Mining

What changed in Forever

wow-professions.com lists the quality-of-life changes:

• Ores stack to 20 instead of 10.
• Every starting zone has a Junior Mining Trainer. They teach only up to 75, and no smelting.
• Starting areas have Poor Copper Veins, and Teldrassil has Chunks of Amber, so Night Elves can mine at home too. Both give Copper Ore, but the small nodes give skill points only up to 20.

You can also learn Apprentice Mining by picking Mining for Dummies as the reward from an early starting-zone quest (Wowhead).

New materials:

• Azerothium Bar: smelted at skill 275 from Pitchblende and Coal, at an ordinary forge.
• Heavy Thorium Bar: smelted at skill 300 from Heavy Thorium Ore. It needs a Molten Foundry, and wow-professions.com knows of no Foundry except the camp item. The ore comes from Heavy Thorium Veins in Mount Hyjal.
• Legionite Bar: an Alchemy transmute of Heavy Thorium Bars. Icy Veins adds Fel Crystals to the recipe.
• Scarce materials: Pyrite, Bauxite and Pitchblende drop alongside ore. Icy Veins says Pyrite becomes Sulfuric Acid in Alchemy and Bauxite goes into new recipes, Enchanting among them. The new bars mostly feed Blacksmithing, with a few Engineering recipes (wow-professions.com).

The sources don't agree on which veins give which Scarce material:

Two pieces of gear also help. Smelting Pants make the early smelts 25% faster. The Rockslicer lets anyone, Miner or not, mine low-level veins for 30 charges (Wowhead).

Levelling, in brief

There are two ways to level, and most guides mix them.

Smelting. Buy ore and smelt it at a forge. Wowhead says smelting gives skill up to 185: copper, tin, bronze, silver and iron take you to about 140. Nothing smelts for points from 140 to 155, and gold then carries you to 185. wow-professions.com is more cautious. It smelts copper, tin and bronze to about 105, adds silver to 120 if prices allow, and treats iron (to about 135) and gold (155–175) as optional. This route costs gold but saves time. Bars sometimes sell for about as much as the ore did.

Mining. The guides agree on the skill each vein needs; they differ on zones.

At the beta's level cap, wow-professions.com couldn't fully test its routes past skill 125. Its higher routes are Classic's, with the note that ore respawns faster in Forever, and in caves so do the mobs. Wowhead says you get at most one skill point from a node however many swings it takes. Icy Veins adds that a group of miners can each take a swing at the same node for a point.

Ranks

Icy Veins gives the skill needed to train each rank: 50 for Journeyman, 125 for Expert, 200 for Artisan. The character level is disputed, as for every gathering profession. Icy Veins' overview gives gathering ranks lower levels (none, 10, 25) than ForeverDB's levelling page (10, 20, 35, from Classic).

Making money

• Wowhead calls Mining an excellent source of gold that needs no money to start. Sell whatever you don't craft with.
• Icy Veins points to gems and the Scarce reagents, which only miners gather.
• ForeverDB shows why the Auction House matters: a vendor pays 5 copper for Copper Ore and 2 copper for Rough Stone.
• Ore and bars also fill Waylaid Crates, which you hand in at your faction's trade camp for Merchant's Favor (wow-professions.com).
• Mining has no Legacy challenges, but Bountiful Harvest raises Scarce finds (Wowhead).