Swiftness

You receive item:

And there was much rejoicing.  As our instance group is progressing, the mighty Skronk just hit 60 in Azeroth which meant only one thing:  time for the epic mount.   No way around it, you have to grind for your ride.  As mudflation has taken hold after TBC, gold is more plentiful when reselling items on the AH and the mount changes that occurred with the 2.0 patch substantially reduced the amount of gold required for the “epic” level 60 mount.

Back in the day, the mount was basically 1000G once you hit level 60.  For a casual player a few years ago, that was quite a bit of gold.  Ten times the amount required for the basic level 40 mount.  Grinding that much coin as a holy priest was very unfun at that time, so I never got around to it.

Under the new regime, the journeyman riding skill will cost you 600G (less with faction discount) while the mount itself will cost you 100G (again, lest faction discount).  As it turned out based on Skronk’s faction, the total was 540G+90G = 630G all in.   Fortunately, thats in 2008 gold, not 2005 gold.  So on to the grind it was.

Skronk is the alchemist of the group and had skinning as his second profession.  As he had crept ahead of the group a bit xp wise and being a holy priest meant grinding for cash via skinning would be painful, slow and result in additional level creep.  As he was falling behind in alchemy, it seemed like the time to switch to a different gathering profession.  Herbalism seemed just the ticket.

He ditched skinning and picked up herbalism.  24 hours later he hit 300 in herbalism and was able to level up his alchemy to 300 as well.  This proved to be a good decision.  First, with alchemy leveled up, he could do daily arcanite transmutes (1 per day) which always sell well on the auction house.  Arcane crystals used to be 25G per back in the day.  Nowadays, they go for about 1-2G on average while the market for arcanite bars is in the 15G-20G range.

Next, with “free” access to all the herbs needed for the pots the group would need, all the surplus could be resold.  Mountain Silversage, Plaguebloom, Dreamfoil, Golden Sansam, Gromsblood etc. all sell very well being primary inputs for the pots that folks consume quite a bit of like healing and mana pots.  Seems the market on our server values the herbs more than the actual pots, so with no substitute for actually running around and gathering herbs, people are willing to substitute gold for that effort.

So all in, only about a week or so of casual grinding to pull in the cash while helping to contribute to needed items for Vikund’s (Paladin) and Bungholio’s (Warlock) epic mount quests.  Don’t get me started on the mounted travel paradigms for most MMOs, but for the moment, let us rejoice in our swiftness.

Behold!