Is there any pattern to node placement for mining? It seems to me that they are found along cliff edges and rocky outcrops etc. Is this the case, or is it just positive reinforcement at work here?
It is absolutely the case, yep.
For herbs, the placement will depend on the species; for ores, you’ll find them in “rocky” places. For example, in Uldum there are ore nodes on river rocks as well as on cliffs.
If you want an addon to keep track of nodes, there’s a lot out there but lately I’ve been using Gatherer2.
Was anyone actually struggling with this?? For me this is one of the easiest mechanics, keep the mobs out of the red zones, no idea why it needed a nerf.
You can put any colour gem in any socket. You wont get the socket bonus but often it’s worth more to you to put your best stat gem (so +40 Agility) in all sockets and ignore the bonus.
This is true. For example, Silverleaf is always on the other side of the tree, while stranglekelp likes to grow next to cranky murlocs.
I should kick you for that, Mister Rik, but it made me laugh. What I meant was that some herbs will crop up at water bodies, some in shady spots, some in open spaces - and which is which varies by species.
Did you ever get to read the haiku I wrote, entitled “The Herbalist’s Lament”?
ahem
Murloc blue and green
Always guarding stranglekelp
Go away, murloc
And I stand by my silverleaf remark. It always grows right at the base of a tree, and you’ll see the yellow dot on your map, approach the dot, find yourself facing a large tree, and the herb is always on the other side of that tree.
That guidance is outdated. Stone Bats stopped being skinnable a few hotfixes ago. They’re not even lootable any more, let alone skinnable.
Patch notes for hotfix when it was done. Towards the bottom:
That particular leather farming approach was evidently too easy for Blizz’s liking. :mad:
A pretty good alternative is the Shalehide Basilisks in the top of that same “bat path” map (The Pale Roost, which is the blue area on the map, and the top of the red area on the map.) They’re not too hard to kill, drop the usual assortment of greys and greens, and almost always drop Basilisk “Liver”, which used to AH for a decent price. Add to that, you can skin any of the dead stone drakes left behind (after being looted hopefully) by players doing the Hard Falls quest up on the Pale Roost area. Just don’t aggro the live dragons. 
shifty eyes If anyone was planning to buy some AGI gems on Ysera today I would do it before tonight, because I’m about to go on an auction spree!
Hey all. I’m back in the game . . . after a year of not really having time for it I find myself with most weekday mornings free from commitment. That, and I was excited to see the new Cataclysm landscapes/quests (though I haven’t purchased Cataclysm itself . . . maybe if I end up getting a toon up to 80).
Anyway, I was just having a thought. One of the things I dislike about WOW economics is that gold is basically infinite. Has there ever been any talk about putting a world limit on the amount of gold available?
It’s just that the degree of inflation seems pretty ridiculous, with mats in the auction house going for exorbitant prices because gold is so cheap. Really, 200g for a stack of leather that I can go harvest in 20 mins or so?
I think it would be a lot of fun if we had to work with more limited funds.
I also think that part of my issue is that I enjoy leveling my professions as I level my toon; for endgame players perhaps that 200g for a stack of 20 leather to work on leatherworking at around lvl250 doesn’t seem so dramatic, but for a lvl 60 character that’s a ton of gold.
Oh, and a question:
I’m leveling a hunter, and I’m wondering if there are any significant differences other that cosmetic between pets of different types?
For example, my current active pet uses the Ferocity talent tree. Are all Ferocity pets basically the same (ie, use the same skills, deal basically equivalent damage, etc)?
I seriously doubt it. That’s what the gold sinks are for (mounts, pets, teleport rings, mats for engineering gewgaws, mats for that alchemy/archaeology mount, etc.).
Accumulating gold is easy if you’re so inspired. YOU could be the one selling that leather for 200g a stack. It’s not like there are impossible start-up costs associated with it. All you need is an appropriate level character, a skinning knife and time.
Yes, all pets of a particular family are the same, outside of maybe one or two abilities. Turtles get a kind of force field, I think, and other animal types get other things. But overall, Blizzard has nerfed any particular advantages or disadvantages that tamable pets used to have (there is a cat (King Bangalash in Stranglethorn) who used to have a high attack speed…Blizzard nerfed that).
There are the following non-cosmetic differences between pets:
- each tree is different. All Ferocity pets do, indeed, have the same tree.
- each pet family has one or two “special” skills. These may be completely useless (owls “do tricks” and they don’t even do that at high levels, whoop-de-doo) or very useful (turtles have a “bubble”, wolves a raid buff, wasps interrupt, spiders web).
- if you’re BM-specced, you will have access to more pet families and your pet will get more talents than if you have one of the other two specs.
As for skills, I generally don’t buy leveling stuff off the AH (except for maybe some “complement” such as a gem for an engineer), I combine Eng or BS with mining, LW with skinning… My JC isn’t a miner any more (she was when she was little), but it’s not like I’m short on the miner front.
Pets are divided into families, and while all, say, Ferocity pets have the same basic DPS skills, different pet families will usually have another skill peculiar to that family. www.wow-petopia.com is probably the best place to learn about the various hunter pets available.
I have to work with more limited funds every day in reality. That’s why it’s called work.
Before I got characters up to 80 and 85 and gold flowed like wine, I made my money by just gathering more mats than I needed for my own professions. If I was doing Blacksmithing and Mining, I’d mine one stack for myself and one stack for the Auction House. It takes a bit of work, but you can generally gather a lot of ore/herbs/leather while leveling.
Alternately, if you want to build a base fund for yourself, don’t take a crafting profession to start with. Take two of Mining, Herbalism, or Skinning and just sell everything. You’ll be providing a much-needed supply of mats to others leveling their crafting professions and you won’t have any expenses of your own. The drawback to that is if you do want a crafting profession, then you have to go back and level it from scratch once you’re high-level, but at least you’d have more money from quests and drops to work with.
No, it’s true. I guess I just wish I had more use for the auction house for items like that. I have yet to run into a situation where I was looking for a mat that I wasn’t capable of making/collecting myself, and so the benefits to purchasing said items (as opposed to farming for them) is negligible. Who would want stacks of leather other than someone training leatherworking? And who would train leatherworking without skinning? And if you have skinning, it makes so much more sense to just go collect what you need than to try and amass the gold required to buy it.
My main. He was LW/Skinning for a long time, but at some point in Wrath, I decided I needed mounts for the Mountain o’ Mounts achievement, and it wasn’t going to happen depending on dumb luck, so I retrained as LW/engineer, made myself a couple of nice helicopters, got the achievement, and kept the engineering because it turns out to be damn useful.
I kept skinning on an alt, who I’ve kept leveled up and active, so that toon farms the leather I need.
Over all the alts on the server my main is on, I’m completely self-sufficient for mats and creatable items. It’s good, but takes some effort.
Not necessarily, the time you take to farm something could potentially be spent doing something more profitable to give you enough money to buy what you need from the AH and a profit.
Wait — what!?
Any gem can go in any color socket? So, you don’t have to only put orange, yellow or green gems in a yellow socket? You only need to do so if you want the socket bonus (which I presume is the bonus stat you get for filling the sockets)?
Here I’ve been carefully filling the right color gem into the matching colored socket all this time because I thought you had to – that not matching the colors wasn’t an option.
The number of times I settled for a ‘lesser’ gem because I couldn’t find a better one that matched the socket color I was trying to fill…<…stomps away muttering to himself…>
The only problem I have with that approach is the word “potentially”. If you’ve chosen poorly on your gathering skills (or, more accurately, shifts in market render your gathering skill choices poor after the fact), you have to potential to either lose money or sit on inventory.
IRL, I don’t make my money on the market either. I make it by working. In WoW, I don’t trust the tender mercies of the invisible hand. I gather and use my own mats, and auction off only the excess. Possibly, in aggregate, it’s slower than rolling the AH dice. But it’s more assured.
(All of that said, once my production-skill toons are max skill and have no projects in the pipeline, I’ll still play my gatherers and auction their take. But I’m not going to get to the point of trying to time markets, or arbitraging small differences, or even buying up current underpriced auctions. It’s just pocket change.)