What To Do With My Sunsong Ranch?

I can't believe it's been a month already but yup, it's that time again! This month's topic over at Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival is very timely given that Patch 5.2 has just landed & changed quite a few bits on the Tillers Farm.

What Are You Currently Doing With Your Sunsong Ranch / Ranches?

Are you growing crops to level cooking skills? Growing raw materials? Doing the Ironpaw Shuffle? Abandoned the farm all together?

If you've been reading a while, you may remember I did quite a few posts about the Farm & the Ironpaw Shuffle too. I even created a spreadsheet to share with you but what have I been doing since then? Well, to be perfectly honest, not as much as I could have!

I only have 1 farm with all 16 plots available and that is on my Leatherworking Paladin. She's been growing mainly Songbell Seeds to get a regular supply of Motes of Harmony whilst I've been leveling my Warrior & DK. I've been making some of the Epic gloves which use 6 Spirits of Harmony and as they can take a little while to sell, in between times, I've been making a selection of the 3 leg armours. They've all been selling but not very quickly & not in large numbers. The gold has been quite nice though - anywhere from 5-8k for the epics & usually around the 700-800g for the leg armors.

When I originally wrote about farming & it was all new & shiny, I started farms on 3 of my level 85's - just the basic farm but they were all planting vegetables that I needed for leveling my Cooking. Once I'd maxed all the Ways, I kind of forgot about those mini-farms. I'm not planning on leveling those alts for a while yet so I guess their farms will just sit there for now.

Just in the last week or so though, I have been doing the Tillers dailies on my Warrior & my DK - both now have 8 plot farms & should hit 12 plots each this weekend (unless I get sidetracked yet again!). My plan for these 2 farms is to provide Spirits of Harmony for the Blacksmith and a few Spirits for the JC to make the 2 pets then I'll swap the DK's farm to either Enigma Seeds (depending on Golden Lotus & flasks prices) or one of the other 'special' seeds depending on my raw materials requirements. I'll consider using the new Work Orders too although I'm not too worried about most of the reputations for these two alts.

I do love the new seed bags though! Planting 4 plots all at once is just so much easier and along with the Plough (that I eventually got around to buying!) it does make farming just a little less irritating. I still hate those damn birds though.

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Engineering Pets - Part 4 - Dragonling At last!

I was going to wait until Mists of Pandaria went live live before posting this but this new Engineering pet is super cute & deserves to see some daylight already!

For the first time, we are going to be able to have a Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling as a proper pet rather than as a 5 minute helper given by a trinket. I've kept all my dragonling trinkets I've picked up whilst questing as well as a fair few other fun trinkets, all happily taking up bank space for those odd occasions when we show off stuff in guild :P

Mechanical Pandaren Dragonling (Skill lvl 575)

I haven't been able to find out where this schematic comes from yet - I don't have beta access either but I will guess at it being trainer taught. We'll find out in a week or so & I'll update here as necessary! I expect this pet to be quite popular given that it's the first mechanical dragonling although how it will fare in pet battles, I have no idea.

As it is a crafted pet, I will take an educated guess & say that it won't be super-popular with the pet battlers as it is not one of the pets listed to be 'rare'. As a collector myself, I'd pay a lot for it early on but as a confirmed miserly scrooge-like gold maker, I will make myself wait until prices stabilise a little later into the expansion! lol

Materials

4 Ghost Iron Bars = 8 Ghost Iron ores
6 Trillium Bars = 12 Black Trillium Ores + 12 White Trillium Ores
2 Spirit of Harmony

Ghost Iron bar = 2 Ghost Iron Ore (mining/smelting skill 500)

Trillium Bar = 2 Black Trillium Ore + 2 White Trillium Ore (mining/smelting skill 600)

With this being information from beta (even at this late date) some items may still be liable to change but for now the info on these materials is as follows.

Ghost Iron Ore is the first tier of ores available in Mists of Pandaria & as such is plentiful in nodes & supply. Trillium Ore appears to be a rare spawn in some of the Ghost Iron Nodes, rather like Truesilver or Khorium at lower levels. The difference this time though is that Trillium has two variations - black & white. Comments on Wowhead suggest the colour of the rock underneath the node may give you a clue as to whether it is white or black trillium but I honestly think that doesn't really matter much - it will be valuable either way. In the time it takes to check the underlying rock colour, you could have mined the node, found out what colour it is & be on your way to the next node!

Spirit of Harmony

At the moment, these are Bind on Pickup as are the Motes of Harmony (10 Motes = 1 Spirit). Spirits & Motes can drop from any mob in Pandaria but there is still a lot of confusion & discussion over these items. With them being BoP, they will act as a limiting factor for almost all craft professions & having a dual gatherer will see that character piling these up & not really being able to use them. There is a vendor for both factions that will accept Spirit of Harmony in return for other trade goods such as herbs, leather, cooking tokens etc.

In reality it means that if you want to make these Dragonling pets for resale, you will have to go out & about & do some killing, either questing or dungeons, I'd guess. This will be a bit of a shock to the system for many serious goldmakers - I know I only actually kill stuff on maybe 3 of my lvl 85 characters, the others just do a bit of farming or low level dungeon boosting for guildies & spend the rest of their time in Stormwind!

If you have Engineering paired with another craft rather than a gathering profession, you may also be torn as to which craft should use your limited supply of Spirit of Harmony. Spirits can be used to by-pass the daily and/or weekly cooldowns on some profession items such as Inscription Research, transmutes & cloths. They are also used in high end Jewelcrafting trinkets & all level 90 non-cloth armour. It will be interesting to see how this limited supply will affect the different professions & how gold makers perceive their value - craft a pet, skip a cooldown or craft high level armour - I'm sure there will be much discussion over the coming weeks on this subject.