Major Update: July 23, 2018
I will plan on updating this article periodically while we all adjust to the new mod. There are many ways to make AD, and with a little effort you can easily make 700,000 to 1,000,000 AD per week. There are two major sections below, Quick & Easy and Supplemental,
RANDOM QUEUES
Pressing K brings up the queues, and only random queues reward with AD. You can still create AD with salvageable items throughout all the other queues, but the random queue is the fastest way to make your daily AD.
In order to go after the random queues, you MUST queue public! You can queue public solo and be thrown together with other unknown players in the game, or you can put your own party together. Here is where it gets a bit frustrating. Every player must qualify for the random queue you desire, if even one person does not qualify the queue will have a red marker on and prevent you from using it. You can hover on the red marker, and see which requirements are being violated.
Random: Leveling Queue
Item Level: None
Group Requirement: None
Estimated Play Time: 15-30 min
Bonus: 9,200 AD, 60 Seals
Repeat Bonus: 1,150 AD, 20 Seals of the Brave
Random: Intermediate Queue
Item Level: 9,000
Group Requirement: 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 DPS
Estimated Play Time: 15-30 min
Bonus: 13,800 AD, 100 Seals of the Brave
Repeat Bonus: 2,300 AD, 40 Seals + Character AD Role Bonus
Random: Advanced Queue
Item Level: 11,000
Group Requirement: 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 DPS
Estimated Play Time: 20-30 min
Bonus: 17,250 AD, 120 Seals of the Brave
Repeat Bonus: 3,450 AD, 30 Seals + Character AD Role Bonus
Random: Expert Queue
Try not to queue this with random people, it only brings misery. Jump on TeamSpeak and grab some guildies or alliance members. It is a bit crazy to think you can run this and use in-game chat. These require a high degree of dynamic teamwork and speaking to one another, it really is the only way to go. Bonus: 23,000 AD, 20 Seals of the Crown (reclaimed in Barovia)
CAUTION: Once the queue activates and you enter the dungeon or skirmish, if you leave early you will be given a 30 minute penalty where you cannot re-queue until the timer expires. This encourages people to not bail out on their party, thus making them wait for another player to take your place. To avoid the penalty, the group can vote to abandon. Once a person leaves and is penalized, anyone can leave without the penalty.
This queue system promotes players completing their campaigns and opening the various parts of the game. Thus, it also encourages you making keys from all the campaigns so you have them on hand for the random action. You cannot open the second chest without those keys, so now being prepared for randoms pushes more playtime in all the campaigns. Alts and bots that do the bare minimum will have considerable work to do to catch up and earn their eligibility for the random queuing.
NON-RANDOM QUEUES
All other queuing can still be accomplished with public or private queuing, but you will not earn bonus AD from them. The enticement is that you can still earn AD from the salvageable items that drop or come from the treasure chest at the end of the Boss fight. After completing your randoms for the day, this is still a good way to grab AD. What is especially cool about these is that you can solo private queue them. This means if you have decent damage, you can solo through them and not wait for any groups to be formed. Sometimes you can run them faster than a group, because the group waits at a door for another party member who died, or is picking up loot, etc.
AUCTION HOUSE
This is the number one way to make lots of AD, nothing comes close to it! If you really want to roll the dice, learn to keep an eye on the auction house. You will become familiar with the price of things, and you will develop an eye for the good deals. Buy and resell to make profits here and there. Do this poorly, and you will lose AD and probably pull out some of your own hair. Do this well, and you can make millions of AD - no joke, seriously you can make a lot when you know how to feel out the market and make the time sensitive deals. They key is to not spend your profits all the time. Pour some of them back into building an empire. When you have millions of AD, you can afford to snatch up really expensive items and make huge profits. Or, you can toil with a lot of small items which would take you months and years to equal one really large item.
FARMING
In the course of the game certain items become very valuable. When Storm King Thunder began with Bryn Shander, Lonelywood, and Cold Run many people made a fortune in AD by running the big heroics in Lonelywood to farm lanolin. Lanolin was a key component that everyone needed to obtain the new weapon set, get it restored, and unleash it on their enemies. By farming it, you could get 4-6 lanolin to drop on average per hour. At the time of writing this blog article, lanolin is selling for 18,000 each at the auction house. That equals 72,000 to 108,000 AD per hour. At one time they were going 40K each. If you know what people want and you can farm it, you can defer your progress a little bit, make a killing in the auction house, and laugh all the way to the bank. Get a group of guildies/alliance together and everyone helps each other. It always helps to announce in alliance and certainly in zone chat. The more players on the map you recruit to help, the faster it goes. If you don't have enough people, your farming rate will dramatically drop and it may even be a waste of time. Today the Cloaked Ascendancy items are super hot, everyone wants them to do the same thing with the new weapon set.
LEVEL 25 LEADERSHIP
Getting your leadership profession to level 25, you can visit the Professions Asset dealer in the Seven Suns Coster Market. Purchase from her, for every open slot, a worn infantry weaponry and a worn infantry armor (purchase these sooner to help yourself get to level 25 faster too!). These are cheap and only cost some gold. With level 25 leadership and these two items you can start making: enchanted coffers, resonant bags, artifact paraphenalia, thaumaturgic bags, and other items that give you lots and lots of usable items to rank up your character, or sell on the auction house. Not only do you save AD by not buying these items, now you start making AD by selling what you are not using yourself.
GUILD MARKS
With the new mods, dragonflight gear is pretty much useless. We used to scramble for guildmarks for this gear, then we started salvaging the gear for AD. There is a much better use of guildmarks and it generates way more AD. Temporary structures in the strongholds yield resources that are used for mastercrafting and more. Buy these items with your guildmarks and sell them on the auction house. Visit The Generalist in the stronghold, east of the fountain, around the corner from the spawn point. The cool thing about the Generalist is that she is always available. Click on her Scrolls tab and purchase Explorer's Cases with your guild marks. When you open them, you will need to visit the appropriate map and collect the resources that these scrolls reveal. This is easy work, it doesn't take long, and if you pick the right scrolls you can convert your guild marks into hundreds of thousands, if not over a million AD. This my friends, is much faster than doing everything else that follows this guild marks section. The other completely awesome aspect is that while collecting your guild marks you are beefing up your guild coffer and the others' of the alliance. Stronger coffers means stronger guild boons.
Below you will see some data I collected today on the scrolls. The values change frequently, but this gives a feel for where to focus. You can always double check the auction house market rates. I highlighted in green the most likely targets. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and flood the market with one or two resources, so spread your guild marks around.
SCROLLS: EXPLORER'S CASES
TL;DR for Quick and Easy
Every day pickup your stronghold, daily key, do random leveling, intermediate, advanced. Run a bunch of epics for the drops, check your seals frequently and trade them in. Every Monday do your weeklies, sell unbound goodies on at the auction house. Rake in a million AD per week.
TL;DR for Supplemental
Play the auction house, use your guild marks wisely with scrolls and mastercrafting resources, farming items for the auction house, and level your leadership profession to 25 to make RP to sell or use.
Quick & Easy
FIRST THINGS FIRST
When you load up your game, it is highly recommend that you:- Stop by the stronghold, pick up the following.
- Builder daily quests
- Coin Master daily quests (directly in front of zoning in point)
- Ranger daily quests (west side of fountain)
- Cleric random quests (on the left behind the fountain)
- After picking these up, go to Protector Enclave and visit the Dungeon Chest Keymaster, Amario Clavus. He is located to the right of the northwest entrance of the Seven Suns Coster Market. Obtain your free daily Dungeon Chest Key from him.
RANDOM QUEUES
Pressing K brings up the queues, and only random queues reward with AD. You can still create AD with salvageable items throughout all the other queues, but the random queue is the fastest way to make your daily AD.
In order to go after the random queues, you MUST queue public! You can queue public solo and be thrown together with other unknown players in the game, or you can put your own party together. Here is where it gets a bit frustrating. Every player must qualify for the random queue you desire, if even one person does not qualify the queue will have a red marker on and prevent you from using it. You can hover on the red marker, and see which requirements are being violated.
Random: Leveling Queue
Item Level: None
Group Requirement: None
Estimated Play Time: 15-30 min
Bonus: 9,200 AD, 60 Seals
Repeat Bonus: 1,150 AD, 20 Seals of the Brave
Random: Intermediate Queue
Item Level: 9,000
Group Requirement: 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 DPS
Estimated Play Time: 15-30 min
Bonus: 13,800 AD, 100 Seals of the Brave
Repeat Bonus: 2,300 AD, 40 Seals + Character AD Role Bonus
Random: Advanced Queue
Item Level: 11,000
Group Requirement: 1 Tank, 1 Healer, 3 DPS
Estimated Play Time: 20-30 min
Bonus: 17,250 AD, 120 Seals of the Brave
Repeat Bonus: 3,450 AD, 30 Seals + Character AD Role Bonus
Random: Expert Queue
Try not to queue this with random people, it only brings misery. Jump on TeamSpeak and grab some guildies or alliance members. It is a bit crazy to think you can run this and use in-game chat. These require a high degree of dynamic teamwork and speaking to one another, it really is the only way to go. Bonus: 23,000 AD, 20 Seals of the Crown (reclaimed in Barovia)
CAUTION: Once the queue activates and you enter the dungeon or skirmish, if you leave early you will be given a 30 minute penalty where you cannot re-queue until the timer expires. This encourages people to not bail out on their party, thus making them wait for another player to take your place. To avoid the penalty, the group can vote to abandon. Once a person leaves and is penalized, anyone can leave without the penalty.
This queue system promotes players completing their campaigns and opening the various parts of the game. Thus, it also encourages you making keys from all the campaigns so you have them on hand for the random action. You cannot open the second chest without those keys, so now being prepared for randoms pushes more playtime in all the campaigns. Alts and bots that do the bare minimum will have considerable work to do to catch up and earn their eligibility for the random queuing.
NON-RANDOM QUEUES
All other queuing can still be accomplished with public or private queuing, but you will not earn bonus AD from them. The enticement is that you can still earn AD from the salvageable items that drop or come from the treasure chest at the end of the Boss fight. After completing your randoms for the day, this is still a good way to grab AD. What is especially cool about these is that you can solo private queue them. This means if you have decent damage, you can solo through them and not wait for any groups to be formed. Sometimes you can run them faster than a group, because the group waits at a door for another party member who died, or is picking up loot, etc.
WEEKLIES
Be sure to do your weekly quests, every week! You will get lot's of AD, and the timer resets every Monday morning. So put it on your calendar, grab some guildies, and go rocket through them. Each yield 4,500 AD and other rewards
- Protecting the Portal (Protector Enclave: Harper Boward, northwest on map)
- Arcane Resevoir (Sharandar, see the woman at the fountain)
- Red Wizards (Dread Ring, see Sgt. Knox)
- Biggrin's Tomb (Icewindale: Caer-Konig: Icewindale Pass, middle west of map)
- Ballad of Baphomet (The Underdark: Mantol-Derith: Bruenor Battlehammer, campfire in the middle of the map)
- Reclaiming the Horde (Well of Dragons)
- Stronghold Siege (Storming the Castle): 4,500 AD, 100 Chultan Riches, 25 Forgotten Totems, Blood Ruby, and more.
SEALS MANAGEMENT
For all seal management go to Protector Enclave and visit the Seven Suns Coster Market in the Southwest. There you will find Phileas Gram and other various traders. There is now another seals vendor in the Port of Nyanzaru, Chult Campaing, around the center baldachino. Currently, Phileas is called the "Seal of the Brave Trader," but this changes as new campaign come on board. You never want to MAX your seals and not trade them in, because if you run another epic you will NOT EARN more than the max. So manage those seals, and trade them when they are max or near max. You will get salvage items for more AD! A great strategy is to go to Protector Enclave before you start running epics, go to the seal trader, and then when you leave a dungeon you are right there if you need to do some trading.
- Adventurer's Seals Trader will let you trade your adventurer seals you earned doing your random: leveling queue. View General Wares, and trade your seals enchants, because if you choose to sell the enchants you will generally yield more AD than the bag of rough astral diamonds. So it is more profitable to take the enchants to sell, or just refine them for yourself. Be sure to pick up your free daily key, just outside the Seven Suns Coster Market, you get one free key per day and it yields more seals. 1200 MAX
IMPORTANT: This is the most convenient place to obtain your standard enchants to slot in your gear. You can still get them off the auction house, but you can get them here for free by spending your adventure seals. Specialized enchants (brutals, cruel, etc.) will be drops in seasonal events (Siege, CTA, etc). - Seal Trader Phileas Gram will let you trade your Seals of the Brave you earned doing epics. Elemental, Protector, etc. seals are no longer traded for goods, but you can trade them for the current campaign seal on the Miscellany option. To yield the most valuable return for AD go to: 1. Equipment; Accessories tab; trade for any ring; salvage it. 1200 MAX
SALVAGE METHODS
A quick word about salvage items: You can only refine 100,000 AD per day, per account. You will quickly realize that you are exceeding this. It is okay, even advisable to keep some unrefined AD always at the ready, maybe 500,000 - 1,000,000, so that you can max refine at a click of a button every day and never worry you aren't maxing.
- Protector Enclave: Seven Suns Coster Market (southwest): Salvage Trader is the dude with the anvil. You simply ride up to his booth, open your inventory, and right click your items that are 130+ in item level and you will see an option to salvage. Once you salvage something, there is no getting it back, and you will receive the AD for it. This is a major part of earning AD! Don't sell salvageable items to other vendors for gold, this is noob mistake.
- Chult: Port Nyanzaru: The Salvage Trader (Carlen Barrowen) is located on the West as you are headed North toward Prince Wakanga
- Icewindale: Caer-Konig: Market (middle of map, west): Salvage Trader has an anvil and you use the same method as above for Protector Enclave.
- VIP Level 7 allows you to whip out your own anvil to salvage. Anyone who steps into the area of affect of your anvil can also simultaneously salvage their own items too.
- Stronghold salvaging is possible when your guildhall is ranked up in the upper levels and your guild has chosen this path. Ghost Templars does not currently have this salvage method.
INVOKING
Be sure to invoke as often as possible per day. You get AD bonuses from these too!
[--------------------------------------]
Supplemental
AUCTION HOUSE
This is the number one way to make lots of AD, nothing comes close to it! If you really want to roll the dice, learn to keep an eye on the auction house. You will become familiar with the price of things, and you will develop an eye for the good deals. Buy and resell to make profits here and there. Do this poorly, and you will lose AD and probably pull out some of your own hair. Do this well, and you can make millions of AD - no joke, seriously you can make a lot when you know how to feel out the market and make the time sensitive deals. They key is to not spend your profits all the time. Pour some of them back into building an empire. When you have millions of AD, you can afford to snatch up really expensive items and make huge profits. Or, you can toil with a lot of small items which would take you months and years to equal one really large item.
FARMING
In the course of the game certain items become very valuable. When Storm King Thunder began with Bryn Shander, Lonelywood, and Cold Run many people made a fortune in AD by running the big heroics in Lonelywood to farm lanolin. Lanolin was a key component that everyone needed to obtain the new weapon set, get it restored, and unleash it on their enemies. By farming it, you could get 4-6 lanolin to drop on average per hour. At the time of writing this blog article, lanolin is selling for 18,000 each at the auction house. That equals 72,000 to 108,000 AD per hour. At one time they were going 40K each. If you know what people want and you can farm it, you can defer your progress a little bit, make a killing in the auction house, and laugh all the way to the bank. Get a group of guildies/alliance together and everyone helps each other. It always helps to announce in alliance and certainly in zone chat. The more players on the map you recruit to help, the faster it goes. If you don't have enough people, your farming rate will dramatically drop and it may even be a waste of time. Today the Cloaked Ascendancy items are super hot, everyone wants them to do the same thing with the new weapon set.
LEVEL 25 LEADERSHIP
Getting your leadership profession to level 25, you can visit the Professions Asset dealer in the Seven Suns Coster Market. Purchase from her, for every open slot, a worn infantry weaponry and a worn infantry armor (purchase these sooner to help yourself get to level 25 faster too!). These are cheap and only cost some gold. With level 25 leadership and these two items you can start making: enchanted coffers, resonant bags, artifact paraphenalia, thaumaturgic bags, and other items that give you lots and lots of usable items to rank up your character, or sell on the auction house. Not only do you save AD by not buying these items, now you start making AD by selling what you are not using yourself.
With the new mods, dragonflight gear is pretty much useless. We used to scramble for guildmarks for this gear, then we started salvaging the gear for AD. There is a much better use of guildmarks and it generates way more AD. Temporary structures in the strongholds yield resources that are used for mastercrafting and more. Buy these items with your guildmarks and sell them on the auction house. Visit The Generalist in the stronghold, east of the fountain, around the corner from the spawn point. The cool thing about the Generalist is that she is always available. Click on her Scrolls tab and purchase Explorer's Cases with your guild marks. When you open them, you will need to visit the appropriate map and collect the resources that these scrolls reveal. This is easy work, it doesn't take long, and if you pick the right scrolls you can convert your guild marks into hundreds of thousands, if not over a million AD. This my friends, is much faster than doing everything else that follows this guild marks section. The other completely awesome aspect is that while collecting your guild marks you are beefing up your guild coffer and the others' of the alliance. Stronger coffers means stronger guild boons.
Below you will see some data I collected today on the scrolls. The values change frequently, but this gives a feel for where to focus. You can always double check the auction house market rates. I highlighted in green the most likely targets. You don't want to put all your eggs in one basket and flood the market with one or two resources, so spread your guild marks around.
SCROLLS: EXPLORER'S CASES
==========================
Caverns
Caverns
Concentrated Residuum 125
Gold Ore 5,200
Slaked Lime 1,143
Skyhold
Adamant Sand 1,500
Lacquer Branch 3,700
Silex 824
Bryn Shander
Snowhare Wool 274
Native Silver 2,250
Raw Sphene 2,500
Cold Run
Native Iron 120
Raw Rubellite 7,750
Effervescent 16,660
Omu
Samarachan
Jute 14, 434
Chultan Spring Water 983
Brilliant Pinion 4,299
Obsidian 5,625
Hotenow
Alum 2,777
Nitre 790
Sal Ammoniac 231
Vellosk
Cashmere Wool 1,475
Dark Alum 11,900
Molybdena 1,692
Lonelywood
Spruce Log 868
Spruce Resin 3,600
Red Alder Bark 12,900
Soshenstar
Lakh Resin 11,600
Bronzewood Log 10,516
Chultan Tea Leaves 1,799
Silkworm Cocoon 2,250
Tanner's Liquor 26,815
TANNERY TRADER
---------------------------
1,571 Deer Skin
2,250 Polar Bear Skin
1,750 Bear Skin
25,000 Tanner's Liquor
---------------------
35,000 Hard Aberrant Leather
23,900 Soft Aberrant Leather
147,741 Lacquered Aberrant Leather !!!
44,000 Lined Aberrant Leather
64,000 Manticore Leather
11,790 Aberrant Leather Strap
MYSTERIOUS MERCHANT
Wisley's Dreaded Dueling Writguards
Executioner's Black Attire
Ring of the Wily
TEMPORARY STRUCTURES
=======================
(This section will be updated as I get the info, here's a little bit)
Tanner's Liquor 26,815
ATELIER Trader (millabout)
------------
25,000 Alkali
900 Beeswax
10,000 Terebinth
3,200 Oak
Log
01,500 Elm
Log
??????? Tincal
-----------
214,440 Magicked
Enamel
055,880 Concentrated
Aqua Regia
040,500 Aqua
Fortis
040,000 Cashmere
Spellthread
029,500 Dark
Lacquer
020,000 Lacquered
Ebony
03,000 Oil
of Vitriol
GOLDSMITH (millabout)
------------------
27,900 Red Rouge
03,795 Brass Ingot
02,850 Azurite
02,580 Marble
01,850 Fieldstone
------------------
340,000 Gold Wire
150,000 Gold Ingot
022,800 Gold Nugget
TANNERY TRADER
---------------------------
1,571 Deer Skin
2,250 Polar Bear Skin
1,750 Bear Skin
25,000 Tanner's Liquor
---------------------
35,000 Hard Aberrant Leather
23,900 Soft Aberrant Leather
147,741 Lacquered Aberrant Leather !!!
44,000 Lined Aberrant Leather
64,000 Manticore Leather
11,790 Aberrant Leather Strap
MYSTERIOUS MERCHANT
-----------------------------------
25,000 Portrait of a Tiefling
15,999 Scenes of the Sword Coast
17, 990 Scenes of the Sword Coast
14,022 Portrait of a Merchant
14,022 Portrait of a Merchant
Guise of the Wolf Clan
Cannibal Lebuth's Headpiece
Sandy's Assault Pants
Protector's StandardWisley's Dreaded Dueling Writguards
Executioner's Black Attire
Ring of the Wily
This method is now OBSOLETE. Don't use it, see Guild Marks above. I am leaving it here so if you are doing this, you can see that there are much better ways of making AD now. After you finish obtaining your dragonflight gear for your main and alts, the dragon fangs start to pile up (Max. 50). You can spend them in various ways. If you go to The Outfitter where you purchase dragonflight items, you can choose "6. Anything besides equipment for sale?", then "Fangs of the Dragonflight." The bag of astral diamonds is one of the lowest yields, don't be tempted. Instead, buy the dyes or dye packs and sell them on the auction house. As of 4/29/17, the Pride dye pack was selling for 12,800 AD or 853 AD per dragon fang. The bag of astral diamonds yielded 5,000 AD or 250 AD per dragon fang.
What does TL;DR mean? Answer: Too Long (wink) Didn't Read, i.e. quick summary
by El Sacerdote@John#5811 of The Gray Company
