Finding a Good Farm

I make poor choices. In theory there is a lot of things that I should have been doing up to this point that I have not. Tam for example trained only the bare minimum of abilities the entire time during playing his rogue. I could have probably done this as well given that there is a very slim number of abilities that I actually use. As a Warrior I mostly only care about tanking… and when I am not tanking I only care about being able to burn through mobs as efficiently as possible without having to completely shift things up. That means I spend most of my time in either Defensive or Arms, and instead of 2 Handers I am more or less dual wielding. This would rule out a whole bunch of abilities that I would never use… but I did not do this thing.

For further bad ideas… for some reason I decided this weekend to burn up fishing from scratch and got it to around 130 before wandering off aimlessly. That means I did in fact spend the money on getting the book that takes me to 225. Why did I do this? Quite honestly I don’t know but I got a Big Iron Fishing pole and decided that I wanted to use it. That time could have been better spent probably doing literally anything else that could have earned me gold. Instead I wound up spending it… and making more bad decisions. That said you apparently catch enough fish going from 1 to 130 to be able to cook your way up to 150 skill. I may or may not have power leveled cooking on my Hunter who is just barely 10.

So here I am at level 40 with a need for 100 gold… which is a truly staggering amount of gold at this level. As it stands I am sitting around halfway through and am entirely focused on procurement of more gold. The challenge here is that everywhere I go to attempt to get the gold.. I am finding isn’t working anywhere near as well as I thought it would. I’ve wandered around aimlessly and while I made about 5 gold last night off my schemes the wanderlust is definitely cutting into the grind time. Dungeoning is an option, but the problem with dungeoning is that I am also increasing my level at the same time which isn’t exactly something I am amped to do for the moment.

So I thought I would take a few moments this morning and talk about what makes a good grind spot. Because I am still hunting for my own sweet spot after trying a bunch of things that I hazily remember as being good ideas. Ultimately there are a bunch of variables that you want to keep in mind as you approach trying to find an ideal location to hunker down and camp.

• Near a Vendor – In theory you need to make sure whatever camp spot you are going after is within a short distance of some sort of vendor that you can sell at. Inventory is a premium and you are going to need to eventually empty your bags out.
• Green – You need to kill really fast to be able to efficiently grind and as a result you need to make sure the mobs you are fighting can barely fight back. This means you more than likely want to find some area that is green to almost grey to you. It means your time to kill will be really high and your need to drink/eat will be less.
• Non-Communal – You want to find something that doesn’t call for help. Ultimately you are setting up a machine and you want a fast but steady pace to mobs. If you can AOE grind then more than likely this goes out the window but you are looking for some place that won’t overwhelm you.
• Non-Runners – In a similar boat you more than likely want something that isn’t going to run because you waste time chasing them down. If you have Wing Clip or Hamstring this becomes less of a problem but you still have to make sure you have that debuff on them before they start to run.
• Valuable Vendorables – You are looking for something that drops something of value often. That value can be entirely negotiable but ultimately you are going to make most of your money from something you can quickly dump on a vendor and get back to farming.
• Tradeskill Friendly – Look for something that you can increase the value of with some quick tradeskilling. Skinning/Leatherworking is the king of this because you can easily convert a lot of leathers to something that can be dumped on a vendor quickly for a profit. Similarly cloth can be upsized a bit into bandages for a few copper profit per bandage.
• Cash Drops A Plus – If you are fighting something that drops cash it helps to make up the doldrums when the thing you are fighting isn’t dropping anything worth selling. Pure cash drop farming however is a really slow way of getting money. They need to be dropping something else be it cloth or vendor greys.
• High Density – You need a lot of mobs in a very small area to keep you from having to run around a lot. Running around is time when you are not earning money, so you need to find something you can be constantly killing until your bags fill up.
• Privacy – The biggest part of all of this is you need to find an area that is relatively unknown, because you don’t want competition in your farming. You need to be able to run your loop and fill your bags in peace, which tends to be the problem with valuable farm spots. Every single farm that I remember from Vanilla is way over-camped right now, because we all need that 40 gold. This is forcing me to branch out and try and find more creative options.

I’ve yet to find my perfect location, but I will eventually find a spot that ticks most of those boxes. I thought however I would throw out some of the things for you to think about as you try and nestle into your own farm spot. The grind is one of the more tedious parts of the game, and the amount of gold that you need to come up with is really a struggle at this level. However I am roughly halfway there. This is more or less my focus for the time being, and for now I am going to just keep my head down and go at it.