I'm behind :(Follow

Well, at level 40, my mining/blacksmithing skills are both around 210 (I think my mining is a couple points lower, but still over 200). The only thing you can really do to get them up is to go out and farm mats (or buy them, but you implied you didn't want to do that) and make whatever items you can to raise your skill (preferably oranges, but yellow things too if they are cheap mats-wise). Try to sell anything green (or disenchant and sell if you have an enchanter alt) on the AH. White things I'd probably just vendor.

However, you might want to reconsider your choice of trade skills (I have personally, as you can see from a nearby thread). If you plan on staying protection throughout, the end-game items you can make aren't likely to be terribly useful for you (I'm talking about the level 70 BoPs). Entirely up to you of course.

But basically, your only options are go out and farm mats (there's a lot of iron around the edges of the salt flats in thousand needles, and iron/mithril around the ogres in alterac mountains).

Edit: Removed edit, 'twas off topic.

Edited, May 5th 2007 5:27am by Vaeliorin

Will it take you a long time? Probably not too awful long. Depends how many other people you're fighting with over the nodes, and whether or not you get lucky finding any gold (there's kind of a dead spot when iron turns green and you still can't mine mithril, as I recall). I got probably 15-20 points in mining in an hour or so on my shammy the other day, but I was the only one farming the area. However, that was at a point when iron was green to me, so I was mostly only getting points off of mithril. This was in Alterac, btw. It might have been a bit longer, but I spent a while grinding on the elites in the ruins because I was bored :P

What do you mean by this? "save ALL your mats until BS is fully levelled."

I hit 70 and my mining was at 125 and BS was below 100. I always thought they were a money sink, *shrug*