In another post, I mention that two gathering professions can make you some sick amounts of gold. But that typically it’s either Herb/Skinning or Mining/Skinning because of the lack of ability to track both Herbs and Minerals at the same time.

However, in combination with the Routes, GatherMate and GatherMate_Data, Herb/Mining becomes more viable.

Aside from the super-nice routing feature (see the other post on that!), it also displays spawn points on your mini-map. You can filter which spawn points you want to see, and you can scale how big they appear on the mini-map. The way it works is that when they are outside of the range that you could detect it, the mini-map displays an icon that represents the specific herb/ore. Once it’s in range, it turns into an empty circle, IF you are detecting that type of spawn…in other words if you have Find Herbs on, ore spawn points will always display the ore pictures, but herb pictures will turn into empty circles when you’re in range to detect the yellow dot. If you see empty circles, and they stay empty for a split second, then you know that nothing is there and you can move on.

So here’s what I do now (now that I dropped Tailoring and re-leveled Herbalism to go with my mining)…

I have a macro:

/castsequence Find Herbs, Find Minerals

I have that bound to a key. Clicking that key will toggle tracking herbs and ore every time I click it. (There is a global cooldown of 1 second, but that’s ok.)

Next, I setup my route to track the most-valuable herb and the most-valuable ore in a given zone. For example, in Shadowmoon Valley, I make a route for Nightmare Vine and Adamantite Ore. This path will cover most of the map. If I miss a few spawnpoints of Felweed or Fel Iron Ore, I’ll live. The route will go near enough to many of them anyway for me to track them.

As I’m flying around following the route, I look on my minimap to see what kind of spawn points are around. Then I hit my macro key to switch the tracking back and forth between ore and herbs. But because of Cartographer I know WHICH one I should be tracking. For example, if there’s a stretch of route that has herbs and no ore, I can tell because of what is being displayed in the minimap, and I don’t need to switch. If I’m coming to a cluster of spawn points that has both, I’ll keep one on (Herbs, for example), and when I enter that cluster, the herbs turn to circles…THEN I’ll click the macro and switch to Ore, and check those empty circles.

It’s tough to describe, but if you have either Herbalism or Mining and use Routes you’ll see what I mean.

If you need help getting your Herbalism or Mining profession up to speed quickly, probably the best guide I’ve seen for speed leveling is Penn’s.

Here’s a video tutorial I created to show how to setup Routes: