How To Powerlevel Mining In One Evening

• Introduction
• Smelting Recipes With Potential
• Leveling Guide
• Tips
• Objections
• Maps

Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to show you how to powerlevel mining very quickly. This is useful if:

• You’re high level and want to get mining to make gold or mine outlands ore, but do not want to spend endless hours in low level zones to mine ore for meager rewards.
• Your mining is lagging behind your character level and you want to increase it so you can mine the ore in the areas you’re leveling in.

Note that you won’t be making much gold doing this, but since you’ll get a higher mining skill faster you can then take advantage of the more profitable high level ore faster. It saves time, and therefore money.

Let’s get started.

There was one small feature introduced in patch 2.4 that probably went unnoticed by many:

• Mining
  • Increased the skill up potential for most smelting recipes.

I just leveled mining on one of my level 70s before the patch, and the way it was done was by using mining and smelting. You see, before patch 2.4 some smelting recipes were gray already when you learned them so you couldn’t get any skill ups from them. So what you had to do was

1.  Smelt as much as possible
2. Then go out and mine some ore to get skill ups

Since smelting was buffed, the need to mine ore has largely been eliminated. If you have the gold, you can just buy ore from the auction house, smelt it and sell the bars. Then you move on to the next recipe. You will neither make nor lose much gold this way, but you will level mining very quickly so you can get high skill to take advantage of the profitable Outlands minerals.

Smelting Recipes With Potential

Leveling guide

Now, I haven’t tried this myself yet but I would say a good path would be like this:

• 1-65
  • Smelt copper (save the bars for smelting bronze later)
• 65-100
  • Smelt bronze
• 100-125
  • Smelt silver
• 125-155
  • Smelt iron
• 155-177
  • Smelt gold
• 177-230
  • Smelt mithril
• 230-250
  • Smelt truesilver
• 250-285
  • Smelt thorium
• 285-300
  • Mine thorium in EPL
• 300-315
  • Smelt fel iron
• 315-325
  • Mine fel iron in Hellfire Peninsula
• 325-340
  • Smelt adamantite ore
• 340-350
  • Mine fel iron ore and adamantite ore in Zangarmarsh or Nagrand
• 350-357
  • Smelt eternium (save the bars for smelting felsteel later)
• 357-375
  • Smelt felsteel

Some additional tips:

• Doing this will require a LOT of ore, since we’re smelting all the way to gray in some cases
• But since you will be selling the bars you should make back most of your money and save a lot of time
• Sometimes, though, you may run out of ore on the AH, especially the rare ore like silver, truesilver and gold
• Don’t bother smelting dark iron as you have to do it inside Blackrock Depths instance and it requires a ton of dark iron ore
• Once you get to 285, enchant a pair of gloves with advanced mining, then go to Eastern Plaguelands and farm thorium until AT LEAST 300. (Thorium is very profitable in itself nowadays so you might as well stay a while in EPL.)
• Once you’re 300+ you might as well just mine nodes in Outlands to 375, as you’ll be making a lot of gold from that.
• Remember to train new smelting recipes at the mining trainer and new mining skill at 50, 125, 200 and 275.

Keep in mind the purpose of leveling mining: To make gold by selling ore, or save gold by mining ore to your crafting profession.

Therefore, it makes sense to skip the lower level ore farming and just smelt ore. But once you get to 285 you should farm thorium, fel iron ore, and adamantite ore, since you’ve now reached the really profitable ore. And there’s really no point in having 375 mining except the ability to mine the rare khorium veins so you don’t have to powerlevel the last stretch with smelting (but you can if you really want to).

Objections?

Now, you might object to this guide saying that it might be better to farm the low level ores too in certain cases.

You might think that if you’re leveling a crafting profession like jewelcrafting, blacksmithing or engineering alongside mining, that it would be smarter to farm all the ore and use it to skill up the crafting profession.

The ONLY time you should do that is if you’re leveling your professions while leveling your character, and using the stuff your crafting or making gold from it.

If you’re already level 70, it is a HUGE waste of time to go into the low level zones to mine, even if you could be using the ore to level your crafting profession. Why? Simple.

Let’s say you mine for 10 hours in lowbie zones to save materials worth 150g for crafting. Wow, 15g per hour and very tedious…

Now let’s say you spend 2 hours in your major city smelting to reach 285 skill, then go to EPL and Outlands and spend 8 hours farming making 100g per hour. You’ve just made 800g, or 650g more than the "savings" from going to the lowbie zones.

You then sell the high level ore for gold (or save it for crafting) and buy the low level ore from the AH.

And that’s the entire point of this guide: To get your mining skill to a place (using smelting) where it’s starting to be profitable to mine ore.

Maps

Eastern Plaguelands mining route. Click image for larger size.

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