Introduction Welcome to my guide on how to farm Cataclysm Herbs, Ores, or even max out on Fishing, Cooking, First Aid, Archeology and ALL other crafting professions! Not to mention that you'll be flying around Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor in no time... even at 310% if you want! ...all this could be yours... without actually buying the Cataclysm upgrade Now technically, this guide can be applied for the even cheaper/poorer folks that have Vanilla Wow or Burning Crusades. Although, you won't make as much gold, nor will you be able to farm Cataclysm goods and fly around Eastern Kingdoms or Kalimdor, but the principal is the same. On to the guide... In order to farm Cataclysm goods and reap all the benefits of Cataclysm without actually buying it... you need meet the following prerequisites (listed below). Prerequisites 1) An active World of Warcraft account with a paid upgrade to the Lich King Expansion. 2) An Active subscription to either Gatherbuddy or HonorBuddy (required for Fishing and Archeology) AND the flying mount add-on (A Gatherbuddy Lifetime account is obviously your best choice here because it covers all of the prerequisites). 3) An initial investment of about 600 gold for flying mounts (this could be significantly less depending on what mounts your farming toons already have). 4) You will seriously want to have your farming/crafting professions maxed out at 450 before you start using this guide. This is especially important if you want to max Herbalism, Mining, AND Archeology (or any of the crafting professions) before using this guide. 5) I highly recommend that your farming toon is level 80, however you can be as low as level 77 with the right player class (i.e. Paladin). 6) Your farming toon MUST be outfitted with the highest level green and preferably blue Cataclysm gear you can get (there is one exception to this rule, but I'll explain that at the end of the guide in the Tips section). 7) Either Gatherbuddy or HonorBuddy (Cataclysm) Herbalism and Mining profiles. I personally think Tony's profiles are the absolute best for leveling/farming in these areas (THANKS TONY!). So I’ve attached them to this guide for convenience. If you plan on using Gatherbuddy, then you need to rename the badnodes to just badnodes.xml and place them in the root of your Gatherbuddy folder. Getting Started Essentially the "meat" of this guide relies on the way Blizzard allows Lich King owners access to ten day Cataclysm trials and how it allows you to keep your profession skill ups and other Cataclysm only skills. There are some important things to note before you run out and start your trial up... and I've listed them below. 1) The ten day trial is activated from your account settings when you login to Blizzards website. 2) The ten day trial requires an active account with ten days of playable game time available. Unlike the Burning Crusades and Lich King ten day trials, which actually extend your subscription out ten days, this trial does not and requires existing time in the account. 3) Don't expect to level beyond level 80, because you’re only going to get one point away from level 81, however, you will never actually level. 4) From what I've been able to determine you only get one (1) ten day trial to Cataclysm. Which is why it's important to make sure you have all of your ducks in a row. HOWEVER....(I've not yet been able to verify this) I know that I've used Lich King and Burning Crusades trial on certian accounts in the past. Then I let the subscription expire and later reactivated them with the Scroll of Resurection (3+ months later), the trials were available again. I won't be able to confirm this though until I cancel one of my current accounts and reactivate it three months later. When you feel you are ready to start, go ahead and start the ten day Cataclysm trial. Once you’re in the game and Cataclysm content is available, the first thing to do is head to your capital city and talk to a flight trainer. Then you’ll need to fork over 250 gold to get your Flight Masters License so you can fly in Azeroth! (Note: It's been brought to my attention that this may have been patched, I'm trying to confirm this though and will update this if necessary.) The next thing you'll want to do is go talk to your primary and secondary profession trainers (assuming you've maxed out at 450). Surprise, surprise you can now train all your professions again and gain access to the illustrious ranks. Once you've done that, go to the library and train Archeology. Side note I know what you’re thinking at this point... Why pay for this stuff if it's going to go away after the end of the trial period? Well thanks to the way Blizzard does their ten day trials... NONE of your upgraded professions or flight licenses go away after your trial ends! You just loose access to specific content in the game (pretty much any Cataclysm location that you have to use a portal to get too), but everything else stays the same. Anyway, back to the guide… You'll get the most bang for your buck if your toon is a pure farmer that only trains in Mining and Herbalism. However, I know there are some of you cheap people out there that refuse to pay for the $39.99 upgrade to Cataclysm, so this should hopefully satisfy your cheap rear ends for a while. From heron out though, this guide will focus on what's needed for the farmer though. I know you might be excited to start leveling up your secondary professions... especially Archeology but DON'T. It will just waste time that could hurt you in the long run. The VERY first thing you need to do run over to the Hero's Board and pickup the quest "Hero's Call: Mount Hyjal!" Follow this quest line so it's gets you to Mt. Hyjal. Also when you get to Mt. Hyjal, I don't recommend hearthing at the Inn Keeper there (unless you have all the flight points in that area), because when were done there you have to waste time flying out (if you forget to get your Flight Masters License and you’re not a mage or druid, you better have someone come get you... because you’re going to waste a lot of time getting out of there without a flying mount). When you’re at the inn in Mt. Hyjal, you'll want to fire up either Gatherbuddy or Gatherbuddy 2 (from Honorbuddy) and load up Tony's Mt. Hyjal 3.5 profile. Your focus here is going to be harvesting Cinderbloom and Obsidium Ore until you get to 475 on each profession then you can move on. Once again, try not to let the bots level your professions too far past 475 because you’re just wasting valuable time. However, once your skill is at least 475, you can leave Mt. Hyjal and move on to Uldum. The quickest way to get there is to have a mage summon a portal to Theramore and then take the flight to Gadgetzan (unless you have the flight point to The Valley of the Watchers flight point , which you have to get anyway if you want to take the flight path back to Gadgetzan, then back to Theramore. Once you’re in Uldum, you'll obviously fire up Tony's Uldum profile and you'll be farming Cinderbloom, Whiptail, Elementium Ore, and Pyrum Ore (you your skill is high enough). This profile will take you all the way to Illustrious Grand Master in Herbalsim and Mining. From then on, you’ll be farming the Uldum profile for your Cataclysm goods. Once you max both Herbalsim and Mining, you can focus on your secondary professions if you like. I recommend maxing out on Archeology first, because once your ten trial expires, you won't be able to talk to the trainer anymore. That's where Honorbuddy comes in since Archeology is such a pain to level. It's as simple as firing up Honorbuddy and using the Archeology bot. Configure it to solve the artifacts and to use the keystones to assist in solving them. I'm going to estimate that this will take you two to three days (maybe less depending on how much you bot) to max this out. Once you've maxed out Archeology, you might want to consider a Skinning/Herbalism combo as a profession set for one of your alts. I've noticed that I often get attacked by either snakes or those gators when farming in Uldum and picking up a little heavy leather never hurt. If you want to do this, you’re going to have to make sure you have the highest level gear you can get on and you’re probably going to want to use Gatherbuddy 2, since it seems to fight a lot better. Tips and Tricks 1) Gear!!! – Once you’ve maxed out on your professions, you’re going to need some decent gear. You can start off by purchasing whatever you can use at the Auction House, but don’t forget that you can bot a number of quests to get decent gear too. Just keep in mind that if you ever do breakdown and purchase Cataclysm, then you’ve wasted the XP you could have gotten doing those quests. It’s a trade off really… better gear or future XP. You make the choice, but the better gear you have the easier things like farming Savage Leather or even Volatile Air in Uldum will be. I’ve done both and it works alright, but keep in mind you will stand out like a sore thumb farming Volatile Air... because it’s a quest area and you’re nowhere near the level needed for Uldum quests 2) Gear??? – This is really the complete opposite of the first tip and the one I use personally. Just buy cheap level 80 Cataclysm gear to get you through your farming profession leveling. Case in point, my farmer toon is flying around Uldum right now completely red because I don’t see the point in repairing any of his armor when he still farms just fine and he gets killed all the time. In fact I’m using Gatherbuddy on him and the only option have check in the “Other” tab is Air Mount and Spirit Rez. He farms a lot faster when I’m not having to fight mobs all the time and I’m not wasting and gold repairing his armor either. 3) Mounts - Don’t be dumb and try to farm Mt. Hyjal or Uldum without a flying mount. In fact I HIGHLY recommend NOT purchasing the fastest mount as well. There are a few reasons for this… One, it costs WAY more than just the flight masters license. Two, there WILL be other people in Mt. Hyjal/Uldum farming and you don’t want to make anyone mad that you Ninja’d “their” herb or ore. Speaking of Ninja’s… disable the option. Like I said, you want to bot just under the radar of suspicion. If other people are farming and you keep cutting them off and grabbing what they were going for… they WILL get mad and start smack talking you. When you don’t talk back to them or show some kind of sign that you read their message, they’re going to get suspicious and start watching you Then it’s just a matter of time before you’re banned. However, if you have a slow flying mount like me (150%), then they’re going to see you coming and they’re going to hop on their 310% mount and beat you to it… which is perfectly fine. They’ll feel a sense of personal victory that they outsmarted you in some way, and most importantly, they won’t say a word to you as they fly away. Not to mention the fact that you won’t even care/notice because your botting anyway. 4) Alternate Farming Locations– If you wondering about alternate farming locations, I've tried a number of them with very little success. Specificatlly, I'd tried farming in Twilight Highlands only to get zerged by multiple mobs on a pretty regular basis. Most of the time, I wasn't even able to get more than a few herbs before I gave up. However if your looking for Obsidium Ore, you can fire up the first profile you used for Mt. Hyjal. I've also found that some leveling profiles work well in Mt. Hyjal expecially for farming Eternal Earth. For the most part though, you might just have to stick with farming Uldum to maximize your profit. 5) Pay your farmer- This may sound odd, but I often have conversations with the various WoW bots I’ve got running (i.e. myself ). Just like other smart botter’s, I try to make my accounts appear to be as unrelated as possible. My main account (the one I play on) uses time cards and I use different credit card numbers for each account. In fact, all of my credit/debit cards have my name on them, but Blizzard doesn’t validate the whole billing address on the card nor do they care what the first name on the card is. All they check is last name and your zip code. So I register each account as various family members (same last name) using different addresses I’ve lived at in the same city I live in. I even have some of the billing addresses registered in different states (now that my state charges sales tax) to save a $1.10 on the subscription fee. Back to the subject at hand though... I have my farmer toon send an in-game mail to my main toon asking if I want to buy herbs/ores from him. I reply back from my main and say that I’ll trade a certain crafted in-game goods for his/her goods. I always seriously rip off my farmer toon too (like I send him one cut gem per stack of gems) and throw in a little extra gold. Who cares really anyway, it’s still all my gold and my farmer toon is putting in “his” guild bank anyway. I just personally feel it’s seems a little more legit this way. Kind of like I’m some kind of in-game mogul or something, which is easier to explain in the event someone at Blizzard was watching me. You can go through these kinds of details if you want, but if you don’t and your account gets banned, don’t ask me for any Gold. LOL! 6) Addon’s- The only addons I use for farming is Bagon (bags), Bankstack, Postal, Who Whispered Me, WIM, and Auctioneer with a custom AutoMagic Mail addon that I updated for Cataclysm (because the developer was too lazy to update it.) I’ve attached the AutoMagic Mail addon to this guide because it’s extremely useful when you have to send a lot of herbs, ores, gems, leathers, enchanting mats, and pigments. Just dump the Core.lua and the Mail-GUI.lua in the “\World of Warcraft\Interface\AddOns\Auc-Advanced\Modules\Auc-Util-AutoMagic” folder, overwriting the files that are already there. Well that’s all I can think of now, but from time to time I’ll update this in the event that any details change. Hopefully it will help some of you cheapos (like me) out there! -Leiptr
i don't think tony would appreciate you re-posting his profiles, it would be better to just link to the threads so people can grab them, encase they get updated.
So what tour trying to say is... Just use the 10 day trial for cata? I do this with every expansion on all my accounts. It adds an extra 10 days of free play time. You can add the 10 days then add a game card for 60 days and you get 70 days all together
Sm0k3d: If I was going to say that I wouldn't have wasted two hours writing a guide now would I? Like the guide says (that you obviously didn't read) the Cataclysm trial doesn't add any time to your account. It only allows your (already active) account the ability to access some of the content. CodenameG: I sent him a message asking his permission just a few minutes ago. I only attached them because I figured botters are inherantly lazy and because I use the Converter plug in to convert his Gatherbuddy profiles to Gatherbuddy 2. I figured this way the single post would be all people needed to follow the guide. If he wants me to remove them, I'm more than happy to remove them. I just really appreciate his hard work making them.
Actually I did read the whole guide and found it confusing because it never got to the point on how to actually farm for cheap, that is why i was trying to figure out what you were trying to say. And it does add time onto your account, or for whatever reason it did for me Edit: and I say it adds time because when I came back from a couple month break I did the trial on my account which had "expired" time on it. Clicked the trial and then magically logged into my account and played it
this is incorrect, couple weeks ago i used it on a wrath account that has been frozen for a year...free 10 days
Thank you, also you should fix your guild a little bit to actually say how to farm cata. All you told us was that things I need to do before I get started.
I'm sorry, but, why the f* are you posting common sense information as a guide? TL, DR version of this guide: Get Cataclysm Trial for free, farm 10 days, earn gold during those 10 days and that's it
I think what the point was, is that after the 10 day trial, you still have your flight masters license, and your maxed professions, and can still fly to zones that don't require a portal to get to (Hyjal, Uldum, Twilight Highlands) after the 10 day trial expires. (Edit: I'm not confirming this. I'm just saying I think that's what they're getting at)
No, that was hotfixed ages ago. You lose Flightmaster License (it's greyed out/disabled) after the trial ends.
if that is true, then i agree that the guide is just well it is still a guide but a guide to tells you to do something you already does, well except for one thing, why the heck would i fly a 150 mount? that is just silly and stupied, turn off ninja nodes yes, never ninja nodes when you bot, they might report you even if they don?t think you are a bot just to get back at you. HB dosn?t ninja by default, so there is nothing you have to do there.' running with no gear or red gear might work. i am going to rep anyway, as he did spend time on the guide.
Okay, maybe you guys could be right on this then. I know that when I used it on my Lich King account (US) I used it on the last day my subscription was good and once my subscription expired, I got the message saying I my subcription expired (or whatever the error message is) and couldn't log in. I then had to use a credit card to reactivate it and get access to the cataclysm content for the rest of the trial period. So if I get one more person to validate this, then I'll change it.
Hmmm, maybe I was grandfathered in then, because I don't have Cataclysm and I still have my flying mount and use it to fly everywhere in Azeroth. I'll admit though, if that's true... that really sucks. Also, I did not write this with the experienced botter's in mind either. I think it's safe to assume that if you've been botting for a while, you've figured out how to utilize just about everyway possible to make your multiple accounts cheaper to operate. Maybe I should have made the title "A N00b's GUIDE to Cataclysm Farming for the Poor/Cheap without having to buy Cataclysm" or something similar. I really hope someone can confirm/deny this though. I'm willing to make custom profiles is this was to be the case though. That way, there would at least be a ground mount profile available for use.
I've made over 500k gold using the methods in this guide with my Lich King only accounts (three of them). This may not be a lot to some people, but it's a lot to me. I didn't see the point of paying $120 for the Cataclysm expansions on my farming accounts when I get the same benefits without having to buy it. Not to mention the fact I've been farming Cataclysm herbs and ores for MUCH longer than ten days on these accounts. I'm not sure why you feel the need to trivialize my guide because it seems "common sense" to you. I could easily say that it's common sense to be courteous to others... especially when they put forth an extra effort in to contribute to the GB/HB community. It's not like I'm a paid technical writer for the Honorbuddy forums. In fact, I've gotten nothing but grief for writing this guide. The reason I wrote it was because I felt like I was hoarding knowledge that some people may be unaware of and I wanted to give back to the community. Plus, I've always felt that as a member of the GB/HB community that it was important to contribute anyway that I could. If you look at the guides section, there are only a handful of guides that relate to actual in-game content. Not to mention that the ratio of guides to HB/GB users is seriously disproportionate. There are easily many thousands of users and there are only about 30 guides... and of those, there are only three or four that relate to in-game topics. Unfortunately, I'm starting to see why this is the case now. What's the point of wasting your time writing a guide (no matter how dumb or obsolete it is), just to get it trivialized and belittled by people that were not even in the target demographic? I suppose I could have just written a two or three sentence guide stating what appears to be the “obvious” to some people, but it really doesn’t help out the guy who just bought Honorbuddy or Gatherbuddy does it. Not to mention that I'm sure I'd get a number of posts stating how dumb of a post it was or some other kind of useless vitriol.
You wrote a nice guide man. The trolls are angry because they were to busy playing on a comp and their mommy or other didn't bring them an Easter basket . But I still highly advise to not farm uldum at Lvl 80 as it is most of the time a dead give away you are a bot. Just look at some of the recent ban posts. They are going after all accounts now tied to a single ip addy. So be very careful using this method . To the op don't worry about the trolls.
I'm not a troll, just pointed out something that wasn't completely accurate and he decided to take it personal and get all angry. Anyway it is a good way to be able to farm cata stuff without buying cata
