Bad Engineer

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This weekend was a weekend in many ways about finishing things that I left unresolved for years.  Over the course of the weekend I managed to get in several heroic runs of Legion content.  During Vault of the Wardens… we wiped a lot.  So much so that by the end of the run we were all showing yellow on our paper doll armor portraits.  It was around this time that I saw some text that I dread “Does anyone have a Jeeves?”.  This was quickly followed up by a statement from my friend Grace, “Hey Bel, You are an Engineer right?”.  To which I have to hang my head in shame every time this conversation comes up, because I am a failure as an engineer.  The biggest problem that I have had is the fact that my warrior is the completely screwball combination of Enchanter and Engineer.  Its like I chose the two worst things to level and slapped them on the same character.  The truth is… I used to be the even stranger profession for a warrior of tailor.  When I created this character I had no bag makers, so I decided to remedy that problem.  Then during Burning Crusade I could not get a helmet to drop period.  I went through all of Tier 5 and almost all of Tier 6 still wearing my Tier 4 helmet.  Over the course of a weekend I decided to fix that, dropped tailoring, and power leveled my engineer from zero to the then level cap… and crafted myself a t6 equivalent helm.  The very next week… a helm dropped for me.

From that point onwards I have been a shitty engineer, always lagging behind and never quite having all of the toys that I should for my profession.  During Wrath of the Lich King I swapped mains and instead focused on Belgrave my Deathknight.  So while I farmed the Jeeves pattern, I never actually got around to gathering the materials to craft it, which even at that time were pretty insane.  This weekend during the AggroChat Podcast, I decided to remedy the failure and set forth to farm all of the materials to craft my Jeeves.  The real credit for this process goes to the wowhead user Ketho for posting a breakout of the materials which made me realize this was actually doable.  So during the podcast I farmed the following list of items…

  • 6 – Copper Ore
  • 32 – Thorium Ore
  • 32 – Fel Iron Ore
  • 32 – Adamantite Ore
  • 4 – Khorium Ore
  • 60 – Cobalt Ore
  • 80 – Saronite Ore
  • 48 – Titanium Ore
  • 2 – Essense of Fire
  • 2 – Primal Fire
  • 8 – Eternal Fire
  • 8 – Eternal Earth
  • 8 – Eternal Shadow
  • 2 – King’s Amber

Looking at the list now it seems even more like madness but I set forth to gather it up while we talked on the podcast.  The first goal was Thorium ore, which I set forth to farming in Winterspring which I could get to easy enough through Hyjal.  Remember I am not a miner on my actual engineer so instead for this job I grabbed Tallow my Jewelcrafting/Mining Shaman.  This part went super quickly, and I decided to drop by Darkshore to pick up a few copper nodes to be done with the “Vanilla” section of the list.  From there I took the Stormwind Mage’s Guild port to Hellfire Peninsula and farmed anything I happened across on my way to Zangarmarsh.  I remember spending hours running/flying circles around Zangarmarsh farming Fel Iron and Adamantite… so I focused on this zone until I neared enough Fel Iron.  From there I took the exit from Zangar to Nagrand and flew a path around that zone until I finally gathered the Adamantite I needed.  I lucked out and found just enough Khorium while farming so I moved on to Northrend, where I flew circles around Grizzly Hills until I had gathered up enough Cobalt.  Similarly to Zangarmarsh, I spent most of my Wrath farming time in Sholazar Basin so I quickly gathered up the requisite amount of Saronite I needed there.  Lastly for Northrend was flying a bunch of circles around Icecrown trying to find Titanium.  Here is the point where I cheat a little and tell you all that I had a handful of bars sitting in the bank left over from something so I didn’t really need that much to continue onwards.

The challenge was getting enough elemental stuff to create the Eternals and the Primals.  Before leaving Nagrand I slaughtered a bunch of fire elementals at the elemental plateau which gave me enough to create the two primal fires.  While mining I got more than enough Earth and Shadow, which left me in a similar position needing fire.  I made an attempt at Wintergrasp but Horde was currently holding it, which means the elementals there have a greatly reduced drop rate.  This is the point at which I went to the wowhead and found that apparently there is a lesser known farm spot in Storm Peaks.  There is a cave full of mobs called Wailing Winds  that are nearly instant respawn and have a pretty decent drop rate for the fire.  So after about fifteen minutes of killing them I managed to gather up the mats to do my Eternal Fire.  This left one last component…  the King’s Amber which I initially thought I would simply buy off the auction house.  We had none available, and after looking at how I might actually get my hands on some… it seemed like it was going to be the part of this equation that killed me.  I instead restored to trying to transmute them… which required 2 Autumn’s Glow that caused me to once again fly some more around Sholazar Basin and this time prospect it hoping for the gem I needed.  I transferred the materials to my alchemist… and then was disappointed that apparently old world transmutes still incur the once a day timer.

It was around this time when Thalen told me he would be re-upping his account and was certain that he probably had the needed gem sitting in a bank somewhere.  We then played this game… of him trying to remember who was his jewelcrafter.  Thalen has been gone from World of Warcraft since about halfway through Pandaria, meaning he has slept several times since then.  When he finally landed on the right character, he didn’t have the gem…  but instead said he could swap to his alchemist and do a transmute.  So we played a similar game of trying to figure out which character was his alchemist.  Finally we got the mats and I mailed everything to Belghast to start crafting the sub components.  This is the point at which I realized that I apparently NEVER picked up the recipe for the original Repair Bot on this character from Blackrock Depths.   Prior to Belghast I had another engineer, and I knew that I had grabbed it on that character, but I guess mentally I transposed that event to happening on my current engineer.  I hopped on a mount and flew over to Blackrock Depths, ran in quickly… got the pattern and returned once more to the Dwarven Quarter in Stormwind where I finally combined everything into my shiny new Jeeves.  I had enough mats left over to craft a Moll-E as well.  It was a whirlwind of farming but during the three hours or so associated with the podcast and me doing post podcast editing I am now less of an engineering failure.