Last night I was a bit scattered in my gameplay. I had a few goals, and none of them were really met. Firstly I wanted to knock out a bunch of quests in the Badlands, because I am slowly being lapped by many of the 40 something dungeon group. One of these involved killing a ton of wildlife that drop various meats. After much slaughter I wound up with two stacks of Red Wolf Meat, which made me realize that I had no recipe to get cooking skill points from. This of course lead me to go over to WoWhead classic and figure out which recipes used that item, and where to find them.
This then lead me to realize that I would need to make a trip to Camp Mojache in Feralas, which is a zone I had yet to visit so far. Were I thinking about speed I would have flown to Thousand Needles and run north, which would have gotten me to my destination pretty quickly. Instead I mistakenly flew to Desolace and ran South, causing me to traverse almost the entirety of the zone. To add insult to injury… I seemingly forgot I had a mount and ran almost all of it by foot. I did however buy my patterns and move on to Thousand needles to farm the Mithril nodes up in the perch area.
The hardest part about this phase in the game is how spread out everything feels. Once you are in a place you feel fairly committed to it just because there is no easy way to bounce to the other continent. By this point my hearthstone was up, which I have set in Orgrimmar which I then popped over to Undercity on the Zeppelin. Without a doubt lately I have been running up on the Zep tower just as the one I needed is pulling away. From there a long flight path down to Kargath got me back to where I started the evening… the Badlands.
The other mission I had for the night was to get Blacksmithing to 225 so I can start the quest to unlock the later levels of that profession. The cruel irony is that in theory I should be killing up off Iron, and I need a metric ton of it. There is a quest that I need to craft 4 Steel helms and 4 Steel chests… so I am focused on creating those and seeing where it gets me skill wise. The suggestion is that I bank all of my Mithril until I have 235 skill, which is a long way from where I am. Also seemingly Iron became valuable on the auction house again, so buying my way out of this rut isn’t exactly viable. So instead… I will be mining the copious amounts of Mithril and Iron available in the badlands while I knock out as many of the quests as possible.
This leads me to the title of the post. I spent a very long time last night killing rock elementals because I need 10 small rock shards. The drop rate of these seems to be almost nonexistent, so I will probably get the rest of my level just killing them without touching any of the other quests. The positive however is that pretty much all of the areas with Rock Elementals have several ore node spawns. So I can hang back, slaughter rocks and grab the nodes each time they pop. This is apparently my life now.
Yeah… I’ve been watching my fiance do the very same thing as he plays Classic. He was levelling his cooking and fishing the other day, and chose mining and skinning to start, with the intention of swapping to Blacksmithing after using skinning to make money. That worked well until he started levelling his Blacksmithing yesterday and found that it was stone that he needed more than anything else despite having loads stored up. He’s been bouncing around all over the place questing and doing his fishing and mining, and it really does remind you of just how spread out things were. Not to mention how hard it was to go from one place to another. There have been so many changes over the years, from new flight paths and quest hubs to shorter hearthstone cooldowns, that we forget.
Don’t forget that only the Lesser Rock Elementals directly east of Kargath drop the small shards. Good luck catching that area not camped all to hell and back.