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Patch 3.3 PTR: Arctic Fur is less annoying, vendor purchased
Here's a nice little find from official forums poster Whut of Cenarion Circle: Arctic Furs, those impossibly hard to farm rare skinning drops that are needed for everything from Leg Armor to Motorcycles, will be a lot easier to get in Patch 3.3. Namely, Braeg Stoutbeard, the recipe vendor outside of Legendary Leathers in Dalaran, is selling them for the low price of 10 Heavy Borean Leather on the PTR. If you've been farming and selling Arctic Furs, I suppose you might be a bit bummed that your cash cow is going away, but for the most part I think most of us are pretty happy with it. For example, if you're like yours truly, you have a stack of 20 Frozen Orbs sitting in the bank just begging to be made into something useful if you could just skin more than 1 Arctic fur every couple months. Then again, at 60 total Borean Leathers before you can actually buy one, you'll still have to put in some overtime with the skinning knife.Overall, though, this is one more nice little thing for professionals (and any tanks or physical DPS upgrading to tier 9 or tier 10 legs) to get excited about in Patch 3.3.Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.
Breakfast Topic: Your favorite routes
Vince sent us this tip from Just my Two Copper: a quick Cobalt circuit in case you're a high level miner and want to spend a few minutes making some ingame money. Truth is, everyone has this various routes that they take in game, whether they be your recent run of dailies, a gathering run (I used to know the Swamp of Sorrows by heart when I was leveling up Herbalism, and even now I've got my own places to go in Sholazar to pick up as much leather as possible), or even a run around to see if you can find some of the rare spawns (the Time-Lost Proto Drake or maybe the spirit beast).What are some of your favorite, most ingrained (in your mind), or most profitable runs in game? They aren't really a trade secret -- AHs tend to change from server to server, and even if a certain ore or item comes into demand, it's usually because no one wants to farm it, not because it's not out there to find. But we do get set in our patterns -- what are some of yours?
The best place to get Frostweave
We've already heard about some great spots for Leather and Chilled Meat farming in Northrend, but Just My Two Copper found a great Frostweave spot -- just to the right of Freya's Avatar over in Sholazar Basin, there's a spawning spot for Bonescythe Ravagers that just can't be cleared out no matter how fast you are. I went over there myself, and Markco is right: every time you down all of these guys, another one pops up, and they drop Frostweave and greens pretty often (in about five minutes of farming, I picked up about 10 Frostweave -- and I'm not even a Tailor -- and a lockbox, too).He says nerf is incoming, and I believe it: there's supposed to be a little battle there going on between Freya's flowers and the undead, and that's probably why they all keep popping up so quickly. But until Blizzard decides to spoil the fun, if you need Frostweave, that appears to be the place to go.
Farming Chilled Meat and Borean Leather in Northrend
We've already posted about just how useful Chilled Meats are -- they're a staple of the cooking dailies, so chefs and anyone else trying to earn Dalaran cooking awards are after plenty of them. And reader ScytheNoire sent us a good tip on how to pick up not only a ton of Chilled Meats, but stock up on Borean Leather if you're a skinner, too: lowering the Reef Bull population on Scalawag Point, just off the coast of Howling Fjord. Because those guys are needed for the daily quest, the respawn rate is great on them, and within a half hour, says ScytheNoire, he picked up a couple stacks of Chilled Meat and the same of Borean Leather (with a few Arctic Furs in there as well). Just stay away from the folks trying to do their dailies and you can rack up a nice bunch of animal products.As many players will tell you, Sholazar Basin is another great place to get both Chilled Meat and Leather, given that most of the zone is beasts (thanks to the Nesingwary quests around there). I've found that the best place over there is the Hardknuckle Foragers and Chargers near the Frenzyheart Tribe's camp -- the Foragers are neutral and go down fast, and will give Chilled Meat and Leather at a high rate, close to one per kill each.For leather, obviously the Jormungar Cave in Storm Peaks is another good place to pick up skins, not only from the worms, which will also give you scales, but from the worgs they kill as well. Unfortunately, I haven't yet found any mobs that will consistently drop more than one leather (the Black Morass was such a goldmine for Knothide), so it's slow going no matter where you are, but there are a few good spots to hit up if, like me, you're getting Leatherworking and Cooking up to speed.
Poaching for skins
I have to thank you, other players on my realm. If it wasn't for you, I probably wouldn't have reached 450 Skinning already. Yes, the garbage of dead mobs that you leave behind becomes my profit -- when you leave that worg corpse or the dead drakonid behind, I'm all too happy to run over, skin it, and clean up that little mess you've made, while sticking a little gold in my pocket as well. Matthew is right there with me -- he calls it poaching, though we're both referring not to stealing, but to simply skinning the leftover mobs of all those players before us.Truth be told, I probably poached more than ever down in the mines of Netherwing Ledge -- there were always players killing down there, and what they didn't skin, I did, both for the quest skins and for my own Knothide. But in the expansion, things are even better -- everywhere I go, there are fields of leftover mobs, and even when someone is able to kill a mob before I get there, I hover over them to pick up the skin afterwards.Matthew has put together a list of all the great places to pick up extra skins -- I'll agree that Coldarra is full of poaching options right now, as is Kamagua on the other side of the continent. Grizzly Hills, also, is not only full of creatures to skin, but lots of leftover corpses as people quest across the zone (though odds are that if you keep up on skinning, you'll be 450 by then anyway). Think of it as a service -- we're the garbagemen of the realms, cleaning up your kills so the next can spawn and the circle of loot can go on.
Scattered Shots: Normal dungeon gear for Hunters in Wrath of the Lich King
Welcome to Scattered Shots, the weekly Hunter column where we could really use a plane to head back to Shattrath and pick up more ammo since we haven't bummed a teleport to Dalaran yet. So. You've breezed past the early 70s. You've checked out the reputation gear for Hunters, and now you're ready to grind. So you've picked up your tabard, and you realize that you still have a question left to answer: Which dungeon should I run? What dungeon has the gear I need to get suited up and ready to run Heroics? Scattered Shots is here to help. We're going to look at some of the best pre-Heroic drops for Hunters in Wrath, and hopefully give you some idea of what way to go when you look for your next dungeon, or at least what drops to cross your fingers for. This guide will focus mostly on normal dungeon drops, although where a quest reward, reputation reward, or relatively easy to craft crafted item is a good option for the slot, we'll highlight it as well. By the end of this guide, the Hunter that didn't quite finish their Karazhan runs during Burning Crusade should hopefully have an idea of where to get a good outlay of gear to prepare them for heroics, and eventually for Naxxramas itself.Good luck on the drops, and good luck winning the rolls over those enhancement shamans!
