A day in Hell

I had the very worst day in WoW. Knowing that I will need titansteel bars for the Titansteel Guardian, I had an "awesome" idea. My arcane mage, the one I told I won't play anymore just banking and disenchanting in Halaa, was a 375 miner. I collected minerals while playing and also made some money by buying ores, selling bars. So the greatest of idea was to level my mining to 450 so I can smelt Titansteel myself. Later I can keep on smelting and selling. Profit in the city, just as I like it.

Howewer there is a catch: all the Northrend smelting recipes bought as grey. 375-450 mining means actually mining 75 nods. How bad can be?

Well, very-very-very bad! Koltas is a pretty nicely geared arcane mage with 1200 SP. Arcane talent means Arcane Barrage to quickly finish monsters above my level, the Mage Armor to never have mana problems, the Slow to kite away even elites from the mine, slow them, blink to the mine and have 1 mining (for the skillup) before he reaches me. All talents to enforce Arcane Explosion to finish off even 4 monsters. So a great character to do such farming. I had consumables, wizard oil, everything.

I had music and I had nothing else to do, since my girlfriend was out and I didn't want to outlevel her. I read guides to know where the mines are. I had rested XP so every killed monster granted me around 2K XP.

Still it was terrible. I was endlessly riding, seeking mines, fighting monsters just to find nothing for minutes, or finding a nod to be taken seconds before I reach it. Without flying mount it took more than an hour to reach slvl 385.

In a hope that it's faster, I returned to Outland. Netherstorm was like a ghost world, no one there. I had flying mount there. Luckily while adamantite vein was green, it mostly gave levelup. fel iron rarely, but rare is more than nothing. Rich adamantite vein was yellow and gave every time. In an hour, with much less annoyment I've reached slvl 400 where fel iron turned gray and rich adamantite turned green.

I kept on mining in Netherstorm. Adamantite was sometimes nice to me and granted a level, rich adamantite often, but such nodes were rare. I reached slvl405 yet and gave up for now. I'll try again early morning when hopefully more nodes will be available.

The worst part was not simply not getting levels fast enough. The task was completely repetitive, did not required any kind of skill, tactics. Ride/fly, if you see yellow dot stop, grind monsters, chop node, repeat.

I can't imagine how can sentinent beings farm. Doing this mindless job for hours not just once during gaming like me, but practically every game day. I think if there were no AH, no way to access gold and materials through trading, I'd either stop playing or would accept much lower level of gear but definitely not farm.

Update: I found Isle of Quel'danas completely abandoned. The nodes there are quick to respawn and has decent rate to be Rich Adamantite and Khorium. I made circles there for an hour to reach slvl 425.

Today morning I went to Northrend to find that the one Cobalt I find in ten minutes is green. So I had to go to higher level territory. Luckily I've seen such lands with my main so I went to Crystalsong forest. In the western part, where the forest is not crystal, there are no red monsters. So I started circling there mining Saronite. 1 more hour, slvl 438.

Update 2: slvl 450 reached. I logged out every 20 mins from questing (just below girlfriend aggro limit) and logged to Koltas who sat by the mines. I rode around and every time gained 0-2 slvls and some saronite. Finally I ported home and smelted my first titansteel. The titansteel bar is 200G more expensive than its materials so it's a nice daily income but still questionable if it worth it.