As promised, a round up of a some items for the last few professions in the list. In Part 1 here, I covered leatherworking, tailoring, alchemy & inscription whilst in part 2 here, I covered engineering, blacksmithing, jewelcrafting & enchanting. This week, I thought I’d round up a few odd bits & pieces from the gathering professions of mining & skinning as well as the secondary professions of cooking & fishing. I’m not going to look at Archeology for 2 reasons 1) I haven’t had a go at it yet & 2) I’m not sure it’s really a gold making profession as such!

Mining

Mining is mainly a gathering profession but you can also smelt the raw ores into bars. This on it’s own can sometimes be a profitable second step. Many miners just put their ores straight onto the AH but it’s worth looking at the price of bars too. Why? Because some Blacksmiths, Engineers & Jewelcrafters buy all their bars from the AH as they dropped mining to use that profession slot for a crafting profession.

The highest priced ores on my server tend to be the Outland ones – Fel Iron, Adamantite & of course, Khorium. Cobalt from Northrend is also in short supply as is Titanium so if your miner is high enough for these zones, you should make some good profits here.

The other processes available to miners that immediately jumped to my mind for this article are -

Enchanted Thorium Bar – skill level 250, learned from the trainer. Used by Blacksmith/Enchanter combination to create & disenchant Enchanted Thorium Blades for Greater Eternal Essences.

Smelt Khorium – skill level 375, trainer taught. Khorium is a rare ore in itself so always good profits but the khorium bar is used by engineers to make a Khorium Power Core – a key component of the Turbo-charged Flying Machine. I’ve sold a few khorium bars for 100g each, such is the rarity of this ore & the bars.

Skinning

The beauty of skinning for me is the fact that whilst out questing, you’re killing these creatures anyway, you may as well make the most of them! Once you hit skill 100, you can divide your skill level by 5 to find out what level mob you can skin. So, for example, if your skill is 200, you can skin mobs upto level 40.When skinning, you don’t just get leathers, you can also pick up hides, various scales like black dragonscale, turle scale, fel scale but also arctic fur (Northrend) and in Cataclysm zones, a Strange Bloated Stomach (eeewww!) which gives you a random bonus of volatiles.

The most expensive skinned items on my server are heavy leather, rugged leather and of course, savage leather (Cata) but all hides & the various scales also sell well.

Herbalism

It’s difficult to pick a particular bit of herbalism for this article as so many herbs sell well at all levels. Particular ones to watch prices for are Briarthorn & Goldthorn as well as all the Outland ones (Felweed, terocone, dreaming glory etc).

Fishing

Not renowned for being the most profitable pastime but there are a few fish which sell really well. Many of the cataclysm fish are used for the highest level buff foods so these are a fairly obvious good money item but lower down the scale, alchemists need Oily Blackmouth & Firefin Snapper to name just 2. I find these sell for a nice price albeit slowly as you need a levelling alchemist to be looking for them. If you really enjoy fishing, there are some great pets & fishing rods to be fished up as well as 2 fishing competitions on the weekends. Head over to Els Anglin’ for all things fishing related – it’s got everything you could ever wish to know about fishing in WoW.

Linking in to Cooking below, you can also visit Wailing Caverns & Northern Barrens for the Deviate Fish. It sells well on its’ own & if you eat it, you get a random, shortlived effect.

Cooking

The most profitable cooked items are of course, the top level Cataclysm buff foods but as I mentioned briefly above, cooking your Deviate Fish into Savory Deviate Delight will almost always make you more money! This recipe used to be a very rare drop but I recently levelled a lowbie hordie & got 4 in one session of questing in the Northern Barrens. If you are Alliance, have a look on your AH if you don’t want to farm the recipe – there are usually quite a few available at reasonable prices but I wouldn’t pay more than say, 20gold.

The other way to make a bit of gold with cooking is to do the cooking dailes in the main cities which rewards about 10g as well as a Chef’s Award. You can only do 1 cooking daily per day per character but if you are lower level, they do award good XP & you can use the Chef’s Awards to buy a bag of Imported Supplies containing lots of Cocoa Beans. Cold nicknamed me the Chocolate Cookie Queen – at one point, I was converting the cocoa beans into Chocolate Cookies with my maxed cook & selling maybe 800 cookies per week! Even if you don’t have maxed cooking yet, a level 10 or above can do the cooking dailies to get the cocoa beans. Most bags contain at least 20 & sometimes 40 cocoa beans which I was selling at 1g each!

So there we go – all professions covered except archeology & first aid. I hope you’ve found this series helpful & I’m always open to comments or suggestions for any items you think I have missed.

Until next week, happy gold making

Nev