Crafting Introductions
Do you hate running through dungeons for hours? Love the OPEN WORLD? Want to turn the local Bandit population into a myth? Boy oh boy, there's great news! In Ascension, you can level up with just Crafting and Gathering. Sure you can mix some killing in there, but why not smell the acorns, swim the rivers. Trying a very hard challenge, such as the legendary hardcore Nightmare Ironman Resolve? Want to just do a challenge to flex on your friends you don't have to do anything but smack a tree? Do you just love pain and professions? Level up from 1-60, from the start using your daily grind picking up rocks and plants.
Hi everyone! My names August. I am a very old retail player, I've played since I was 6, which is crazy to think about. I've learned a lot from retail to various private servers. I've done a lot of the crafting challenges and others, just well crafting. From the Nightmare Absolute Resolve, to the Nightmare Resolute, and some. I am here to give you insights on the best races; locations; and professions for your future challenge runs. Sure they might take a lot of time, but their safe routes! This worked for my last season, but it does get repetitive and boring, but remember, its as much commitment as running the content. So please take it with a grain of salt if you don't like slow paced adventures.
RACES AND STARTING LOCATIONS
The best way to run most crafting zones, is to look at their content and reward. I've always found Horde to struggle to meet the Alliance, Elwynn offering one of the best starting zones for Humans, in addition to rich and fast respawn nodes. The highlights being mining; herbalism; and tailoring. Sure you can mix and match, but these three professions are practically handed to you in very neat routes, and on top of that-there's usually not that much competition. So Humans are typically my go to for challenges where I know I want to craft! And while it's relatively changed, our two three harvesting points, and three crafting points should relatively be the same as last season. This might change in the future; but for now let's ride or die!
If you do play Horde; you have two zones that really stand out, I've gone to EVERY zone starting wise, both Alliance and Horde, the biggest investment to your time will be Undercity and thus Tirisfall, and if you were high enough level, Silverpine, but SIlverpine is ironically a safer zone for Alliance then Horde due to Dalaran.
HARVESTING
Cloth
-Linen, oh Linen
Ignore all other clothes honestly
Herbalism The BIG 5
-Earthroot **
-Swiftthistle **
-Peacebloom
-Silverleaf
-Briarthorn
Mining
-SMELT SMELT SMELT SMELT SMELT
Copper my beloved, and oh so shiny Rough Stone, and some bronze. Bronze is nice.`
CRAFTING
There are a couple of key elements here we need to first establish. We will need Linen, and while we can use it for tailoring in our early level hops, it will go here, and exclusively mining to make this work. You'll make enough money for parts but if you have a realm; personal; etc bank item, make it in use.
Engineering (Mining Technically as well!)
Rough Blasting Powder *
Copper Bars *****
Copper Bolts
Copper Tubes
COPPER GUN LOTS OF GUNS
Repeat, $$$
Tailoring: Tailoring is our easy and beginners way to $$$ and XP, ride it to level 15, while you harvest your billions of ore. Convert that linen into bolts, then into cloaks, repeat and rinse till roughly there. Once then we're going to freeze it. Rough Dynamite gives good XP, so we'll sort it over to engineering so it'll save us some time level scaling.
Alchemy: The reality here falls upon it as a filler, it offers good experience with specific potions, but it's primary a filler between profession drops to offload herbs, plus it gives you a decent level range of skill thus giving you a decent set of buffs and healing potions to fall upon up till 30-40, unless you've hard harvested. Potions regarding Earthroot, Swiftthistle, and Briarthorn, tend to be the biggest xp feeders, but they also usually depend on zone. So use it as a filler.
ROUTES
Oh beloved map.
I don't think I can link resources here, but these are really easy to follow.
Northshire, from the start of the gate to the mine, and around the edges. Pretty much you do a circle like Ungoru OOH AH AH
The big other one is literally around the edge of the map of Elywnn, stopping at Duskwood, keep going, then curving into the mountain range area up near the mines and goldshire, and riding that to Stormwind, and around. That's it. That's literally it.
So here's the proper overview of what you can do, as dumb down as this guide is, I am always open to answer questions at Augustsheep, and guide players, as well as I'll probably soon during this season do...a lot of challenges; again or new ones- just crafting.
BREAKDOWN
Alliance < Elywnn Forest < Human
For our first 5 levels, we're going to settle down for a spell focus. If you're playing a hardcore challenge, I suggest taking Mana-forged Barrier (MFB), and a Pet, I usually went Undead, the Undead starting pet is really solid, if you have good tank pets or a Spider, go with those. DO NOT TAKE DRAGONS, trust me. If you aren't, good for you! All you want to do is get a good setup of spells. Normally I go Frost Bolt, with a Pet, and a Dot. This allows me to speed clear and control situations a bit better, just makes it all the more safe. Dying loses you time, and in hardcore well- don't die! Sell your starting gear, if you have the Fel warchest, and any cosmetic sets, use these. This will give you a lot of space to start with and a decent armor to work with till you start picking up loot. Lootbot if you have it for pet, if not well you need to loot for some time, but don't worry. Go to the book of artisans, learn herbalism and mining. When you have enough learn Cooking; Woodcutting, and First Aid. First Aid will be useful for downtime, pick up some basic bandages, otherwise you can ignore it, just helps save mana and time resting. Cooking will be used for meat, and etc, but we will ignore fishing. WOODCUTTING IS ONLY USED IF ITS ON THE WAY. DO NOT USE IT IF YOU ARE IN A ZONE WITHOUT CHAINING. If your looping, its normally better to ignore woodcutting due to its unfortunate series of nerfs as it stands. Now we're going to do the first set of quests, clear the entire Elwynn quest line, during this time make sure to turn on your tracking for herbalism and ores. Copper is your priority. So once you have finished your first loop around doing the quest, deposit if you can, make sure you do not smelt any copper. If you go into grey mining copper, drop it, and pick back up Mining, same for Herbalism and herbs. (Though you shouldn't) Only drop if you go into gray for earthroot, ideally you want Earthroot, as it's good experience and boosts your off-profession. Now we're going to use tailoring to boost ourselves and killing defias bandits. Once we hit a comfortable 15-20, we're going to go back to that loop. Once we have hit level 25, Now's the great time. You should have easily betwen 200-500 copper, based on how busy the zone is. So this will be our first 'crafting session' Go to Goldshire, set your hearth, if you can buy a mount or already have one, good get training. Now go to the Engineering District within Stormwind; that'd be the Dwarven District. Find a funny little engineer vendor, buy a ton of wooden stocks. You ideally want to leave with 4-5 stacks, so make sure you're vendoring greens, you should have at this time around 2-6 gold roughly minimally, if not more. Hearth back, run to the Blacksmith, now start smelting your ores, ANY time your copper bar goes grey, and you can NOT make Bronze or Tin, stop and drop. Don't afk, you need to be active, trust me. It's a LOT of experience you'll miss. If you have any Malchite, make sure you save it, it'll be useful later. Once you're done with all your lovely smelting, drop Mining. Pick up Engineering. Now comes the boring 20 minute crafting fest, yahaha. IF you have any scrolls, or crafting gear, get ready to use it, sort your inventory out first before you do. You want as much space as possible. Don't be afraid to inventory dump into a bank. Now! Set aside half your copper ingots. Craft rough blasting powder till you get bolts, immediately stop, and make as MANY BOLTS as you can. For our first set, we want to even it out. So if you have 60 copper, that means 40 goes into tubes, 20 into bolts. But ideally you want to have a lot of bolts and tubes. Bolts are better to start because you don't need extra materials. Either way, once you have greyed out or finished you'll repeat it, till you can get to tubes. Now make as many tubes as you can. If you have guns still not greyed out, make till grey, drop, sell guns. This is what you'll end up repeating. When your first starting off, ideally you want to split copper, as remember you need 50 to get tubes, but you also need a LOT of Tubes and Bolts.
So the crafting order and repeat's gonna look like this
SPLIT 50 / 50 (2x for Tubes so account for that as it's '50')
Rough Blasting Powder (BPP)
Handful of Copper Bolts (HCB)
Copper Tube (CT)
Rough Boomstick (RB)
BPP<HCB<CT<RB<Drop<REPEAT
And that's it, test out what you can do with your alchemy in between, if you have around 60-100 of each, and then repeat. It took me around 12-15 ish game hours (Around 28-or something hours of real time) to finish the Nightmare Absolute Resolve challenge, with about 3 days, some challenges were faster, some people had better results then me, but I roughly spent 7- 5 - 3 hours doing it. It will roughly take you 2-3 days, but it could be accomplished in one, but I don't recommend it.
Horde < Tirisfall < Tauren ideally but I always ran BELF, Tauren is simply for a minmax stat. Follow my Alliance breakdown for what you want to do, just alter it with my route and starting guide for you!
So for your route, you'll clear the undead zone's quests and get to 15. DO NOT. Leave Tirisfall, do not go to the Barrens, do not go to the Orgimmar. Orgimmar is only for if you exclusively have the HS, which I did. IT WILL cost you time otherwise. Pick up any and all Undercity quests, but do not go past that, Do Deathknell, Agaman, and Brill, it's pretty good experience and safe, be careful with any boss quests however. Generally ignore them, some of the Undead mobs are nasty if your on hardcore, if you aren't, take them, even if Ironman, it's really easy. Deathknell's route, is simply around the edges, follow it up, then chase the mountain and road to the farm and tower, run it along the coastal cliff, around Agaman, and back. Garrens Haunt can be done, but it's dependent on your challenges and safe keeping, I died there twice on my Absolute Resolve because I was a idiot, and I died a LOT in the Barrens. Ashenvale is a great zone, but I learned the hardway if you ain' farming Stranglekelp, you ain't gonna have a good time. So we're going to balance ourselves around Tirisfall. You essentially due the same concept as Elwynn, but do not follow to Undercity, you go around as soon as the cliffs end, to the next. Generally there are some nodes in the middle mountainy areas and stuff, but I only did them when I ran up towards Brill and curved down to the Mountains. Repeat, rinse. Since there are a lot of good experience quests, assuming you can gain the experience, ride them out for the levels, once you sorta ding them and finish, then back to Undercity with your hearth, buy all your materials, run it back to Brill or Craft there, repeat. I generally found it to be 4-5 more hours of time sink when I did one Horde run crafting (Although this was a Trial run with a Orc who did Fishing and WC before its nerf.) But do what you want with that knowledge. I strongly recommend you do it on Alliance.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or walkthroughs needed, PLEASE PLEASE feel free to reach out to me. I don't proclaim to be the 'best' crafter on Ascension, but I feel very reputable and experienced, a lot of people back in the last Season came to me on how to do it, but a lot of people also found their own improved ways! Don't be afraid to ask others or invent your own methods, there's always ALWAYS a hidden experience trick, and time saver. Sometimes you find it on your first othertimes the 3rd or 5th.
Discord = Augustsheep
Hi everyone! My names August. I am a very old retail player, I've played since I was 6, which is crazy to think about. I've learned a lot from retail to various private servers. I've done a lot of the crafting challenges and others, just well crafting. From the Nightmare Absolute Resolve, to the Nightmare Resolute, and some. I am here to give you insights on the best races; locations; and professions for your future challenge runs. Sure they might take a lot of time, but their safe routes! This worked for my last season, but it does get repetitive and boring, but remember, its as much commitment as running the content. So please take it with a grain of salt if you don't like slow paced adventures.
RACES AND STARTING LOCATIONS
The best way to run most crafting zones, is to look at their content and reward. I've always found Horde to struggle to meet the Alliance, Elwynn offering one of the best starting zones for Humans, in addition to rich and fast respawn nodes. The highlights being mining; herbalism; and tailoring. Sure you can mix and match, but these three professions are practically handed to you in very neat routes, and on top of that-there's usually not that much competition. So Humans are typically my go to for challenges where I know I want to craft! And while it's relatively changed, our two three harvesting points, and three crafting points should relatively be the same as last season. This might change in the future; but for now let's ride or die!
If you do play Horde; you have two zones that really stand out, I've gone to EVERY zone starting wise, both Alliance and Horde, the biggest investment to your time will be Undercity and thus Tirisfall, and if you were high enough level, Silverpine, but SIlverpine is ironically a safer zone for Alliance then Horde due to Dalaran.
HARVESTING
Cloth
-Linen, oh Linen
Ignore all other clothes honestly
Herbalism The BIG 5
-Earthroot **
-Swiftthistle **
-Peacebloom
-Silverleaf
-Briarthorn
Mining
-SMELT SMELT SMELT SMELT SMELT
Copper my beloved, and oh so shiny Rough Stone, and some bronze. Bronze is nice.`
CRAFTING
There are a couple of key elements here we need to first establish. We will need Linen, and while we can use it for tailoring in our early level hops, it will go here, and exclusively mining to make this work. You'll make enough money for parts but if you have a realm; personal; etc bank item, make it in use.
Engineering (Mining Technically as well!)
Rough Blasting Powder *
Copper Bars *****
Copper Bolts
Copper Tubes
COPPER GUN LOTS OF GUNS
Repeat, $$$
Tailoring: Tailoring is our easy and beginners way to $$$ and XP, ride it to level 15, while you harvest your billions of ore. Convert that linen into bolts, then into cloaks, repeat and rinse till roughly there. Once then we're going to freeze it. Rough Dynamite gives good XP, so we'll sort it over to engineering so it'll save us some time level scaling.
Alchemy: The reality here falls upon it as a filler, it offers good experience with specific potions, but it's primary a filler between profession drops to offload herbs, plus it gives you a decent level range of skill thus giving you a decent set of buffs and healing potions to fall upon up till 30-40, unless you've hard harvested. Potions regarding Earthroot, Swiftthistle, and Briarthorn, tend to be the biggest xp feeders, but they also usually depend on zone. So use it as a filler.
ROUTES
Oh beloved map.
I don't think I can link resources here, but these are really easy to follow.
Northshire, from the start of the gate to the mine, and around the edges. Pretty much you do a circle like Ungoru OOH AH AH
The big other one is literally around the edge of the map of Elywnn, stopping at Duskwood, keep going, then curving into the mountain range area up near the mines and goldshire, and riding that to Stormwind, and around. That's it. That's literally it.
So here's the proper overview of what you can do, as dumb down as this guide is, I am always open to answer questions at Augustsheep, and guide players, as well as I'll probably soon during this season do...a lot of challenges; again or new ones- just crafting.
BREAKDOWN
Alliance < Elywnn Forest < Human
For our first 5 levels, we're going to settle down for a spell focus. If you're playing a hardcore challenge, I suggest taking Mana-forged Barrier (MFB), and a Pet, I usually went Undead, the Undead starting pet is really solid, if you have good tank pets or a Spider, go with those. DO NOT TAKE DRAGONS, trust me. If you aren't, good for you! All you want to do is get a good setup of spells. Normally I go Frost Bolt, with a Pet, and a Dot. This allows me to speed clear and control situations a bit better, just makes it all the more safe. Dying loses you time, and in hardcore well- don't die! Sell your starting gear, if you have the Fel warchest, and any cosmetic sets, use these. This will give you a lot of space to start with and a decent armor to work with till you start picking up loot. Lootbot if you have it for pet, if not well you need to loot for some time, but don't worry. Go to the book of artisans, learn herbalism and mining. When you have enough learn Cooking; Woodcutting, and First Aid. First Aid will be useful for downtime, pick up some basic bandages, otherwise you can ignore it, just helps save mana and time resting. Cooking will be used for meat, and etc, but we will ignore fishing. WOODCUTTING IS ONLY USED IF ITS ON THE WAY. DO NOT USE IT IF YOU ARE IN A ZONE WITHOUT CHAINING. If your looping, its normally better to ignore woodcutting due to its unfortunate series of nerfs as it stands. Now we're going to do the first set of quests, clear the entire Elwynn quest line, during this time make sure to turn on your tracking for herbalism and ores. Copper is your priority. So once you have finished your first loop around doing the quest, deposit if you can, make sure you do not smelt any copper. If you go into grey mining copper, drop it, and pick back up Mining, same for Herbalism and herbs. (Though you shouldn't) Only drop if you go into gray for earthroot, ideally you want Earthroot, as it's good experience and boosts your off-profession. Now we're going to use tailoring to boost ourselves and killing defias bandits. Once we hit a comfortable 15-20, we're going to go back to that loop. Once we have hit level 25, Now's the great time. You should have easily betwen 200-500 copper, based on how busy the zone is. So this will be our first 'crafting session' Go to Goldshire, set your hearth, if you can buy a mount or already have one, good get training. Now go to the Engineering District within Stormwind; that'd be the Dwarven District. Find a funny little engineer vendor, buy a ton of wooden stocks. You ideally want to leave with 4-5 stacks, so make sure you're vendoring greens, you should have at this time around 2-6 gold roughly minimally, if not more. Hearth back, run to the Blacksmith, now start smelting your ores, ANY time your copper bar goes grey, and you can NOT make Bronze or Tin, stop and drop. Don't afk, you need to be active, trust me. It's a LOT of experience you'll miss. If you have any Malchite, make sure you save it, it'll be useful later. Once you're done with all your lovely smelting, drop Mining. Pick up Engineering. Now comes the boring 20 minute crafting fest, yahaha. IF you have any scrolls, or crafting gear, get ready to use it, sort your inventory out first before you do. You want as much space as possible. Don't be afraid to inventory dump into a bank. Now! Set aside half your copper ingots. Craft rough blasting powder till you get bolts, immediately stop, and make as MANY BOLTS as you can. For our first set, we want to even it out. So if you have 60 copper, that means 40 goes into tubes, 20 into bolts. But ideally you want to have a lot of bolts and tubes. Bolts are better to start because you don't need extra materials. Either way, once you have greyed out or finished you'll repeat it, till you can get to tubes. Now make as many tubes as you can. If you have guns still not greyed out, make till grey, drop, sell guns. This is what you'll end up repeating. When your first starting off, ideally you want to split copper, as remember you need 50 to get tubes, but you also need a LOT of Tubes and Bolts.
So the crafting order and repeat's gonna look like this
SPLIT 50 / 50 (2x for Tubes so account for that as it's '50')
Rough Blasting Powder (BPP)
Handful of Copper Bolts (HCB)
Copper Tube (CT)
Rough Boomstick (RB)
BPP<HCB<CT<RB<Drop<REPEAT
And that's it, test out what you can do with your alchemy in between, if you have around 60-100 of each, and then repeat. It took me around 12-15 ish game hours (Around 28-or something hours of real time) to finish the Nightmare Absolute Resolve challenge, with about 3 days, some challenges were faster, some people had better results then me, but I roughly spent 7- 5 - 3 hours doing it. It will roughly take you 2-3 days, but it could be accomplished in one, but I don't recommend it.
Horde < Tirisfall < Tauren ideally but I always ran BELF, Tauren is simply for a minmax stat. Follow my Alliance breakdown for what you want to do, just alter it with my route and starting guide for you!
So for your route, you'll clear the undead zone's quests and get to 15. DO NOT. Leave Tirisfall, do not go to the Barrens, do not go to the Orgimmar. Orgimmar is only for if you exclusively have the HS, which I did. IT WILL cost you time otherwise. Pick up any and all Undercity quests, but do not go past that, Do Deathknell, Agaman, and Brill, it's pretty good experience and safe, be careful with any boss quests however. Generally ignore them, some of the Undead mobs are nasty if your on hardcore, if you aren't, take them, even if Ironman, it's really easy. Deathknell's route, is simply around the edges, follow it up, then chase the mountain and road to the farm and tower, run it along the coastal cliff, around Agaman, and back. Garrens Haunt can be done, but it's dependent on your challenges and safe keeping, I died there twice on my Absolute Resolve because I was a idiot, and I died a LOT in the Barrens. Ashenvale is a great zone, but I learned the hardway if you ain' farming Stranglekelp, you ain't gonna have a good time. So we're going to balance ourselves around Tirisfall. You essentially due the same concept as Elwynn, but do not follow to Undercity, you go around as soon as the cliffs end, to the next. Generally there are some nodes in the middle mountainy areas and stuff, but I only did them when I ran up towards Brill and curved down to the Mountains. Repeat, rinse. Since there are a lot of good experience quests, assuming you can gain the experience, ride them out for the levels, once you sorta ding them and finish, then back to Undercity with your hearth, buy all your materials, run it back to Brill or Craft there, repeat. I generally found it to be 4-5 more hours of time sink when I did one Horde run crafting (Although this was a Trial run with a Orc who did Fishing and WC before its nerf.) But do what you want with that knowledge. I strongly recommend you do it on Alliance.
If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or walkthroughs needed, PLEASE PLEASE feel free to reach out to me. I don't proclaim to be the 'best' crafter on Ascension, but I feel very reputable and experienced, a lot of people back in the last Season came to me on how to do it, but a lot of people also found their own improved ways! Don't be afraid to ask others or invent your own methods, there's always ALWAYS a hidden experience trick, and time saver. Sometimes you find it on your first othertimes the 3rd or 5th.
Discord = Augustsheep