Mining speed leveling guide for WoW: TBC

The purpose of this guide is to show you how to level mining very quickly. This is useful if:

• You’re high level and want to get mining to make gold or mine Outland ore, but do not want to spend endless hours in low level zones to mine ore for meager rewards.
• Your mining is lagging behind your character level and you want to increase it so you can mine the ore in the areas you’re leveling in.

Note that you won’t be making much gold doing this, but since you’ll get a higher mining skill faster you can then take advantage of the more profitable high level ore faster. It saves time, and therefore money.

Let’s get started.

There was one small feature introduced in patch 2.4 that probably went unnoticed by many:

• Mining

  • Increased the skill up potential for most smelting recipes.

I just leveled mining on one of my level 70s before the patch, and the way it was done was by using mining and smelting. You see, before patch 2.4 some smelting recipes were gray already when you learned them so you couldn’t get any skill ups from them. So what you had to do was

1.  Smelt as much as possible
2. Then go out and mine some ore to get skill ups

Since smelting was buffed, the need to mine ore has largely been eliminated. If you have the gold, you can just buy ore from the auction house, smelt it and sell the bars. Then you move on to the next recipe. You will neither make nor lose much gold this way, but you will level mining very quickly so you can get high skill to take advantage of the profitable Outland minerals.

Smelting recipes with skill-up potential

Mining leveling guide

Now, I haven’t tried this myself yet but I would say a good path would be like this:

• 1-65
  • Smelt copper (save the bars for smelting bronze later)
• 65-100
  • Smelt bronze
• 100-125
  • Smelt silver
• 125-155
  • Smelt iron
• 155-177
  • Smelt gold
• 177-230
  • Smelt mithril
• 230-250
  • Smelt truesilver
• 250-285
  • Smelt thorium
• 285-300
  • Mine thorium in Eastern Plaguelands
• 300-315
  • Smelt fel iron
• 315-325
  • Mine fel iron in Hellfire Peninsula
• 325-340
  • Smelt adamantite ore
• 340-350
  • Mine fel iron ore and adamantite ore in Zangarmarsh or Nagrand
• 350-357
  • Smelt eternium (save the bars for smelting felsteel later)
• 357-375
  • Smelt felsteel

Additional tips

• Doing this will require a LOT of ore, since we’re smelting all the way to gray in some cases
• But since you will be selling the bars you should make back most of your gold and save a lot of time
• Sometimes, though, you may run out of ore on the auction house, especially the rare ore like silver, truesilver and gold
• Don’t bother smelting dark iron as you have to do it inside the Blackrock Depths dungeon and it requires a ton of dark iron ore
• Once you get to 285, enchant a pair of gloves with advanced mining, then go to Eastern Plaguelands and farm thorium until at least 300. (Thorium can be very profitable in itself so you might as well stay a while in Eastern Plaguelands.)
• Once you’re 300+ you might as well just mine in Outland to 375, as you’ll be making a lot of gold from that.
• Remember to train new smelting recipes at the mining trainer and new mining skill at 50, 125, 200 and 275.

Usually, it makes sense to skip the lower level ore farming and just smelt ore, but once you get to 285 you should probably farm thorium, fel iron ore, and adamantite ore, since you’ve now reached the really profitable ore. And there’s really no point in having 375 mining except the ability to mine the rare khorium veins so you don’t have to level the last stretch with smelting (although you can if you want to).

In some cases it may be better to farm the low level ores, if they’re very expensive on the auction house.

However, if the ore you need for smelting is relatively cheap on the auction house, it’s typically a lot faster to buy it than to go and mine it yourself.

Maps

Eastern Plaguelands mining route:

Eastern Plaguelands mining route.