Is this an attempt to stem the reliance on professional farmers for herbs since most likely many won't be able to obtain the items in a 5 man dungeon?

Truth be told, I am somewhat for this plan of action. I do have a rogue however, so the herbs will be obtainable to me with some time invested. Reset the instance 5 times and while I'm waiting for the reset just stick around till the soloable herbs respawn, pick them and then reset again.

We'll have to see how it plays out. When I had more time I generally just waited till the off-hours for my server, farming in the early morning to get what I needed. And even THEN in the past 4 months I have been unable to find a thorium vein or a black lotus.

If it all goes as it seems to, I'd be more in favor of this plan, but that's solely dependant upon how many professional farmers are rogues and do this themselves.

Wait... what? Is there something I'm missing here?

Hearthstone (trick/exploit) I am assuming.

You can do the same in RFC.

I did get a chance to do some testing, and the drop rate isn't good at all. From both kills (which can yield herbs) and "herbing" I got (1) Ancient Lichen from 100+ kills.

They aren't bad mobs to farm however, as the process of "herbing" a dead mob always yields something (vendor trash, food, herbs).

Duo and Brilliance nailed it. I used to do the same in RFC (and Org is more convenient anyway), but now I'm trying to switch mains and gear up a hunter as fast as possible. Stormwind is convenient and the PvP city of choice, and luckily Winterspring has a hearth-able town (boo EPL and Burning Steppes, boo!)

/end-derail

Alright you can only have one of the mastery quests at a time but the Grand Master Alchemist in Honor Hold or Thrallmar will point you to the correct one for whatever you want.

Master of Elixirs is from Lorokeem in Shattrath
Master of Transmutation is from Zarevhi at the Stormspire

Transmutation Master - Just requires bringing 3 Primal Mights to complete the quest then allows sometimes to get greater results when transmuting materials

For Master of Elixirs you have to goto Black Morass and obtain 10 Essences of Infinity from Rift Lords and Rift Keepers. Then bring 5 Elixirs of Major Defense, 5 Elixirs of Mastery, and 5 Elixirs of Major Agility.

Elixir Master - Sometimes a chance to create an additional elixir

Can you only have one mastery at a time or all as long as you complete the quests? Can you switch between them?

Just one, in fact you can't even see the other quests if you already are started on one.

What do they mean by greater results? An extra mote or something? Or is it something like:

Regular transmute: Gold-->Truesilver (yeah its not real)
Regular transmute (transmutation master): Gold--truesilver-->Arcanite

No idea, what they mean since don't have it. Its not quite clear from the description.

http://www.thottbot.com/beta?sp=28677
http://www.thottbot.com/beta?sp=28675
http://www.thottbot.com/beta?sp=28672

BTW the transmute mastery quest is bugged right now and can be completed without any primal mights.

Are there more alchemy labs in BC? Or are BWL/Scholo trips still needed in order to make flasks?

Holy crap, really? How did I not know that. Oh well, I still prefer the aesthetics of Winterspring.

I think there's an Alchemy Lab in Shattrath City.

Invite someone to a party, make them leader, zone into the zone, leave the party, wait 30 seconds, forced Hearthstone effect. Even if your Hearthstone is on cooldown.

You know, I've heard this from multiple people, but it always seems to be pretty vague, and I've never actually seen one despite looking for it. Does anyone actually have proof or experience with it first-hand?

Also, unrelated, I really like Elixir mastery, the double creation rate is pretty good (I'd estimate around 20%), and it can proc off itself, seeing that I made three elixirs out of the mats for one was a bit of a surprise.

Took me all of 30 seconds to locate the lab in shatt.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v141/Tyrgon/lab.jpg

It's on the same level as the alchemy trainer, just on the other side of the hut. You can make flasks while standing at the trainer.

I have seen the alchemy lab, its in the lower city, next to the alchemist trainers in one of thoses weird guys tower... somewhat vague i know but i assure you its there :)

Pretty hard to pick what mastery to take... transmute mastery could be huge if you get 2 primal might out of 1 set of mats for example, but even at a 20% proc rate thats only once per 5 days... hmm

edit - damn im a slow typer today, thanks vosk for the picture hehe

Sorry to quote an older posting. But I wanted to write this about gathering in general.

Please bear with me, I give a simple way to proof my claims yourself, if you want to spend the time for it, that is.


Many people simply think that all there is to gathering professions boils down to installing an addon (gatherer) possibly with preloaded spawnpoints and just be there quicker or when less people are around. And that's it - all of it. However, like all professions, there are certain things well worth knowing. One of the least known things seems to be how spawn points "work".

Please note that this pertains fully to the normal, live, official servers. I've never played on any non-official ones (why would one anyhow, when you can get the real deal) so I don't know what "they" do. In any case, at the bottom is a way to see for yourself, should you find my text that unimaginable strange and unthinkable. Also my main experience is with herbs but now I have an alt miner and it seems to be exactly the same thing.

So, enough introduction, here's the meat:

Each zone with herbalism nodes has some values associatied with these nodes. For one, there is a maximum number. A specific zone can never ever have more than X nodes active, ie pick-/mine-able at any one time. That is, if a zone is completely devoid of any players, you can wait for an infinity, there won't ever come a point where ALL nodes are populated and active. Furthermore, there is a "natural respawn" rate (I call it natural to differentiate from the unnatural respawn players can cause). Start with any zone, let no-one enter the zone and there slowly will be a respawn at the zone's rate up until the max number of active nodes is reached, at which point no natural respawn occurs anymore.

So far so good, most of you probably knew that or at least felt that this is so. Cool, but where's the real thing now? Well, what almost no-one seems to know is that there is one more value, and this one has huge consequences, as far as gathering is concerned. There is also a minimum value of active nodes in a given zone ! When the minimum amount is reached and a node is picked/mined, the game instantly respawns a randomly chosen node in the zone! Now read that previous sentence again. And again. Do you realize the consequences and what this really means, especially wrt the part I quoted ?

So why is there a shortage on certain herbs, if you can basically force the game to spawn one (albeit at a random location) ? The problem is, that people tend to be very picky (pun intended) when gathering herbs. For example, in Azshara, people pick Dreamfoil, but don't pick Sungrass oder Purple Lotus. And this is bad. When you factor in those mechanisms above, if you only pick one out of many herbs in a given zone, the respawns are either a) what you seek or b) what you don't want. If it's a, then fine but if it's b, it sort of "wastes" a herb spot. And this DOES create a shortage on your useful herb.

Lesson learned: Always pick all herbs. Not just dreamfoil. Not just gromsblood. All. You will create spawns in heavily farmed zones and this in turn may result in spawns "in front of you" in your farming direction you are heading.

Note that I never tried to verify that in instances, ie SM. Since all wings are in fact one single instance, but every wing as far as the spawn-area is concerne is perfectly solo-able by level 60 chars, this isn't that difficult to do, should anyone like to.


Now how you can verify that what I just wrote really is having this effect. There is currently one zone in this game, where you can see the effect of the spawnpoint mechanic very well and with a minimum of effort.

Go to the blasted lands (that's where the portal and Kazzak is). This zone is relatively small (kazzak area has no herbs), yet contains highly valued herbs (gromsblood). Spend a bit of time to find an optimal path trough the zone, touching all herb nodes that are in the zone. Do not forget the altar in the mountain area, there are 3 or 4 gromsblood spawn points there too!

Now when you have your somewhat circular path ride it along and only pick gromsblood, if any. You will run out of the nodes very fast. (Note that since 2.0 there is one node that cannot be picked since the herb just floats in the air at the entrance to the portal). Now once you ensured that indeed no new nodes spawned, pick all nodes. And always run the same path. Each time you do a complete circle, there will always be new, fresh nodes. Some will be gromsblood, some won't. But you are currently causing the game to spawn them for you, as the minimum number of active nodes in this zone seems to be 3 or 4. Still not convinced? Go into the zone with your friendly co-herbalists. Go on vent or TS and split up. Each one picking a herb is to announce where and when. You will see that as soon as one is picked at the minimum value, another one pops up somewhere else.

So to sum it all up: Gathering professions do have an internal mechanism and aren't just "install gatherer and go" thingies. Due to this mechanics, there can't be ever "too few" of any one herb. Claiming so is saying that you don't understand how gathering works, which however is extremely widespread and extremly seldom documented. There can, however, be too many farmer just picking one type out of many and thus creating a situation where there are many non-desired non-picked herbs which due to the randomness of a respawn make the desired herb more rare than need be.

Hopefully, this information helps some of you. I, for one, have always been able to get any amount of gromsblood, whenever I want. Limited only by the time I invested in running around in the blasted lands.

There is of course the exception to the rule, and this is the black lotus. I've heard many stories about it's spawn time, and I've never been able to confirm myself any of them. There are currently two hypthesis about them of which I think one of them is what really happens: the "only one at any time in one zone and respawns exactly 1 hrs after picking" thesis and the "only one at any time in one zone but can respawn instantly" thesis.

Most people that are interested in the subject seem to tend to the first one, though I also had people tell me that they did indeed get two within a hour in one zone, without a server restart or anything special. Personally I have never witnessed more than one within one hour, at most I've been able to extract 3 or so out of one zone in a day and I wasn't specifically camping the spawn points, merely passing by and was very lucky. This too, however, would actually be testable, if you find enough herbalists, who are willing to spend more than one hour and each one "guards" a spawn point. 1 hour without anything special and 1 hour while they are guarding, many more herbalists try to farm the area, picking all they can in order to try to force a respawn. That would probably be a good test, but I do lack the motivation to pull this one off. Maybe one of you wants to do this, one time.

I knew this was true! I would pick the crappy sungrass and whisker in Azshara to allow more dreamfoil to respawn (kind of thought of it like "weeding") but everyone said I was crazy.