First Time Botting Project

[Pelatov]

So first time out here trying this out, so far really good success. Just a single seat HB license, but things are going great right now.

Running the Bot about 8-10 hours a day, M-F, while at work. 3 weeks into it so far and here is what I've done:

Leveled Paladin to 110
Leveled Mage to 110
Leveled Demon Hunter to 101 and froze XP (Legion Normal Farming)
Maxed out Skinning and Herbalism on 101 Demon Hunter
Maxed out Tailoring and Enchanting on 110 Mage
Maxed out Mining and Blacksmithing on 110 Paladin

Paladin and Mage Farm mostly World Quests
Demon Hunter Farms mostly dungeons for skins and herbs

Daily Run Setup:
Hours 0-2: Paladin Runs and Completes all world quests, completely automated. (Also farms any ore found as I go)
Hours 2-4: Mage Runs and Completes all world quests, completely automated
Hour 4: Take a break and log out
Hours 5-8/10: Demon Hunter Runs Legion Dungeons skinning/herbing any mobs. Sells all BoP loot, and any uncommon gear. Deposits all BoE blue + purple into personal guild bank to sell later.

Profit so far: So far (in the past 3 weeks) I've made 653,284 gold.
This includes all money made from quests while leveling, gold made from AH selling skins, herbs and ores, money spent on food/repairs/gearing up DH with 840+ BoE 101 epics (only 4 pieces so far), etc...

I have to say I am very happy with my success so far. So far I haven't done anything unattended, I leave it running on a monitor that I watch like a hawk for anything that may go awry, whispers from players, etc...

Loving things so far, and is nice because it frees me up to play my main account the way I see fit without worrying about spending hours a week farming and wasting time.

 

[Alijkb]

Hello there Pelatov.. My goal of botting is to get gold so i can buy subscription for in-game currency.
Im kinda intrested in Honorbuddy and now when im seeing your success i would like to ask you some questions..

How am i able to bot my character to 100 from scratch, and how can i make around 200k without the Legion Expansion..

Best regards, Alijkb

 

[Pelatov]

always willing to help. more than enough goldz to go around, hit me up if you need something.

 

[Pelatov]

I've had a couple of questions via PM on what I'm doing, and while I don't believe to have even somewhat tapped the potential of HB, and don't proclaim to be an expert gold maker, I can give some tips and a bit of the setup that I use. Now note, there are going to be more efficient ways of doing this, especially if you purchase a higher HB seat count (i.e. bot on more than 1 account at once). What I'm going to put here is what I've been doing with a single HB seat, so I'm just botting with 1 account at a time.

 

[Pelatov]

Pre-Farming Setup/Requirements

1. Get at least 1 character to level 110. No, this is not negotiable. If you really want to make the $$ you need to be appropriate level.
2. If you can, get 3-4 characters to 110 (I am up to 8 on my botting account). While not necessary this is important so you can rotate bot toons and not as likely get reported. I try to cycle every 2-4 hours now per toon.
2a. give the toons legit names that have nothing to do with eachother. This makes people think that you are legit when they see you running around in circles. Names that look like you rolled your face on the keyboard are a dead give away. Also, make the names unique. Don't be "AwesomeBot" "AwesômeBot" "AwesömeBot", people aren't stupid. If the names are basically the same except for alt character codes, they'll figure it out quick.
3. All of your Farming toons need to have herbalism/mining. These are $$ makers. You don't necessarily need to level these while leveling as Legion will let you gather at skill rank 1, but I did make an extra 7500-10000 gold per toon I leveled getting them to 110. So either way works.
4. Find/Buy/Make some good farming profiles. There are good profiles on the HB forums to start with, there are paid profiles, or you can take a free one and modify it to your needs or write your own from scratch. If writing your own there are plenty of websites that show good paths to take for Herb/Ore gathering.
5. Get ready to spend some time tweaking HB to your preference, initial setup takes a bit, but is worth it in the long run.

 

[Pelatov]

Configuring HonorBuddy/GatherBuddy

Ok, so here we will spend some time. I personally have found the best success with using GatherBuddy2 Bot as my botbase and then tweaking from there. HB will remember your settings per toon, so once set up per toon, you won't have to change anything except for the specific farming profile (to be covered in a minute)

1. Set HB to Gatherbuddy2 BotBase


2. Configure GatherBuddy2

a. If you haven't already done it, check the "Enhanced Mode" Check Box.
b. Click on "Bot Config"


First thing you will notice is a pop-up with 5 tabs. We need to go into these tabs and start configuring.

c. Paths - On this tab the two important things is Randomize Hotspots and randomization Factor. By enabling these it will tweak with the hotspots so that Blizz has a harder time detecting the bot because you aren't hitting the same exact spots in the same exact order every time. Do be careful with this as you will need to watch and tweak with the randomization factor as I have had certain paths the I run into a tent and get stuck, this will take some playing with.

d. Gather - Pretty self explanatory.
You want to mine and herb, duh.
Uncheck "Don't ninja node" in legion Blizz changed it so that a node lives for X amoutn of time after the first person touches it, so you can hit a node at the same time as someone else, its ok. Do it. You want the node. I don't like messing with elites. No node is worth the time spent killing the elite. And face the node before harvesting, this makes it seem less bot like to look at the node.
The last part comes down personal preference. If you find a good profile where you can use a vendor mount to sell junk, it almost doesn't matter. As a test I did a 10 hour run on one toon, didn't fill bags, but sold a lot. So, /shrug. whatever you want here.

e. Manage - How do you want to manage this?
Set a time limit, 0 is unlimited. I do 2-4 hours depending on time of day and what I feel like. While I'm at work and can easily manage the bot and switching toons, I do 2 hour runs, then switch toons. I set a alarm on my phone to remind me to switch.
If you get rez sickness....WAIT! You won't kill crap and will just keep dying.
ALWAYS LOOT MOBS. This is for 2 reasons. 1. vendor junk sells somewhat decent. 2. In legion all nodes have a chance of spawning a mob when they are mined/herbed. When you kill this mob he like to drop an extra 10ish of whatever item you just gathered. I did a test of loot vs not looting, after 2 hours farming came away with about 33% more material while looting than not looting. Do it.

f. Node Selection - Only uncheck things if you don't want to gather something, otherwise just leave it all checked. that's what I've been doing.

g. Advanced - Don't screw with it. Can get wonky, you need to really think and know what you're doing. Defaults are fine and dandy.

​

This about sums up basic config for HB to run GatherBuddy2. You can mess with class config, settings and tools, etc.. but isn't necessary. I won't go into this here, but know that running Singular profiles works fine pretty much for everything when it comes to combat.

​

 

[Pelatov]

Get/Write a Good Profile

I'll leave this up to you, but there are plenty on the forums to search for. Go to the GatherBuddy2 Profiles -> Legion Section Find what you want. Create a subfolder in the "DefaultProfiles" folder under HB, then load what you want to farm.




That sums that up, I leave this part to you as it comes down to preference. I say try a few profiles before comitting, even change between profiles that farm the same thing, just to change things up from a hotspot perspective.

 

[Pelatov]

No we're ready to farm on make goldz.....NOT QUITE

You make thing we're ready to go, and yes we are but no we're not. In legion all gathering comes in 3 ranks. the higher your rank, the better you gather. So when you start a new character farming, what for when he/she picks up the quest for the next rank. When you do, STOP YOUR STINKING FARMING AND GO DO THE QUEST! Yes, its worth the time investment to get the stupid quest done. I haven't found a good profile for this, but i'd turn on grindbot or combat bot, navigate my way way around to do the quest and get it done. its worth it. Especially on materials like Starlight Rose. Rank1 you mostly get Starlight Rose Dust....completely worthless except for keeping 20ish around to do the rank3 quest. Rank2 you gather more rose but still get a good bit of dust. Rank3, you no longer get dust and only Roses. Trust me, its important. Also, note that for mining Leylight Deposit is not the same as Leylight Seam, so do the quests for both as you get them.

 

[Pelatov]

Finally! I'm Rank3 and everything is a cake-walk

Well not really. At this point you can make a decent amount of gold just selling mats. You can easily make 200-300k/per week if you are farming most of the day, but this is not where the money is!

I don't like selling just raw mats for 3 reasons.

1. Selling tons and tons and tons of raw mats floods the market, dropping overall price
2. If all you do is sell raw mats, people suspect you of botting, if you have 1 bank toon that is posting 200 stacks of dreamleaf per week, people catch on.
3. The money isn't in the raw mats, its in the crafted items.

This all being said, take a 110 and make them a Blacksmith/Jewelcrafter, take another 110 and make them an Alchemist/Inscriptionist. this will cover the mats you are primarily gathering and you will be able to work with these. I say get your toon to 110 mainly because a lot of the quest chain for the really good money making recipes comes later in level. Jewelcrafting requires 108 for some of the best recipes. Herbalism requires running Heroic dungeons for some of the rank2 recipes, etc...get your crafters to 110. dual craft on them so your farmers are doing double duty and getting herbs and ore. don't waste time only gathering one material.

With your crafters make sure to get rank3 on all good recipes. For Alchemy I recommend the 4 raiding flasks. They sell like hotcakes, raiders are snatching them up, and with rank3 I've had procs in excess of 11 flasks off of 1 craft (rare, but it does happen).
Jewelcrafting, even if you just mass prospect all the ore you get, the Rare Gems sell for quite good uncut. also, getting the rank3 recipes for cuts works good. People are always gearing up and want a better gem.

Crafting keeps you from flooding the market with raw mats and keeps your overall profits up. Do it.

For this I haven't automated any of this with HB. I'm too much of a control freak, and prices fluctuate often enough that I like to control my postings. i have a bank toon that is guild leader in my banking guild. This toon posts everything that all characters create. Each server will be slightly different, hence why i take control of this part. just find your favorite auction mod and use that to help with posting. Default auction interface sucks.

 

[Pelatov]

And now what to do with all these crap whites and greens I get?

Everything, and I repeat everything can be used for a profit. Pure and simple.

While herbing your herbs you'll get a crap ton of Yseralline Seed. When prospecting you'll get an even larger amount of green quality gems. The temptation is to sell these for a pittance, make a quick profit and call it good. Once again, DON"T DO IT! Craft baby, craft.

With crafted gear there is one items that sells like popcorn at a movie theater, yes I'm talking all about Obliterum. And that's what we do with these. We craft and we obliterate. For Yseralline Seeds you will be using your alchemist to craft Ancient Healing Potions. You will make a crap ton of these. You will hate them, and you will make so much money. The worst part is obliterating these, and I haven't looked into HB automation for this, but using two mods, Easy Obliterate and Oblivion, it allows you to script your obliterating to a keybind, and auto-populate the next item for obliteration. This is still a manual process until you add Auto-Hotkey and write a simple script to press the needed key every 3ish seconds and then walk away. I craft in the neighborhood of 2-3k potions per say and make 30-40 obliterum a day off of these. at 1500-2000 a pop on my server, that's a tidy profit all in its self.

Here is the script I use:

#NoEnv  ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
;
#Warn  ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.

SendMode Input  ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.

SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir%  ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.

#Persistent

SetTimer, PressTheKey, 3157
SetTimer, ForceExitApp, 3600000 ; 60 minutes
Return

PressTheKey:

Send, '
Return

Esc::ExitApp

ForceExitApp:
SetTimer,  ForceExitApp, Off
ExitApp

This hits the ' key, which i configured in the mods every 3.157 seconds. It times out after 60 minutes, just so that I don't forget and leave it sending the same key and anti-afk'ing me.

The one down side to this method is WoW HAS to the focus screen on your computer, which means you can't tab it to the background and do other stuff. Not pretty, but I haven't messed with HB enough to figure out if it can do this or not.

I do a similar thing with the green gems I get to make rings. These I disenchant or obliterate, depending on the price of enchanting materials and how much obliterum I've made with yseralline seeds.

As always, for the selling I take a personal interest as human judgement is going to sell better than a bot every single time. But the tedious gathering and farming, bot it up.

 

[Pelatov]

Doing this has been netting me a crap ton of gold, with minimal actual work on my part. It is not an extensive treatise on how to make gold, but gives an idea of where to start. So far since starting I have netted well over 8 million gold do far. I have used to to buy WoW tokens on 3 accounts (my main account which I don't bot off of, my bot account, and a friend who doesn't know I'm botting but just knows I'm wizard at making gold) that have given each of the accounts 12 months of sub time. Assuming paying for HB for 12 months is roughly $100, Paying Blizz in the most economical way is about $144 for 12 months, PER ACCOUNT. Or for 3 accounts, $432 in 12 months. do the math.

Also, this has left me with an excessive amount of extra gold on top which I've dumped into hearthstone and other Blizz games/services. I keep some on hand for a rainy day, but its totally worth it. I hope my long winded explanation helps get some others going and making gold.

As with everything, don't get too greedy, and don't overextend yourself. As long as you can stay under the Blizz radar, you'll keep making money left and right.

 

[Pelatov]

Considering the Future

As i mule over what I've written I feel the need to write a last bit of advice of prepping for the future, prepping for banwaves, etc...

As of last week I used WoW tokens to buy a 3rd sub to WoW (haven't loaded it up with time yet, I'll explain why here in a moment). What I'm doing here is I'm leveling, pure and straight leveling. That's it.

With the possibility of a banhammer smacking any time (if you're botting don't whine, it happens) I decided I wanted a backup account so that if/when this happens i'm ready. So here is my current setup.

Account 1: Bot Free. This is where I raid, dungeon, play with friends. i don't want it banned, HB never touches. I also keep my guild leader bank toon here. I never bot on it, I just go to the guild bank and move mats/crafted items to sell.

Account 2: Botter's Express. This is where I farm and bot from. This is currently running 12 hours a day. I log onto it as soon as I wake up, I stop a little after I get home from work. This is where I make my money from.

Account 3: Botting for Levels. I'm merely leveling all the toons I can on this one, with botting 12 hours a day while I sleep I'm getting a character to 110 within a week. I know manual is faster, but I purely quest, no dungeons. Too risky. Once I get a full roster and get my Professions leveled on these guys I will let the account go inactive.

What this will allow is for when the ban comes, I can wait a week to make sure Blizz isn't gonna hit a second account quick, and then I can pick up where i left off with minimal interruption. Before the account goes inactive I will take 1 toon, leave them with enough gold to buy 5 WoW tokens (don't know how price is going to fluctuate, so leave a buffer) and let it sit inactive. No need to pay for an account we aren't actively using, even if it is just gold. Save your $$ as you can.

Also, as a precaution I never keep a 0 inventory in my guild bank. I always have 1 tab full of leystone ore, 1 tab full of felsate, 1 tab of dreamleaf, etc... This way in case of banhammer, major patch (y'all remember 7.2.5 it happens) etc... I can back off on what i'm selling, but I can keep my presence in the market when prices like to go higher because bots aren't actively farming.

But that's about it for now, I hope this helps those who have been PM'ing me, and helps those who come here at a later time.

 

[schae]

why do you put so much effort into it? if there's a detection vector youll get banned anyway and those character shuffles were useless. let it run 24/7 and youll get 1400k in those 2 weeks, it usually takes 4-12 weeks until youre banned and so youll get enough out of it for a new account

 

[Pelatov]

I know if there's a detection vector I'll get banned. What I'm avoiding here is getting banned earlier than a detection vector from being player reported. That's what the shuffles are for.

I'm not saying my way is the right way, I'm just saying what I do. If you want to get one character up to 110 and run 24x7, that's fine too. If it works, that's great! For my situation where I work in IT, so i sit in front of a computer at the office for 9 hours a day, its easy to do my shuffles. It may be unneeded paranoia, it may not help in the long run, but at the end of the day it gives me peace of mind. People are have been PM'ing me about what I'm doing to make money, like a lot of people, so I decided to post here what I've been doing instead of answering the same question 20 times, just do it once and refer people here.

But for all I want to stress that whatever route you go to make gold, if it works then its the right way for you.

 

[schae]

yeah but the thing is, you will be banned. if its tomorrow or in 4 weeks. it doesnt matter. get used to it. if you are, you'll understand that those times where you could try to look legit are over. 5 Reports could be enough, too many ppl know how hb movement looks like. even if your bot is only botting 1hour a day, he can stuck and you'll receive reports. so why dont you throw away your accounts every 4-12 weeks and farm hard 24/7? use a vm + vpn and your main account wont be touched. youll make enough gold out of it to buy a new account.

 

[Pelatov]

I do use the VM+vpn. I also was running between 19-22 hours a day. I decided to try your advice on not worrying so much and I've been trying your advice since Friday. Since I am new to botting still myself, I'm willing to try anything that makes some sense at least once.

I do have to say, I have definitely seen an increase of about 33-50% in materials gathered going this route. I'm changing VPN (I have my own private VPN network with 4 locations in the US on 2 in continental Europe, so I feel secure knowing I'm the only one using them for this purpose) every 12-14 hours. At the same time I grab a different route to farm, just to change things up and get the other mats I need. Right now I just have a regular 1-seat license, but I'm seriously considering getting 2 or 3 seats when my 3 month time is up.

I'll keep this up for another week and see where I am at farming wise compared to previous weeks. I'm still managing my auctions myself, as that's just the way I am, but that takes 30-45 minutes a day of my time which I'm fine with.