Hey there guys!
This is Reckles with WTBGold and what I don’t want to talk about today is how to farm Mageroyal,
Briarthorn, and Swiftthistle.
There’s no competition, Hillsbrad foothills is just best.
Follow this route, like usual, the map's down in the description.
I got over a thousand herbs an hour.
No other zone comes close.
What I do want to talk about today is WHY this route is great, so I’m gonna take the
next 4 minutes to go over how herb nodes work in World of Warcraft so you guys can understand.
Your first instinct as a new farmer or even as a new guidemaker, is to go to wowhead,
look up a map of the herb nodes and say, “wow, there’s lots of herbs around Ruins of Alterac.
I’ll go there.
I’ll draw a line around that.”
Here’s what happens.
Your first five minutes of farming, absolutely great.
Nodes everywhere.
You're constantly herbing.
You get like, 40 of each herb in 5 minutes.
Then, out of no where things just seem to stop spawning, almost like an invisible GM
is watching you and like, punishing you for trolling trade chat.
It takes you an additional 15 minutes to get another 40 of each herb.
Here’s why.
There’s 4 important factors that describe how herb nodes work.
As of Legion, all gathering nodes have some phasing, where if another player loots an
herb, it disappears for them, but the node is still visible and lootable by you for the
next 30 seconds.
We’re going to ignore this here because it’s only really important in current content
high competition areas, so you know, you don’t hate your fellow farmers anymore.
The second thing is that each zone has three important numbers.
The first is potential nodes (you can see this by doing a little work.
Going to WoWDB or WoWHead and adding up the numbers.
With the Hillsbrad example, it has about 700 potential nodes).
The second number is minimum nodes (For this, I farmed for a while to empty everything out
of Hillsbrad and then just went around physically counting everything up.
Hillsbrad seems to have about 50 nodes as the minimum) The third number is maximum nodes
(generally this is about double the minimum, but for our test, our example here, let’s
say it's 80) The third important factor is Auto-fill.
Whenever there are fewer herbs in a zone than the maximum.
So, our maximum is 80.
If there are only 70 nodes, 1 herb will spawn randomly somewhere on the map every 60 seconds
or so.
Now, I don't know the exact timing.
It's really hard to test.
Blizzard hasn't ever responded to me, and that's fine, but this is an interesting mechanic.
And I'm not gonna explain it, I want you to do some thinking here.
Tell me in the comments what you think the affect would be if this didn't exist.
The impact on your results in a zone with heavy competition, your results in a zone
without heavy competition, your total herbalism auction house earnings, on WoW’s inflation,
and finally on just general gathering enjoyment.
Would farming be more or less fun if this didn't exist?
The fourth factor though is Force Spawn, and this one's really important.
Has a big impact.
Whenever an herb is looted when the zone is already at the minimum, another will instaspawn
somewhere else on the map.
So let’s combine these four points and look at Hillsbrad again.
I’ll split the map into two sections, the Ruins and the area around Southshore.
I'll do zone A and zone B and Imagine you’re farming just the ruins, the one WoW-Professions
recommends.
Without any competition the map will have the maximum of 80 nodes up.
They'll be pretty evenly distributed between zone A and B. So you'll have a ton of herbs
really quickly when you're gathering for the first 30 nodes.
At that point the random instaspawn will kick in.
Because there are so many potential nodes we’ll get about half the new herbs spawning
in A and half spawning in B.
But once we’ve forced 10 nodes to spawn over in the B, which doesn't take that long,
zone B by itself has the map-wide 50 node minimum all by itself, so instaspawn turns
off, and you’re left with 1 herb a minute, only half of which spawn in your side.
Just the autofill.
So, this dynamic zone-wide spawn interaction is why, for extended farming sessions, you
want to design your route so it covers as many herbs as possible.
It’s also why you want to be wary of any guide maker who gives results from less than
30 minutes or an hour of testing, or of course anyone who just doesn’t list results at
all.
So that’s it for me, good luck getting your mageroyal.
Press the like button if you learned something.
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Thank you for watching.
Have a great day and happy gold making.
I feel...I feel like there should be a drinking game with this series where you gotta take
a shot every time I say the word node.