You may know that when Cataclysm removed weapon/armorsmithing from the game, it also removed a lot of the patterns that went with each. One of the coolest looking ones was the Phantom Blade, and as some may or may not know, if you don't have the pattern, it was added back to the game in the 4.3 patch.
WARNING: If you want to farm this pattern it's pretty easy to farm but BEWARE the pattern is BoP so you'll have to do it on your Blacksmith.
Alright the link to the pattern is here. You may be looking at the drop rates thinking ".02% drop rate? That's insane!" This is very much not the case. This item was added back to WoW in Patch 4.3, and this .02% drop rate is calcualted on all the drops from those adds (over 115,000) since vanilla WoW, which haven't dropped the pattern until now. For a more accurate drop rate, the WoW site lists the drop rate as "Very Low", which is in the range of 1-3% (as compared to extremely low which is <1%). For reference another item that has a drop rate of "Very Low" is Ashes of Al'ar which Wowhead correctly calculates, and has listed at a 1.7% drop rate. Luckily, unlike Ashes, the Plans for the Phantom Blade are farmable off of multiple creatures that can be reset.
Alright the link to the pattern is here. You may be looking at the drop rates thinking ".02% drop rate? That's insane!" This is very much not the case. This item was added back to WoW in Patch 4.3, and this .02% drop rate is calcualted on all the drops from those adds (over 115,000) since vanilla WoW, which haven't dropped the pattern until now. For a more accurate drop rate, the WoW site lists the drop rate as "Very Low", which is in the range of 1-3% (as compared to extremely low which is <1%). For reference another item that has a drop rate of "Very Low" is Ashes of Al'ar which Wowhead correctly calculates, and has listed at a 1.7% drop rate. Luckily, unlike Ashes, the Plans for the Phantom Blade are farmable off of multiple creatures that can be reset.
Farming the Phantom
To get this pattern you have to kill either Shrieking or Wailing Banshees in Stratholme's The Gauntlet, which the entrance to is located in Western Plaguelands here (don't do what I did at first and go to the regular entrance)
Once inside, you can follow this path, and you just kill the banshees along the path (dotted line is no banshees, but necessary).
Now there is one caveat to this method. Anyone doing this method is subject to Blizzard's 5 instances per hour lockout. At 85, you could probably do 12 of these per hour, but it WILL lock you out after 5. I did this, and it ended up taking me 12 runs. On average it should take less, but it is possible to take more than 12. Again you may have to take a break, but luckily queuing for random dungeons/raid finder doesn't count towards this total so in your downtime you can do randoms.
Crafting/Selling
Like the Icy Cloak Post I wrote a while ago, this has look alikes that are available from vendors. Your main audience is those who will see this item and say "Hey I want that, and I'd be willing to pay that price for it". You're not going to get someone who looks it up on Wowhead and says "lol look at all these lookalikes! I'm not paying for that one!", unless they're deadset on the color, so price it accordingly! I just really like having these cool looking craftables on my alts, make 3-5 of them, throw them in the bank, and if they sell, great! If not, reduce the price after a few weeks, keep trying. I had a lot of fun farming and crafting this, and I hope you do too! If you do try doing this, leave a comment about your experience getting it, I'd love to hear from you!
Cheers,
Phat Lewts
