic Plus can hold that if it starts getting the retail treatment — token, store mounts, the whole apparatus — is the real question.

On the Token specifically: ElonCS said flat out he'd rather pay a DLC price to access Classic Plus than see the WoW Token introduced there. "Having the WoW token in Classic is very sad in my opinion. I think that should not be in Classic." Hard agree. The Token warps the economy in ways that are fine-ish in retail where everything is already inflated to absurdity, but in Classic it would gut the farming culture that makes the whole thing worth doing. Why fish deviate fish for 10k an hour when someone can just swipe a credit card?

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The stream ended with ElonCS heading into lumber farming — three accounts running simultaneously toward a goal of 36,000 total lumber to convert into housing decorations for the AH. Degenerate numbers, his words. Completely correct, also his words.

What stuck with me is this: the most useful gold-making content isn't always the most optimized. It's the stuff that shows you how someone actually thinks through a problem in real time — wrong spec, overpriced fish, a sandwich getting made in the kitchen while Scandinavia slowly broils. ElonCS isn't giving you a fixed answer. He's showing you the process. And if you pay attention to the process, you can run it yourself on whatever the next thing is.

I'm probably going to go check my alts' world quest status now. That 80k-per-hour estimate has been living in my head rent-free since I watched this stream, and that's kind of the point.

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— Derek "D-Block" Washington, Gaming & Interactive Media Correspondent, Buzzrag