Then you probably hit nagrand after someone else farmed the clouds, or are unaware where the clouds usually are. It's like mining nodes, you can have good or bad luck, but a quick round is usually worth it. Alternatively, you could have gotten lucky on air drops from the elementals. Mote farming is not a "I need it right now" farm-method like grinding mobs, but more "check every once in a while and get lots in a short period".

Oh, and combining it with the SSO daily (and cooking/fishing when applicable) quest was usually a good idea.

Not saying it was a great moneymaker, but making proper use of it had it's benefits. Personally I dislike grinding and found myself just doing a round maybe once a day or 2 days, grabbing 5 to 15 motes every time around. Of course, more or less dominating a certain leg armor type at the start was worth way more than this (with nethers being BOP even more so).

More general: I feel that currently engineering is really missing a unique benefit. Even tailoring comes out better imo because of the BOP flying carpets (really why are the engineering ones BoE?) and leg armor BoE's which are sellable to everyone, more or less sustainable.

I've only hit one mote cloud so far in Northrend (near the airport in Borean Tundra) but it gave me 3 Crystalized Water and 4 Crystalized Fire. Now either I was extremely lucky or thats a hell of a lot more than the BC clouds (and an interesting variety too).

There are several north-east of Camp Winterhoof (on the frozen lake/mini water fall) - they drop mixed crystals as well (water and air). The general droprate seemed to be a little lower than what I normally got in tbc - 12 crystals in 4 spawns as opposed to 4 or 5 motes per cloud in the outlands. I obviously need to do some more extraction though.

I managed to get to 300/300 Blacksmithing and Inscription on my DK in just under 3hrs by following my BS guide that I posted a few parts back.

Few caveats I found:

Blacksmithing:
*Always buy more Stone than you think you'll need. I ran out a few times on Heavy stone due to RNG hating me and it cost me
*Skip mithril spurs around 260 and make thorium bracers. The skill up for them made it worth while
*Get your steel made as you'll need it, don't try to be tricky and buy iron bars and then try to get it converted over. Buy/make steel you'll need.

Made it to 300 in about an hour and a half and that's because I had to ship 200+ iron bars to my miner to make them into steel.

Inscription:
It's a messy awful wretched profession to level. Why? I'll tell you why.

You mill herbs to make pigments, you take pigments to make ink. You take Ink+parchment to make Glyphs. Easy?
Now when mass leveling you can only make 5 of each type of Glyph as it goes from Orange to Yellow. Head back to the trainer and get your next batch of 5 for skillup. Rinse and repeat.

*Mill all your herbs if you are sitting on them. Grind them all down, all of them. They take up less space in your bag than all those herbs do. Don't worry about space for now. Trust me, I spent more time running around getting what I thought I needed than anything else.
*Bring all your pigments to Trainer, level stuff up as 5, doesn't matter which ones, and then pick next allotment of 5
*if you get Rare pigments and can get ANY skillups off them make their ink. I turned on "Only materials I have" checkbox and it caught a few things that I had sitting around
*Darkmooon faire cards are a good way to level if you got the inks
*Be prepared to pay out the nose for mats right now. I spent 20G/stack of Kingsblood. Insane I know but hey I ran out, so I had to stuck it up and pay.
*Only make orange recipes, don't do yellow, avoid recipes that do Ink/2 and try to stick with Ink/1 with more parchment. Parchment is cheap.

Overall I guestimate that by mining and herbing most of my stuff and purchasing I spent about 1k in materials for both. I had more stuff than what I thought and everything I made I shipped off to my DE alt to melt it down and sell. I sold everything I had at the AH this morning and probably have close to 2k of crap on the AH with all the herbs/bars I had left over that I gathered extra and didn't use.


Life Lesson: Gather more stones than you need, Mid level milling has a gap where you won't get much skillup so plan accordingly, have an alt that can DE everything. Welcome to 300/300.

Will chime in here.

I dropped Engineering for Skinning (to get LW up easily) and reached 450 last night without really trying. It is easy, you get skillups fairly fast, even from green skins. And most importantly, there are dead mobs everywhere... literally everywhere. It is really hard to leave the dense areas with loads of skinable mobs. I spent 25 minutes near the elevator at Vengeance Hold just skinning the Wargs people killed. It was silly. Got some 150 leathers (boo on scaps, though they don't need LW to combine any longer and that's good).

Fishing still sucks. Thought they had changed the skillup parameters. Was sorely mistaken and have only leveled once in around 30 catches. I hope I'm just unlucky as such a rate is painful. But it did help Cooking a lot.

I tried to find a reasonable guide for leveling leatherworking in Wrath but did not find anything here or elsewhere. So I took a crack at it:

Thinktank leatherworking guide

In particular I don't like how difficult it is to get past 415, and how expensive it would be to level past 425. Yet I've not found any recipes that would get there. Any suggestions?

ETA: sorry about that; I didn't realize that heavy borean leather was trainable at 390, not 375. Wowhead is still very incomplete right now.

Is it true that the JC profession dailies don't give XP as indicated by wowdb? If so, that really sucks. Having to do chores, i mean daily quests, is bad enough on your way to 80 without getting xp for them.
And I further read that you can only do one of them per day? And there's nowhere else to obtain them, no world drops or anything, aside from a few heroic boss drops?

The whole reason you pick JC is because you don't want to do stupid dailies for money. I think the introduction of dailies into BC was a monster economics nerf, and frankly it was one that I didn't need. Now I have to log in and do these repetitive quests every day for a year to get the recipes? This is supposed to be fun? What a bunch of crap.

Am I missing something here?

Still on 375 jc.
I had like 4 bop patterns drop for me in Storm Peaks & Icecrown. Not sure if they are random or bound to specifik mobs, but drop chance seems fairly high.

After running 4 heroics I got another 3 jc patterns, again very high drop rates or perhaps its a guaranteed drop.

I was fishing in the waters outside Violet Hold and I fished up a [Rusty Prison Key]. I noticed that one of the sewer gates in the water in front of me had been torn open, and inside it was a box. WoWHead comments confirmed that this key was used to open the box, which contained a BoE Blue, among other things.

However, when I approach the box, I can't interact with it whatsoever.
Has anyone else had any experience with it?

In addition to a fun pvp zone, Wintergrasp appears to be a decent place to gather ore and herbs. Right now there aren't many players in this zone and the resources are fairly plentiful. Once you get to Dalaran you can get here, so it's convenient if you're still in the low 70s.

I've gathered high level herbs and seen lots of saronite nodes and some rich saronite and titanium nodes today. The mobs are level 80, but you can take them out with seige equipment or have a pet/friend pull the mob while you grab the node.

There is a nice summary of proffesion gains in this thread on page 35: The WotLK profession thread . Regardless of the fact that this list needs a little update, some of you might find it an interesting read and it is sort of hard finding this useful information on page 35 out of 54.