Help me Thori-um Kenobi. You're my only hope.

Alternate title: "O Thormio, Thormio, whereore fart thou Thormio?", but really, this is a video game blog so Star Wars > Shakespeare. And, yes, I know its spelled wrong, but really, this is my blog so farts >> accurate literary quotes.

Long story short, Thorium was the only tedious phase of leveling mining from 1-300 over the past three days.

Long story medium, Eastern Plaguelands sux balls, even for a level 60. I was enjoying running around unfettered through all the zones, but EPL required walking on foot, killing the mobs sitting between me and potential mineral deposits. That's slow. I hate slow. Searing Gorge comes highly recommended for Thorium, but the damn Zombie invasion was occurring there all night, so the place was being totally farmed dry by damn level 70's on their damn instant-cast flying brooms. Un'goro is another option for Thorium seekers. My love/hate relationship with Un'goro was in hate mode.

Long story long. My little explanation yesterday of how wonderfully balanced things were between herbalism and mining came to a close at herbalism 300 and mining 260. From that point forward, the balance was totally askew.

Just cruising the zones listed above, mining slowly crept to 270 which did happily open the door for Rich Thorium. Smelting 31 Thoriums resulted in a grand total of 3 skill points, which is just silly.

At the same time, Mount Silversage, one of my old school favorites, was a'rockin, and herbalism shot up to 320's during this same time.

Bah.

Thorium was the only part of this whole process that caused pain.

But, the pain's over, and my lil dual gathering economic powerhouse is back in Outlands, farming proper gatherables.

Actually, I haven't made a dime off this yet, because I'm saving all the mats for professions for all the little babies, but the whole experience reinforced for me just how much I enjoy herbalism and mining. With Herb/Mine, its like Christmas every day, with all these little nodes waiting for you to open them. Just fly around, doing whatever you'd be doing otherwise, toggle Find Minerals / Find Herbs, and sing Gathering Carols.

Skinning still feels like work. When you need skins, or when you want to do the daily quest, fly to Nagrand, farm the bejesus out of the Clefthoven. Not very Christmas-like. And LW is stupid, and has been stupid for the past 6 months, other than the fact that I get to play drums every 2 minutes during boss fights, which would be much cooler if the animation actually had a massive drum summon and sit on the ground with magical drum sticks wailing away for 30 seconds. Still hoping for LW to be something useful while leveling to 80, or if not, then at least while gearing up at level cap in prep for WotLK raids.

But I'm back in the Dual-Gathering Saddle. Gotta figure out what broke about my little gold tracker chart when patch 3.0.2 rolled out, plus figure a way to have it aggregate the savings from toons on three different accounts, since all the babies are sucking Amava dry. But I digress.