Old School Farming: Gold, Greens, Pets and Mounts

Part One: Introduction

What do I farm to get lots of greens?

If you're anything like me, I tend to get bored just farming the same thing day in and day out, and also have a lot of mounts to still work on. So i developed a route that would allow me to hit a variety of different dungeons and raids, work on my mount and pet collection and still get a great amount of greens, money and cloth.

As you may have guessed, this guide is more an example of how to more efficiently farm old school content by providing a list of possible places to farm, the fastest order to complete them in, and hopefully in the future, an average time, gold per run and greens/cloth/valuable items collected. Right now, I am going to show you the instances and raids that I personally farm each week, but I will try to expand this to include all raids with rare pets and mounts. This guide will only include places that you can solo though, so anything else you won't see here.

Disclaimer: This is not the most efficient way of making money. This is a way to get a bit more variety in Auction House greens and make it a bit more fun and self-rewarding.

Also, since I currently only have a horde at level 90, I apologize to my alliance friends. You can use this as a cheat sheet on things to run, but I'm afraid the route will be vastly different for you.

Part Two: Dungeons and Raids

If you already have a route, or are only interested in a few places, this is cheat sheet for dungeons and raids I'll be routing out, as well as a list of additional places to farm (depending on your needs).

Mounts

• Vortex Pinnacle
• Zul'Gurub
• Tempest Keep,

Pets

• Molten Core
• Blackwing Lair
• Karazan
• Serpentshrine Cavern
• Tempest Keep
• Ruins/Temple of Ahn'Qiraj(mounts, great transmog gear, pets)

Optional Places

• Ulduar(mounts)
• Zul'Aman (mount/pet)
• Naxxramas(pets)
• Grim Batol (excellent place to farm cata greens check out Sophistical's guide)
• Fireland's (mounts, not sure if solo'able)
• ICC(mounts, again not sure if solo'able)
• Stratholme(mount)
• Stonecore(mount)
• The Obsidian Sanctum 25 (mount)
• Utgarde Keep

Part Three: The Route

Now we're going to get to the actual route part. For the initial version of this guide, I will be showing you how to efficiently farm: Vortex Pinnacle, Ruins/Temple of Ahn'Qiraj, Onyxia, Zul'Gurub, Karazan, Molten Core, Blackwing Lair, Serpentshrine Cavern and Tempest Keep in that order. The total travel time for these instances is approximately 29 min 45 seconds with 310% flight speed. I cannot tell you how long it takes to run each instance as that depends on the class, role and item level, but in the future I may try to give you the times as a feral druid tank.

Step 1: Vortex Pinnacle (~2 minutes)
The starting point for this guide will be Orgrimmar. From here, take the portal to Uldum and fly southeast to Vortex Pinnacle. For this mount you may farm it to your heart's content on either normal difficulty, or run it once on heroic. This is a great place to get Volatile Air from (which sell like hot cakes) but does not have the highest gold per hour.

Step 2: Ahn'Qiraj (~3 minutes)
From Vortex Pinnacle, you will be flying Northwest to the Temple/Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. If you are just looking for pets (and some particularly rare enchanting recipes) just run Temple. Ruins is a great place to farm trash for some very high priced transmog gear. If you're interested in this, check out Toxxer's guide.

Step 3: Onyxia (~4 minutes)
After running AQ, fly Northeast to Onyxia. This is a pretty quick instance and has a chance to drop the annoyingly low drop rate Ony mount. Make sure you have some ranged abilities as she does have a flight phase.

Step 4: Zul'Gurub (~4 minutes)
In order to go from Onyxia to Zul'Gurub, we will be taking the boat in Ratchet. Fly North to Ratchet from Onyxia (~2 minutes) and take the boat to Stranglethorn. There may be some additional wait time depending on when the boat arrives. The 4 minute travel time was with a boat that arrived as I was flying up, so I had minimal wait time. Once you arrive in Booty Bay, fly North to Zul'Gurub. Zul'Gurub offers two different mounts, so make sure to kill High Priestess Kilnara and Bloodlord Mandokir

Step 5: Karazan (~1 minute)
From Zul'Gurub, fly North and a hair East to Karazan. I highly recommend running Karazan once a week because it is a fantastic place for greens, pets and a chance at a mount. It also has some great enchanting recipes and is extremely easy to complete at level 90. For the mount, make sure to killAttumen/Midnight, for pets, kill Terestian Illhoof, Opera (Little Red Riding Hood), The Curator and Prince Malchezzar. As you can see, Kara is a great place for your pet collection and will also put a decent chunk of gold in your pocket.

Step 6: Blackwing Lair and Molten Core (~2 minutes)
Molten Core and Blackwing Lair offer a combined 6 pets and are fairly straightforward runs. In Molten Core, there are some epic boe's that have a decent sell price on the auction house, so you can either skip the trash (its easy to run around without aggro'ing) or you can pull and kill everything.

Step 7: Serpentshrine Cavern (~8 minutes)
After you have completed Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, hearth back to Orgrimmar and take the portal to the Blasted Lands. (Alternately, if your hearthstone is set to Summer's Rest, you can take the portal to Shattrath). From here, you will be flying West(or North if you're in Shattrath) to Serpentshrine Cavern. SSC is a huge raid instance so if you are only in it for pets to sell, you can kill Lady Vashj first (she has a chance to drop a very rare pet--it sells for ~4k on my server). Other bosses to kill for pets are:Hydross the Unstable and Morogrim Tidewalker.

Step 8: Tempest Keep (~5 minutes)
Tempest Keep is going to be the last instance for this guide and it is definitely a great place to end,with every boss having the chance to drop a pet or mount all fights are pretty easy with the exception of Kael'thas. For this fight, I would suggest looking up some youtube videos for your class before trying the fight.

However, the main thing you need to make sure you do is equip the Staff of Disintegration and make sure to right click it for the buff once equipped. Also make sure you don't have any pets summoned or he will mind control you and the fight will reset.