Here’s the problem: when you pick up a profession late in the game (here, Rik swapped Enchanting for Mining on his level 50), then the skill is much too low for the places in which he would be questing. At level 50, you’re seeing a little Iron, mostly Mithril, and some Thorium. Mithril requires 175 Mining. So he’s got to go back to the lowbie zones and work Mining up to where it’s usable in the leveling zones.
Mining also tends to be a little harder than Herbalism to gather as you go, as nodes are restricted to rocky outcroppings, and in most zones that means the border mountains. In the middle, where most of the questing gets done, there’s very few nodes. Conversely, that’s usually where all the plants are for Herbalism (with the exception of stuff like Earthroot, anyway).
If I gathered as I went, I would be constantly short of metals. When I take a couple hours specifically to do a mining run, I can usually finish with about 40-60 pieces of ore that I can sell, smelt, or prospect.
For months I’ve been driving to Redding to help family. It’s about a four hour drive. Recently, every time I get ready to do it, I get this nagging little feeling that I should have the flight point discovered by now.
Not this, but I have tried to pan the camera on screenshots to see more. Also, I’ve tried to cursor over a button, inventory item or buff tracker on screenshots to bring up the tooltip.
If I get into the car after playing my herbalism character, I’ll tend to (subconsciously) check out all the neighbor’s flower beds on my way out of the subdivision.
When driving, I try to mentally move the mouse cursor over Ford Crown Victorias that are in the distance, to see if they’re cop cars or regular cars. :smack:
One thing I don’t think anybody’s mentioned yet (I skimmed a bit, but I didn’t see it) is that Silver is a rare spawn of (I believe) Tin. So there’s no real way to know where it’s going to spawn–just sometimes when what should be a Tin vein spawns, it shows up as a Silver vein instead.
Also, a tip for miners at Tin level: there’s a cave in the Wetlands (I’m not on WoW right now, but it’s full of spiders and near the road where you go through the gate to get to the dwarf lands) where some ore called Incendium spawns. These deposits require the same mining skill level as Tin, and since they’re quest items for an Alliance quest, they spawn very fast. If you’re a little bit patient and you’re not actually that concerned about the Tin itself (as opposed to the Mining skill points) you can level your mining up to about 175 just by doing circuits of that cave.
There’s another similar cave that works for around Iron level mining skill in the Arathi Highlands, near Hammerfall. It’s a little hard to find (up in the mountains by way of a hard-to-find path) but if you do find it, you should be able to skill up a fair bit in there too.
This is why, if you’re doing a mining circuit in order to pull ore (rather than skill up), it’s worth it to grab tin if it’s in the area even if the skill is grey and you’d rather be looking for iron and mithril. By getting rid of the tin veins, you keep the turnover going and increase your chances of finding silver when the nodes respawn. Same applies to iron and mithril when it comes to gold and truesilver.
Well that explains that. I came across a Silver node in Stonetalon, and a bit later when I passed it my tracker showed it was active again, but when I got to the node it was Tin.
Just for fun: While attempting to reach a mineral node with no obvious path to it, through sheer persistence I managed to get to an area that I suspect is supposed to be inaccessible. This screenshot shows where I was according to the map:
The cliffs at the far Western edge were surprising sharp-edged, compared to the degree of weathering typical of the Stonetalons, as if a monstrous crack had recently opened up in the mountains:
Bahaha. Dude, that’s awesome. You may want to submit a bug report (not sure how, but there’s probably info in-game or on the website) with information on how you got there. It’s neat, but Blizzard will want to know.
After watching a video like this one, I managed to make it to this hidden troll village in Darkshore. Screenshots if you don’t want to watch that long video.
Ah geez, I’d have no idea how to describe how I got there. The mountains all look the same through there, and the only reason I ended up where I did was sheer dumb luck and persistence. While trying to get above the aforementioned mineral node I was doing a lot of jumping while trying random gaps between peaks, and I probably just lucked into landing a foot on the one tiny spot that let me go a bit higher on the next jump. When I came back down I was in a different spot from where I started. There was nothing obvious about the route I took and I doubt many other people will stumble across it.
I have an uncanny propensity for being completely blind to the correct and simple route to take to get to things, and so I frequently end up spending way too much time and effort attempting to force my way into an area, only to discover once I’m in there that there was a wide, completely obvious path that I somehow totally missed. A good example of that also happened yesterday. I was in Ashenvale, and I already had the “Explore Ashenvale” achievement, but there are always a number of areas to discover that aren’t required for the exploration achievement. So I was walking up the West bank of the Falfarren (sp?) River, and when I wandered a bit away from the river the words “Discovered: The Shadowy Nook” appeared on the screen. There was nothing but an apparently impassible wall of trees, roots, and rocks there, but I figured I may as well investigate this previously-unseen area. So I spent 5-10 minutes trying to find the way in, and eventually managed to hop skip and jump my way over a big root and between a massive tree trunk and a giant rock to get into the Shadowy Nook. Nothing there but an empty cave and I think a couple furbolgs. And also a big wide path that led me straight back to the main road :smack:
Heh. You reminded me of the time back when I used to play Alliance, the spouse and I wanted to go to Desolace but had no idea how to get there. So we swam. All the way down the coast. I don’t remember now where we started or what we had to pass to get there, but I remember that it took us forever.
Never mind that there was a perfectly easy way to get there through the Stonetalon Mountains. We had no idea where the Stonetalon Mountains were, nor how to get there. So we swam. We still joke about it now.
I just did almost the opposite thing in Azshara. I had the quest for the guy in Ironforge who wanted me to get some rubbings in the ruins. Once I had the rubbings, I had to get to that small island off the southern tip of Azshara and fire a flare gun to signal another dwarf in a flying machine to pick them up. As near as I can still tell, getting to and from that island still requires a lot of swimming, but swimming to the island would have been a lot easier than what I actually did.
Once I had the final rubbing I began to make my way to the southern tip of Azshara. This entailed a lot of sneaking around large numbers of level 52-54 Elite giants, and fighting my way through many level 50+ nagas, only to reach the coast and discover nothing but long, sheer drops to the beach/ocean. After some scouting around I finally found a spot on the cliffs where I could get down via a number of shorter drops (i.e. drops that would only take half of my hit points). I didn’t know how I was going to get back up, but I figured there had to be a way and I’d worry about that after handing the rubbings over to the dwarf.
So after I handed the rubbings over, I scouted the nearby beach looking for a path back up. No luck, so I decided to swim around that lower “horn”, hugging the coastline all the way, until I got to the beach below the ruins. And that’s when I discovered that, just beyond the spot where I made the last rubbing, I could have just gone straight ahead and found a nice, gently-sloping path down to the beach. I still would have had to swim all the way to the island, but that would have been a heck of a lot easier than the route I actually took!
Speaking of Azshara — I’ve read quite a bit of the lore while working my way toward the “Well Read” achievement. Is it safe to assume that that big, round “hole” that looks like the crater of a massive meteorite is actually where the Well of Eternity was before it blowed up real good?
No, the former site of the Well of Eternity is the Maelstrom in the ocean between the two continents (they used to be one continent). The fact that Zin-Azshari is in the zone Azshara is a little bit of a lore-bender, since the Maelstrom is actually somewhere between Tanaris and Stranglethorn Vale.
Well sure, the Maelstrom is where it is now, relative to the continents, but it’s been many millennia since the big implosion, and who’s to say precisely which directions the various pieces of the old continent, and the Maelstrom itself, moved? Doesn’t the lore say the ancient elves built their city on the edge of the Well of Eternity?
Actually, the Maelstrom is much further North. You can draw an almost straight line from the center of the hole in Azshara, through the center of the Maelstrom, to Menethil Harbor. It almost looks like when the Well imploded, it sank that whole section that is now bordered by Hillsbrad Foothills, Arathi Highlands, Wetlands, and Dun Murogh before pushing the chunks of the continent apart.
Going back to lowbie zones isn’t all bad. I did lowbie quests to farm rep while I was farming ore. Makes the grind to the ambassador title a little more bearable.
Heh. A group of guildies and I swam a bunch of lowby (single digit low) gnomes from Westfall to Booty Bay so we could take the boat to ratchet and raid the Valley of Trials (orc/troll starting area). Why gnomes? Because they spank corpses when they dance on them, of course.
