Retribution Paladin
Making Gold – Mining Un’Goro Crater

Un’Goro used to be an absolute gold mine in vanilla WoW.  I cannot tell you how many countless hours I spent farming there…both ore and herbs.  When Burning Crusade hit, I had so much gold from farming there, I had more than enough to buy my epic flying mount, training, and then some.

So, I decided to head back there and see how I could do two expansions later.  I already know a good deal about what Thorium and Mithril Ore sell for, so I was licking my lips at the prospect of some phat gold per hour numbers here.

One aspectI have going for me is I still know all the spawn points for the ore.  That helps tremendously, but can be done without just as well.  First, the biggest money maker will be the Rich Thorium Veins.  They will drop up to 5 Thorium Ore each.  There are a handful of spawn points, 4 of which are up at any given time.  Sometimes there may be less.

One Rich Thorium Vein will for sure be at Fire Plume Ridge.  There are 5 possible spawn points there on the ‘volcano’, so check the whole area.

The other 3 possible spawn points are in the southwestern quadrant of the zone.

So here’s how my route went:  I started at Fire Plume Ride with the first Thorium node.  Then, I went to the SW area and got the rest.  I skirted the outer wall of the zone north all the way around to the gorilla cave in the NW part of Un’Goro.  There can be 2 Small Thorium Vein nodes there, and I got both.  Then I head halfway down the Eastern wall, cutting dead west back to Fire Plume Ridge to hit the RTV spawns again.

After I hit the middle and SW areas, I then reversed and tracked along the wall in the southern part of the zone, stopping at the bug cave, where there were another two ore nodes inside.  Heading along the wall back again to the middle of the east border, I then cut west again back to FP Ridge.  Rinse and Repeat.

I stopped at 30 minutes, right after my third sweep of the Rich Thorium Vein areas.

Here are the details of my farming:

Time Elapsed: 30 minutes

Loot:

• 58x Thorium Ore – 116g
• 9x Mithril Ore – 18g
• 3x Truesilver Ore – 10.5g
• 5x Gold Ore – 15g
• 76x Dense Stone – 2.28g
• 11x Solid Stone – 2.75g (none on my AH at the time, shockingly)
• 1x Large Opal – 13g
• 3x Blue Sapphire – 15.75g
• 2x Arcane Crystal – 30g

Total Gold Made: 223.28g

Total Gold per Hour: 447g per hour

Now that’s not too bad.  I was actually thinking I would make a little bit more, but there is some slowdown with travel time.  Even with Crusader Aura up, the nodes outside of the SW area are pretty far apart, but you must hit them to maximize gold/hour while waiting for the Rich Thorium Veins to respawn.

Now, with Cataclysm on the horizon, Blizzard has said they will revamp the current mining/herbing spawns (or that’s my interpretation of it), so they may come in higher quantity with xpac release. Or they may not, who knows.  My point is, this may not be a viable gold making method forever, but as of right now, due to the high demand for Thorium and Mithril Ore, it is one of the best!

Oh, as a side note, always sell your ore as ore…do not convert to bars as those usually sell for less.  People like jewelcrafters and miners  need ore to level up, especially when power leveling the profession, so ore is usually in higher demand!