Material Farming for Engineers

Related: Gnomish Engineering And You

The following is a table that lists all of the mats that you need in order to level your Engineering up to max for level 24 (Engineering 240 in our case) including the mats required to craft the items you need for the quest to specialize as a Gnomish Engineer and the mats to create the Gnomish Goggles.

Crafting the items that you need for that quest are not taken into account for the items that you craft to level because I was just too lazy to figure out what skill levels you needed to be for each item and which items/mats I could knock off of the leveling list. So you might have a handful of items or so that you craft without getting skill ups, but unless you miss getting skill ups where you should have otherwise gotten them, this should be the full shopping list you need to complete all of your Engineering requirements.

Rough Stone	24
Coarse Stone	31
Heavy Stone	27
Solid Stone	80
Copper Ore/Bar	86
Tin Bar	36
Bronze Bar**	71
Iron Ore/Bar	22
Gold Ore/Bar	2
Mithril Ore/Bar	101
Wool Cloth	2
Mageweave Cloth	20
Light Leather	6
Medium Leather	6
Heavy Leather	14
Tigerseye	2
Moss Agate	2
Citrine	3
Jade	1
Weak Flux	21
Nightcrawler	15
Elemental Fire	2

** = The totals for Copper and Tin Ore/Bars include the totals that you need to make all of your Bronze Bars. I list the Bronze Bars only so that you are aware of how many of those you need to make.

Some of the items on this list are very easy to obtain, and some of them… well, aren’t. The following is a list of the best places for you to farm each item that you need. In the case of mining nodes, I’m going to leave out the zones that are far away from Alliance settlements since we’re all Gnomes, and I’ll just stick with stuff that’s fairly close to “home”. The exception to that is nodes that you stand little or no chance of being able to farm on your level 24 character.

Keep in mind that with gathering nodes in particular, the number of nodes that I have listed below are how many node spawn locations exist in the zone. That does not mean that you’ll find 22 Copper Veins in every Deadmines run you go to, only that there are 22 possible locations for a copper node to appear there.

Mining Nodes
Copper Ore/Rough Stone: Darkshore (269 nodes), Elwynn Forrest (176), Dun Morogh (158), Loch Modan (138), Westfall (90), The Deadmines (22), Wailing Caverns (4)

Tin Ore/Coarse Stone: Ashenvale (302 nodes), Northern Stranglethorn (257), Redridge Mountains (102), Loch Modan (59), The Deadmines (8), Wailing Caverns (8)

Copper and Tin you should be able to farm yourself without much trouble at all. Some of the higher level zones like STV and Ashenvale will have harder mobs for you to face than some of the other options, but there’s also higher concentrations of the nodes (as you can see) so farming should be faster overall even though you’ll spend more time fighting mobs in the area.

Iron Ore/Heavy Stone: Feralas (365 nodes), Desolace (226), Northern Stranglethorn (52), Duskwood (42), Wetlands (31)

Gold Ore: Western Plaguelands (165 nodes), Felwood (109), Feralas (82), Northern Stranglethorn (20)

Mithril Ore/Solid Stone: Thousand Needles (419 nodes), Badlands (314), Felwood (283)

These three are all likely outside of your solo farming capabilities on a 24 Gnome Clone. You can either ask for help from higher level people, roll a Death Knight to farm with instead, or look for other means of getting them. Warlocks and Frost Mages can do some farming in these areas by allowing their pets to get agro long enough for them to mine a node or two and then running away to get out of combat, but that’s a long and boring process.

Cloth Farming
Luckily there isn’t all that much cloth that you actually need to level Engineering. You can certainly use a lot of cloth if you’re going to make explosives, but you can do most of your leveling with very little cloth.

Wool Cloth: drops off of level 20’ish Humanoid mobs. You should easily be able to find all the wool you need with a single run through Stockades or Blackfathom.

Mageweave Cloth: is outside your Gnome Clone’s farming ability. As far as I know there are only two classes in the 20-24 bracket that can successfully solo the mobs that drop this cloth, and neither one of those are clothies. If you want to attempt farming it then by all means head on up to the Plaguelands and give it a shot. Realistically, you’ll need to get help from a higher level character or buy these off of the auction house.

Leather Farming
Skinning is a good profession to have and one that’s a perfect substitution for Mining if you want your Gnome Clone to be a little bit different. In fact, I urge a few of you Clones to go ahead and drop your Mining for Skinning so that you can provide leather to others who will in turn provide stone and ore for you.

Light Leather: is the primary drop for all of the beasts in the teens and low 20’s. Farming this should prove no challenge at all and can be done quickly and easily at any of the farms in Elwynn Forrest (where Stormwind is) by killing the pigs that have forced respawns every time you kill a certain number of them.

Medium Leather: is found from mobs in the mid-teens and 20’s. One of the best places for you to farm this though is in Wailing Caverns from the giant lizard boss, Skum. He’s located very close to the entrance now (the first room to the east) and when you skin him you’ll get 3-7 Medium Leather and sometimes 1-5 Medium Hides as well. Engineering won’t use the Hides, but you can post those on the AH and put the profits toward other items that you can’t farm yourself.

Heavy Leather: comes from beasts in the mid-20’s and 30’s. The most likely place for you to farm Heavy Leather is in the Blackfathom Deeps instance. Since you’ll likely be there with a group anyway, killing the mobs should be fairly simple. Since the mobs in BFD are pretty low on the level range for Heavy Leather your chances are only about 20-25% of getting Heavy Leather off of them, but that’s still a decent percentage compared to killing mobs solo out in the world. You can also get it off of the one mob in Gnomer that’s skinnable, the basalisk companion who comes out with Grubbis.

Simple Gems
If you choose to go with Mining as one of your professions, you’ll have a good start on collecting the gems that you need. Without Mining (or Jewelcrafting if you prefer to prospect ore) your source of gems is farming, fishing, and hunting chests or rare spawns.

Malachite: can be farmed from basically every low level mob in the game. Racial zones that were created in Burning Crusade and Cataclysm have higher drop rates in general than Classic starting zones, but percentages are small either way. If you like LFG you can usually find a few of these in each of Ragefire Chasm, Shadowfang Keep, and Wailing Caverns. You also have a fair shot of finding these in the little presents you get for cleaning grimy objects in Gnomer.

Tigerseye: can be also farmed from almost every low level mob in the game. If you like LFG you can usually find 1-2 of these in Shadowfang Keep, Wailing Caverns, and The Deadmines. You also have a fair shot of finding these in the little presents you get for cleaning grimy objects in Gnomer.

Shadowgem: drops from mobs in the teens and 20’s, with higher drop rates in dungeons. I like to farm Shadowfang Keep and Wailing Caverns for these as I typically find 2-4 in each run. My record for a single run of Wailing Caverns is seven.

Moss Agate: is a little harder to find both as a drop and from mining since the nodes you find them in are higher level zones. However, you can find a fair number of these in dungeons as well. The top dungeon for Moss Agate is Blackfathom Deeps and almost every mob in there has a chance to drop them for you. Average drops in BFD are around 1-4 per run.

Jade: is one of the harder gems for you to find on a 24, and your best bet is probably going to be purchasing it on the AH or hoping to stumble onto one while you’re mining higher level nodes if you can find someone to give you a hand mining. The simplest way to get Jade is to have a Jewelcrafter use their Prospect skill on Iron and Tin, particularly the Iron.

Citrine: is probably the single hardest thing for you to farm on a 24 without help. Again, the simplest way to obtain Citrine is by prospecting Iron Ore, with Mithril Ore coming in as a close second.

Vendor Goods
The two items that you can easily get from vendors are Nightcrawlers and Weak Flux.

Weak Flux: can be found at most Blacksmithing, Engineering, and Jewelcrafting supplies vendors and from general trades supplies vendors.

Nightcrawlers: are purchased from Fishing Supplies and Trades Supplies vendors. They don’t all sell them, so if the one you find doesn’t just go look around a bit for another vendor. You can find 1-3 vendors that sell these in almost every major city.

Other Items
The only other item that I haven’t covered yet is the Elemental Fire. This typically drops off of mobs in that are level 46 and higher, but Deathwing did us all a favor. The remake of The Stockades now includes various types of fire elementals which all have a chance of dropping these. The chance isn’t great, but 5% is better than a lot of the other items you’ll be looking for so you have a pretty good chance of getting the ones that you need after a couple of runs.

You can also farm the new fire elementals that appear around the stones in northwestern Arathi Highlands. They’re level 29 so they’re a little tough for some classes, but you should be able to handle them as long as you don’t over-pull. They have a 15% drop rate so it’s up to you whether you prefer a 5% drop rate with a full group helping you or a 15% drop rate solo with possibly slow kills.