Anyth is my hunter that mostly lives amongst mothballs. I take her out of storage generally once a week to run with “Team Lowbie”, although now that they’re pushing through the mid-70s, it seems a somewhat ill-fitting term. She’s mediocre at best, suffering from a horrid lack of decent gear and a recent talent change has left her on the “Power Underwhelming” side of the DPS charts, but at least she isn’t stealing aggro from the tank anymore. Time to make her earn her keep. Although I’ve been very, very successful with making gold with Strev, I’d been pondering a way to diversify my holdings, as it were, and make a little extra scratch with Anyth when I don’t feel like tooling around with Strev.
I’d considered getting her herbalism, but I scratched that plan when I remembered both Myrial and Michaelle have that skill and the last thing they needed was another teammate fighting over nodes. How about mining? As I recollected, mining was a decent enough income producer, so I plunked down a few copper and flew around Elwynn Forest looking for ore.
After ten minutes and six nodes I realized it was going to take a long time to get anywhere productive, so I looked up mining on wow-professions.com and discovered to my joy, I could buy my way into the upper tiers by smelting ores from the AH into bars. With a new-found mission and a thousand gold ‘loan’ from Strev, Anyth shopped her heart out and smelted her way…to about 350. At that point all of her smelting recipes were gray and she’d actually have to mine to increase her mining skill. Heh.
Fortunately, this meant she was “Northrend” ready for ore. I installed the “Gatherer” addon and flew over to Sholazar Basin and went to town. If you’ve never played with this addon, it is godly. It marks on your map places where nodes spawn that you or your guildmates discover. It also can display a transparent overlay on your screen nearby potential nodes and maintains a ‘trail’ of where you’ve just traveled. By the time you’ve made a few circuits of a zone, you have a fairly good map and path to take to hit as many nodes as possible.
I quickly learned than flying at slow speed was going to be a serious pain, so I hit up the Bank of Strev for another 4.5k for Artisan flight. This was a solid investment and I have no buyer’s remorse for once.
Anyth flew around ‘mapping’ out the Basin’s nodes. Each one yielded in addition to ‘stuff’ a little over 3k xp. It was actually possible (if not practical) to level through mining. After a time, I had a pack full of cobalt and saronite and was ready to graduate to Obsidium, one of three new ores from Cataclysm. After making my way to Uldum, I discovered vast and plentiful areas of Elementium, which were far above my skill level to acquire, and instead flew across the length of the continent to Mount Hyjal to find a depressing number of fellow miners scooping up the few nodes I could find. It’ll take a few days to cross that Elementium barrier (particularly since Anyth isn’t an everyday character), but hints of Uldum’s treasures haunt my dreams.
(Note: In 24 hours Anyth’s mining revenues paid back the initial 1k loan. It’ll be a while on the flight money.)
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