I spent a good chunk of time just getting to 295. But now it seems I can’t get it any higher. I can no longer smelt to gain more, smelt thorium bars is grayed out.
Now that I got Cataclysm mining from my trainer, the original 295 I had is now replaced by a bar that gets to the maximum of 75. So now I can’t see my skill level anymore.
Professions have gotton a bit confusing. There must be something I’m overlooking.
PRETTY sure to get max mining in Vanilla you had to grind Rich Thorium nodes, which were green, so it took a while to get a skill point.
I don’t recall if you could smelt anything but I would take a look at that as well.
I found my skill in the mining menu,
so I can see my skill. (For a moment there I thought the bar had been replaced)
A few things. As you have seen, they separate the skill into each expac now. It will show only the most recent tier that you have learned on your Professions tab, but you can open the Mining book to see the rest.
Each ore has two skills associated with it, one for Mining it and one for Smelting. generally you will still get Mining skill ups well after Smelting goes grey.
However, you are correct that even Rich Thorium won’t give you any more after 295. It seems like an unnecessary extra difficulty but they added a lot of those when they split up the professions into tiers. To get the last 5 points you can learn to smelt Dark Iron Ore, which requires you to complete a quest inside Blackrock Depths, and then mine it inside Molten Core. It is a lot of busy work but not difficult for a higher level character.
Alternatively if you had not already learned Cata mining you could use the monthly +5 skill reward at the Darkmoon Faire. Unfortunately that always applies to the highest non-maxed tier so right now it will boost your Cata skill. If you maxed that out without learning any other tiers you could use next month’s to raise the Classic tier.
All that said, there isn’t any real advantage to maxing out the skill. I know, we all hate unfilled bars. But maxing this one won’t unlock anything or let you do anything better than you can at 295/300. So you could just leave it until one day you get around to it, or a Faire comes up when you have all the other tiers maxed.
Thank you both for the advice, I’m gonna try getting that quest.
Unrelated to anything in this post – Sorry OP and good luck with your levels! Darkmoon Faire is helpful for this! I keep seeing you everywhere on the forums now since you commented on my Tmog a while ago! >:O
Ah yes, that’s what it was. Been so long since I’d done it I’d forgotten.
It can be done
I swapped over to my HM Tauren. They get a +15 to their mining skill. His sits at 315. I don’t remember exactly how I did it. I did hit up the DMF for the last 5 points. Mined a lot of Rich Thorium veins.
There is a guide here:
TOTALLY NOT A LINKhttps://www.wow-professions.com/guides/vanilla-mining-leveling
Had to add some garbage text there because, ya know, trust. Remove TOTALLY NOT A LINK for the link.