Here’s a way to combine engineering and mining to potentially make tons of gold fast. In a nutshell, it’s about farming ore and primals with mining, engineering and fishing (optionally), using your epic flying mount to move rapidly between locations.
There are some requirements to do this:
- You need to have mining, preferably 375 skill
- You need to have engineering, at least 350 skill
- You need to have an epic flying mount
- Ideally, you want to have 375 fishing skill, but it’s not required
In case you didn’t know, engineers can make a device called Zapthrottle Mote Extractor which is used to extract motes from certain gas clouds in Nagrand, Zangarmarsh, Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley. With craftable goggles (or the epic engineering goggles) you will be able to spot those clouds on the minimap. Tracking clouds does not interfere with tracking mining nodes, so you can do both at the same time.
Combining mote farming, mining, fishing and a couple of daily quests is what can bring in extraordinary amounts of gold. Here’s how to do it.
Start in Shattrath and accept the daily quests The Multiphase Survey and Gaining the Advantage (the latter is completed just by mining).
Equip your engineering goggles (not the goggles you got for The Multiphase Survey). Also turn on track minerals on your minimap.
Make a sweep over the small area of Terokkar Forest to the north west of Shattrath, mining any ore you find. Then head to Nagrand.
Path from Shattrath to Nagrand via Terokkar Forest.
Nagrand wind clouds farming route.
The gold dots are windy clouds reported by others and the blue dots I have added myself.
Follow this map around Nagrand and farm any gas clouds and ore you find along the way. Be aware that some gas clouds in Nagrand hover in the air and you need to go up on floating plateaus to farm them. However, some will be out of reach and must be skipped (heart breaking, I know). It’s a known bug and will hopefully be fixed soon.
When you get to the Spirit Fields in Nagrand (the large green area around Oshu’gun), equip the other goggles that were given to you for The Multiphase Survey. This will let you see (though not on the mini map) fires that you can do a reading on by using (right clicking) the goggles while equiped. Once you got 6 readings, equip your engineering goggles again and continue the route.
Once you’ve done a round, go up to the elemental plateau and check the lake for any pools of pure water (they are light blue pools). There are a total of 6 spawn points but only 2 will spawn at any time. Once you empty a pool it will despawn and another one will spawn elsewhere, provided no one else has been fishing there for some time. So it’s possible to fish out all 6 pools if no one has been around for a while. Doing that will typically net you 25-40 motes of water in 12 minutes.
Zangarmarsh gas clouds and ore deposits farming route.
Then head to Zangarmarsh and follow the route on the map above. Some places I’ve drawn do not lead straight to a gas cloud. However, they do lead to areas rich in fel iron and adamantite, so the detours are worth it.
The clouds in Zangarmarsh give motes of water which can be very valuable. Zangarmarsh has less Adamantite Deposits and Rich Adamantite Deposits don’t spawn in Zangarmarsh either. It is still a very profitable zone to farm since there’s typically less competition. After you’ve done a full circle in Zangarmarsh you can restart the route, flying up to that area of Terokkar north west of Shattrath again.
When you feel you’ve had enough of farming, go turn in the quests in Shattrath and auction the loot.
To increase your earnings, you could use some of the raw materials to craft some more valuable items. Examples of this would be Adamantite Scope, Adamantite Shell Machine, Adamantite Arrow Maker. Just keep in mind that crafting also takes time, and time equals money. So it might actually be more profitable to just put up the raw materials for sale on the auction house so you can spend more time farming.
Here’s what I earned in 60 minutes of farming. The prices are from www.wowhead.com and may vary, but however you look at it, this can be very profitable.
| Item / Quest | Quantity | Value each | Total |
| The Multiphase Survey quest | 1 | 10g 10s | 10g 10s |
| Green item reward from The Multiphase Survey | 1 | 2-8g | 2-8g |
| Gaining the Advantage quest | 1 | 16g 39s | 16g 39s |
| Major Rejuvenation Potion (reward from Gaining the Advantage) | 1 | 1g 50s | 1g 50s |
| Grey items | N/A | N/A | 71s |
| Mote of Fire | 6 | 2g 50s | 15g |
| Noble Topaz | 1 | 40g | 40g |
| Khorium Ore | 2 | 2g | 4g |
| Eternium Ore | 6 | 1g 50s | 9g |
| Fel Iron Ore | 40 | 50s | 20g |
| Primal Water | 5 | 20g | 100g |
| Mote of Water | 4 | 2g | 8g |
| Primal Air | 4 | 25g | 100g |
| Mote of Air | 2 | 2g 50s | 5g |
| Primal Earth | 2 | 3g 50s | 7g |
| Mote of Earth | 6 | 35s | 2g 10s |
| Adamantite Ore | 26 | 1g 50s | 39g |
Total: 379.8-385.8 gold in one hour
I didn’t even have fishing on this character, so with fishing you could probably add 60 gold to the total. I was lucky enough to find a blue gem, but even without that the earnings would still be over 300 gold per hour.
Additional tips:
- Buy or have a leatherworker craft you a Riding Crop.
- Make sure you have some Aquadynamic Fish Attractors ready for fishing in elemental plateau. You can make those with engineering.