Mine, All Mine

This week I have been mostly mining! I started off patrolling Borean Tundra on MacNeilly’s new epic gryphon picking up all the Cobalt Ore I could find, though I found it to be few and far between. As soon as I skilled up enough, I progressed to doing circuits of Sholazar Basin, grabbing as much Saronite and very rarely Titanium as I could lay my hands on. This took a little longer than it really should have, mainly because MacNeilly is still only level 70 and Sholazar Basin is full of level 76/77 mobs. Still, there are a lot of nodes that are free from mobs and on the odd occasion that I did get jumped it was quite easy to get away (Pally bubble FTW). Even with a couple of other farmers it didn’t take me that long to amass 50 stacks of Saronite a couple of stacks of Titanium and a serious amount of gems and eternals, this coupled with about 20 stacks of Cobalt Ore that I got earlier seemed like quite a haul. Then I remembered what I was actually trying to accomplish; the whole idea of levelling up my mining skill was meant to be to assist StoneKold in levelling his Jewelcrafting. So armed with an online Jewelcrafting guide I switched over to StoneKold and took the portal to Exodar and became an apprentice jewelcrafter.

Now I’d heard that it was quite expensive to level JCing but as I had a Grandmaster miner ready and willing to supply the raw materials, I thought that it would be a dawdle. Oh how wrong I was. I sent MacNeilly back to Ironforge to start the hunt for the 4 or 5 stacks of Copper that I’d need to get started. Even on his Epic Charger with the Crusader Aura active, it still took a fair while to find, mine and post back the required amount. I thought about giving up and just hitting the AH instead, yet another bad idea. I don’t know if it’s just my server but low-level minerals cost a bomb, and that’s if you can even find them. That wasn’t the worst part though, after leaving Dun Morogh in search of Tin, I finally decided to head to Thousand Needles. After a couple of circuits I had found some more Copper, a bit of Iron and Mithril but only 2 stacks of Tin. This was not going as well as I though, after a good few hours mining, prospecting and crafting I was only up to 133.

Thank goodness for Pilgrim’s Bounty, you can’t beat a good old Warcraft holiday to take your mind off mindless grinding. Based on the North American holiday of Thanksgiving, Pilgrim’s Bounty let’s you partake in cooking, eating and sharing the foods of the holiday and of course the obligatory ‘dressing up in silly clothes’ too. A couple of good things about this holiday are the +10% reputation gain earned by eating five servings of every food at the ‘Bountiful Table’. There are also five new recipes to learn which will come in very handy if you are seeking the ‘Chef de Cuisine’ achievement for which you need to learn 160 recipes. So I switched to McRaffles (trainee achievement whore) and get started. As usual there is a whole lot of jumping around from place to place which I was pleased to see some entrepreneurial mages taking advantage of, by selling a serious amount of portals. I finished of last night with four achievements under my belt, a stack of cooked delights, a full set of holiday gear and a couple of ‘Turkey Shooters', with which to blast unsuspecting rogues of various races. If I get turned into a sodding turkey once more…….

~McRaffles