Burning Steppes AOE Farming

Guest post by: KiKiA

We all know the feeling: Your raid has not started yet, the battleground queue is taking ages or you just feel like trying your luck at some light farming. There are lots of places where you could go to get some current-content materials, but this post is about a nice mid-level location. You will get tons of cloth, a large number of green items and bags full of vendortrash, which all add up if you vendor it during downtime.

Burning Steppes
Onward to battle! ...and loot!

Where to go?
Your targets will be groups of “Blackrock soldiers” and  “Smolderthorn Assassins”, which are perfectly aligned in tight groups and excellent targets for any high level player with AoE damage. With roughly 3000 hp, they should die instantly and give you no problem at all. 

Burning Steppes
The red marked zone is where you will be farming.

Why would I farm here?
One of the reason I like to farm here, is because of the easy pulls. One tick of AoE should kill about 25 mobs at once. With AoE looting getting implemented soon, this means you can loot 25 mobs in only a few seconds. Another reasons is the number of groups. There are three packs on the east side of “Blackrock Stronghold”, and another one further to the east. This gives you at least 100 stationary mobs to kill, while there are also a few patrolling NPC’s.

This location is also home to a rare spawn which you can kill for transmog items. And if you are a rogue, you can pickpocket them for “ Heavy Junkboxes” that sell nice to people who go for the “ Insane in the Membrane” achievement.

Another good thing about these packs is that they respawn after a few moments. Without AoE looting, you should see the first pack respawn about as soon as you have looted the mobs from the last pack. This means almost non-stop farming for the valuables they can drop.

A group of at least 25 monsters, perfectly aligned and waiting to be killed.

So, what do they drop?
With an average of 5 silver per drop, money is not your primary reason for killing these NPC’s. However, they do have a nice chance of dropping cloth and various items. You can expect decent stacks of Mageweave and Runecloth, which should sell nice for everyone. And if Runecloth itself is not worth selling on your realm,you might want to consider this post on Kuja’s Goldmine.

 A quick tour (two full clears of the groups) gained me the following. It might not seem like a lot of loot, but consider that clearing these groups twice takes roughly 5 minutes, if you do your AoE right. Respawn time seems to be the limiting factor, but that gives you time to auto-sell unwanted items to one of the vendors on your Reins of the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth :)

• 8 gold
• 6 gold (vendortrash) 
• 3 green items 
• 30 Runecloth 
• 56 Mageweave cloth