The upcoming patch is buffing Mining.

When you mine a deposit, you’ll get all of your ores and any crystallized elements in a single hit.  ‘Normal’ deposits seem to provide a minimum of 2 ores and a maximum of 4.  As the notes say, overall ore from a single point should be about the same as previously.  (It can be assumed that ‘Rich’ deposits will provide 5-8 ores.)

In my experience Mining was slightly ahead of Herbalism in terms of gold per hour due to the presence of blue gems. But one of the thing that Herbalism had in its favor was that you only had to ‘pick’ the herbs one time (and would get multiple herbs)…Mining required you to swing 2 – 8 times per node and get one ore per swing.

In theory this should speed up Mining, pushing its advantage over Herbalism slightly higher.