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Big part of how successfull you are in WoW is do you have the resources to back up your doings. Most people do not have all crafting or gathering professions on their characters and they need to rely on support from friends or gold to fill in the gaps. And even if you’d have all of the professions there will still be at very least the repair costs. Nowadays it’s very easy to get gold but it wasn’t always. Back in vanilla, and most of Burning Crusade there were no daily quests to do. You had to grind, grind and grind a bit more. So let’s take a trip down the memory lane and see what was the hot stuff back then (from my personal point of view obviously). This is TOP 10 countdown of most grinded mobs pre-wrath.

Aah the legendary patch 1.9 and Ahn’Qiraj. Handfull of repeatable quests which mostly involved killing bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. And I did kill bugs.. enough to get exalted with Cenarion Circle. All the Silithid were elites so you could not solo them with all characters and those who could not were forced to group up. I however could, outdoors anyway.. roots didn’t work indoors back then. I can’t imagine how frustrating it would have been if I would not have been able to solo them. Grindy stuff like that is something you want to do on your own time… late at night. I wonder what for I was grinding the reputation anyway. Oh well.. couple years later you got a fancy title for it.

Yes this is a fish. And quite elusive one. You can fish it from several locations: Hinterlands, Winterspring, Moonglade, Eastern Plaguelands, Zu’Gurub… But the tricky part with this was you can catch it only during the night and not same amount all the time. If you fished between 12am and 6am the only fish to drop was Nightfin. Sounds fun doesn’t it. It was! My favorite place to fish them was Hinterlands.

Level 59-60 elites which meant they dropped 17-20 silver each which was quite amazing amount back then. Also if you look at their loot list it’s mostly just grey items which were good for cashing at vendors. And since they’re elites not everyone could solo them and there was not much competition for them. Not my favorite place to grind money but a solid option if some other place was feeling too crowded.

I didn’t grind at Tyr’s Hand until rather late part of vanilla. All mobs are elites and many are ranged, lots of patrols and bunched up mobs. So as a druid it was a little bit difficult if you wanted to do it alone. But eventually my gear kicked up and I could do it. And they of course added the Moonkin form into game so I could actually take few hits. Money was pretty much the same as from giants in Winterspring but Scarlets also dropped Runecloth which was nice addition.

The main food source during Burning Crusade. These guys dropped Chunk o’ Basilisk which was needed for making Blackened Basilisk. There are other locations to get it besides Terokkar Forest but this was best of them by far. If you just followed the small streams or the northeastern cliff edge you would find lots and lots of them very close to each other. Very easy to farm and I did it a lot.

Later in the game I spent lots of time grinding at Northdale. Lots of ghosts around who drop Runecloth, Essence of Undeath and Invader’s Scourgestones which you could use for Argent Dawn reputation. Then there’s the water elementals who drop Essence of Water which I used for making Hide of the Wild to sell in auction house. Back then the droprate of essences was very very low so they fetch quite a price.

I’ve always thought the Timbermaw Furbolgs are kinda cool so I did a lot of rep grind for them, before they made it a bit easier and actually gave some repeatable quests. It took ages and I got past revered before the quests were put in. But I made some serious money while at it and damn it felt good when you finally hit exalted and turned in The Brokering of Peace and Magni yelled for all Ironforge to hear:

Above and beyond the call of duty indeed… the amount of time involved kinda creeps me out now when I think of it.

This was the number one grind spot in Burning Crusade. The place was jam packed with mobs dropping Mark of Sargeras, Fel Armament and Netherweave Cloth. This is where I grinded two characters to exalted with Aldor. I didn’t buy anything from auction house to speed up the reputation so I saved and earned a lot while doing it myself. Another good thing about this spot was the two elites patrolling in the area which cut down the amount of bots.

Best place to grind in vanilla. At least it was for me since I had skinning. Yetis are kinda funny.. they’re one of the two skinnable humanoids in game (in addition to worgen). And being humanoids they also drop money so double win for me. I made lots of gold by selling the Rugged Leather in auction house. Whenver I needed money without too much hassle or stress I just headed for Winterspring.

Holy crap these guys are the most awesome thing ever. When I was leveling through Un’Goro I didn’t get killed by them but I did get chased by them every now and then. And oh it was so hilarious to watch someone get stomped by them. At some point.. maybe level 56 or so I thought I am so going to try and kill one of these things on my own. It wasn’t that easy and not all Devilsaurs are the same.

When I got to level 60 it was time to start collecting money for epic mount. I had (tribal) leatherworking and skinning as professions and I had put a lot of effort in keeping the skill high. Often instead of leveling I paused for long times to skill up my leatherworking instead. So, I had profession high so I bought myself Pattern: Devilsaur Gauntlets and Pattern: Devilsaur Leggings. Then it was just a matter of lots of grinding and hopefully selling the products for good price.

I’m sure everyone’s been to Un’Goro so you know that Devilsaurs are pretty small in numbers. There was four spots where I sat and waited for them to walk by. Killing them wasn’t easy so I needed safe locations with lots of room to mess around without accidently running into other mobs. After a while it became fairly routine so the stress factor weared off and I actually became quite good in hunting them.

The biggest hazard for me was other players. I understand they might have meant well when they come rushing to my ‘aid’ and breaking my roots so the Devilsaur just charges and beats hell out of me. And every time I tried to explain why I need to do it alone they just went “lol you were going to die and I saved you lolz”. Sigh. Of course I was going to die because you freaking tried to kill me! So I just made a shout macro and spammed it every time I saw someone coming to ward them off. Sometimes it worked sometimes not.

It took forever but the items I crafted sold for 80-100g a piece which was insane amount of money back in those days. And for quite a while I seemed to have the monopoly on these items at the auction house so.. yay for me. Eventually the day finally came when I had collected the 1k gold I believe it was back then and bought Reins of the Swift Frostsaber. And I have Devilsaurs to thank for that.

Hm.. seems like I got a bit carried away on this last one. But they deserved it.