500 thorium bars later O_oFollow

Yerf, finally got a BS toon and being the genius I am I did it on a new server, meaning no financing/PLing - every scrap of ore I mined myself.

At this point I think it's fair to say that BS is quite possibly the roughest tradeskill to level after having just spent the past two days personally mining the 500 thorium ore needed to make the final run to 300. UnGoro is hands down the place to farm - nice easy circle of the place, minimal hive diving and tons of ore to be found. Someone had suggested Silithus due to the rich thorium nodes in the hives but take it from me, it's not worth it - UnGoro might not have as many rich nodes but its WAY faster getting from node to node and there's a ton more of them.

Now that I can finally mine and use the stuff I mine in Outlands back to leveling!

I'm leveling up a new DK, and I'm thinking of trying out Blacksmithing this time around. I know it's not the easiest tradeskill to level, but from what I've heard Jewelcrafting is a lot more aggravating. I can definitely attest to this, as my other DK who is 71, hasn't even hit Outlands designs yet. There's just so many obscure materials or gems which are hard to find or expensive to find due to prospecting. I've never tried blacksmithing before, so that's the main allure there.

I still haven't decided what tradeskills I want for my goblin. Some combination of inscription, engineering or jewelcrafting (I'm pretty much abandoning my old DK). Might stick with mining and either engineering or JCing, as I do intend on server transferring my lock at some point and she's got inscription already.

But say I was going to go out and level my mining to 300 before taking the DK to Outlands, and I used all those mats (and later ones) to level up BSing. Obviously it wouldn't cost me 10k that way. Was it annoying because of the cost or because of random mats that were hard to find like Flasks of Mojo and crap like that?

I've leveled engineering, JC and BS all at different times. The way I remember it, I could be wrong here, JC was a pain in the 250+ stage because many recipes took rare gems that I couldnt always find on the AH. Sometimes I'd only get 2 points out of a recipe because I could only find the materials to make 2. I farmed stuff for a while in EPL like troll mojos and that kind of thing for my final points.

Blacksmithing was just really expensive in terms of bars. I bought tons and tons. If I had to guess, BS would be more raw bars but JC you had the chance to blow through so much ore and not get the gems you needed to level.

That said, more simple bars is a little easier for gathering yourself. Its not like you gather 100 thorium in the HOPE you find some kind of Opal gem from prospecting it all.

With flying mounts in Azeroth coming I don't think leveling most professions will be that bad anymore. If they keep JC dailies in the game I might make 1-2 more jewelcrafters just to learn all the recipes that much faster.

I got a crap-ton of the formerly hard to find gems leveling the mining - I think they upped the drop rates - so JC might not be so bad anymore.