WoW Confidential

Gathering professions are used by many players while leveling or even when just starting out with gold making at level 80 because it doesn’t require any investment, the profits are very immediate and low level materials that you gather are worth a lot.

Gathering professions and buying and selling on the auction house as WoW School shows in their guide is the best way to make gold for anyone under 5k and without a crafting profession. I don’t think any player would dispute that.

It would be ideal if you could combine the two best gathering professions: Herbalism and Mining together but many players do not choose both of these professions on one character as you can only track one profession at a time.

There is a solution, with the use of this gathering macro I found it will automatically switch between Find Minerals and Find Herbs for you every 1.8 seconds and best thing of all it is legal to use in WoW and not against Blizzards ToS agreement. (nothing I post on this site is against the ToS btw)

Gathering Addons

1. Gathermate and Gathermate data – These addons populate your world map and mini map with all the mining and herb nodes. Gathermate data comes preloaded with all the locations already available and is updated very frequently on the curse website.
2. Routes – An amazing addon that figures out the best gathering route by using the gathermate data and creating the shortest path between the nodes. The is an optimization feature to cluster nodes so that you are only travelling the shortest distance between nodes (as it takes into account your range for tracking).
   You can also select which herbs/ore to include or exclude based on what is still giving you skill ups or have insufficient skill to gather from.
3. SexyMaps – I found the routes addon didn’t work with the default blizzard mini map and I found Sexymaps was fully compatible with it, you may need to go into the addon config menu to take off some of the frills and flashy graphics.

Gathering Macro

Here’s what makes it possible to track herbalism and mining at the same time, with this gathering macro you can copy it from a notepad document and paste it into the chat box in WoW. Once executed it will switch between find herbs and find ore until you either quit the game or type /reload ui.

/run local f=AuG or CreateFrame(“Frame”,”AuG”) f.m,f.t=1,0 f:SetScript(“OnUpdate”,function(s,e) f.t=f.t+e if f.t>2.5 and not InCombatLockdown() then f.t=0 f.m=3-f.m SetTracking(f.m) end end) f:Show()

I’m using both herbalism and mining on my newly created Death Knight for my project to hit 10,000g as fast as possible and so far I’ve made 600g from low level herbs in 3 hours of gathering to afford my flying mount to use in Outlands. 200g/hr is pretty good for something a level 20 could do (First level you get a mount). Although you could get around 1,000g/hr as a level 1 follow WoW Schools AH guide.

I also tried the  addon Spotter that also automatically switches between herbalism and mining but I found it would stop after I gathered some materials and I’d have to click the icon again to restart the macro, the macro posted about has worked great.