Still Useful Farming Posts Recap

With everyone so focused on Mists of Pandaria dailies, leveling & raising new Pandaren alts, it's easy to forget that some of the old tried & tested items can still make good money on the Auction House. I thought I'd cheat a little today & just recap some of my old posts that I'm still finding useful on a regular basis especially as these items can be snatched up pretty cheaply at the moment.

All these items are on my snatch shopping list & I check them almost every time I'm in the Auction House. There are so many new alts being raised now that these items find their way to the Auction House by players who have no idea of their market price or their niche uses & who just want to make a few gold here & there. That's where the experience & time learning comes in handy for gold makers!

• Essence of Air - used mainly for 2 enchants for Heirloom weapons and usually sell for 150 gold or more. There's a nice where to farm essence of air map in this post. I've seen these as low as 20 gold on my server recently. The enchants aren't selling for me at the moment but I know that they will sell once the shinyness has worn off Pandaria a bit!
• Spider's Silk - I tested 3 farming areas in Where To Farm Spider's Silk post early last summer & it's still relevant. Spider's Silk is used for the Spidersilk Boots (rare quality) tailoring pattern & the Toughened Leather Gloves (rare quality) Leatherworking pattern, these items are steady sellers especially for low level PvP'ers. Spider's Silk is also used for the Spidersilk Drape but with the advent of heirloom capes, the market for this item dried up last year. I usually snatch Spider's Silk up for 3 gold or less whenever I see them but I have so many now, I've been selling a few at 25 gold each.
• Essence of Water & Globe of Water - I started farming Globes of Water for the Mechanical Yeti pet when all the Battle Pet excitement started but I've stopped now - the pet market has changed completely & until it settles down, I'm just going to keep an eye on it. The Essence of Water however, I'm still snatching up whenever I can. Once other transmutes with cooldowns are no longer so profitable (thinking Living Steel at the moment), I will return to the Essence of Water to Essence of Air transmute. I started testing for the Farming Globe of Water post not knowing about the Water/Air transmute but when I picked up so many, I had to change the angle of the post to include where to farm Essence of Water too!
• Large Fang - Oh how I hate these large fangs! I tried to find a place to farm Large Fangs but it was really painful so I've resorted to buying them whenever I see them on the Auction House. I've not even bothered to make the Barbaric Bracers as I can sell large fangs for 25 gold each, having bought them for 5 gold or less.

Are there any items like these that you farm regularly or would like to know where to farm them? I'm quite happy to go test areas out so let me know in the comments section :)


Image © Natalie Maynor under Creative Commons licence

Something in The Air?

© Nev 2003 Something in the Air

A little while ago, I did a post about getting my Timbermaw Reputation to exalted in order to get the 2 heirloom weapon agility enchants. Both these enchants use Essence of Air which is notoriously difficult to farm since the Cataclysm. Wowhead lists them as a 5% drop rate which, as we all know, means a lot of farming time. The first time I went farming in Silithus, I killed Dust Stormers for almost 1 hour to get the 8 Essences of Air that I wanted. Recently I have had reason to go back several times & I've also shown or taken guildies there too.

The quickest way for a level 85 character is to portal to Uldum & fly across to the top north-west corner of Silithus as shown on the map. There are 2 main areas, concentrated around either side of the Crystal Vice where the earth elementals (Rumblers) are. The blue line on the map is the approximate path for the Twilight Prophet & her guards. She drops 7-10 Encrypted Twilight Texts which are used for Cenarion Circle reputation so if you already have the rep (or not interested in rep grinds), you can sell them on the auction house for maybe 20g each but obviously, your server prices may be a little different. I have them on my snatch list & buy them up when I see them for 3g or less.

So why am I telling you about this slow farm/low drop rate item? Well, I've been farming there several evenings recently & I have a feeling the drop rate has been improved!

I lent some gold to a guildie & instead of them repaying me in gold, I asked her to farm 8 Essences of Air for me, expecting it to take maybe 2 hours & she would feel like she'd worked for her loan! Instead, she whispered me within about 30 mins to say she had them already & did I want any more?

Two weeks ago, I was at Ahn'Qhiraj with another guildie farming the Battletank mounts & when we hit the 5 instances per hour limit, I took him over to Silithus to show him this corner. It's a nice little gold earner for anyone patient enough to farm & then patient enough to wait for them to sell. We were there for maybe 20 minutes & between us we got 10 Essences of Air.

Another evening this last week, I was kinda restless & didn't want to start any major stuff as it was getting late so I dived down to this corner & did a bit of farming. Within the first 12 minutes I had picked up 9 Essences of Air, not to mention 10 Breath of Wind & 12 Elemental Airs.

Now this is all anecdotal of course but my luck with the RNG is never very good. I decided to test my theory again this morning (Sunday) before writing this post & what happened? Yup, you guessed it - 3 essences of air in 30 mins - back to the old, horrible drop rate!

I had a look at the comments on Wowhead & there seems to be a mixed response as to whether the drop rate has been improved. I'm going to try it again in the late evening, just to see if there's a time based element on this particular RNG as one commenter suggested.

So, has anyone else been farming these lately? How was the drop rate for you? Or would someone like to test this hunch out?

Edited to add: If you have a choice of alts to take farming here, take a miner - lots of thorium nodes & some truesilver ones as well. Also, if your guild is going for the killing critters achievement - there's a fair few snakes around too! Enjoy :-D