by John Petelle

Created on: January 14, 2010   Last Updated: January 20, 2010

Many World of Warcraft players continue to search for an ethical, fun way to earn gold while playing their favorite MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). The gathering professions, also known as harvesting professions, do exactly that.

There are three primary methods to earning mountains of gold through the gathering professions:
     1)Selling the gathered materials through the Auction House

     2)Selling the gathered materials through the Auction House after refining them
     3)Selling items looted during the harvesting process to vendors and the Auction House

The key foundation to making money through gathering is to maximize what you gather in the shortest amount of time and being able to effectively sell the gathered materials afterward. For World of Warcraft players, there are three character professions which focus on gathering (harvesting) materials in the wilds of Azeroth: Herbalism, Mining and Skinning.

Characters can learn up to two Primary professions, and since all three of the gathering professions are primaries, an early choice will have to be made. To simplify finding the harvest nodes, it is recommended that a character does not select both Herbalism and Mining, since only one of those node types will be displayed on the mini-map at a time. Node placement for herbs and minerals are roughly equal, and both can provide significant income, so the difference between Herbalism and Mining is fairly minimal.

Herbs and minerals are gathered from nodes that spawn semi-randomly across the landscape of Azeroth. The respawn time on nodes varies widely, so while it is possible to sit in an area and watch for a node to come back, the wait can be a long and frustrating. It is more productive to continue moving across the landscape in search of new nodes.

Through a process of exploration and experimentation, your character will be able to find areas of the map that provide a regular circuit of node spawns, and an ideal circuit will have most of the nodes at the start of the circuit path starting to respawn by the time the circuit is finished and will minimize any unnecessary fights along the way. Once raw minerals or herbs have been gathered, characters have to ability to process them into bars (for ore) and pigments (for herbs) to diversify their Auction House listings.

Skinning operates differently from Mining and Herbalism in that it does not rely on spawned nodes, but instead

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