Blood Elf Bandit Masks

Since the first 10-19 Warsong Gulch Bracket was introduced in 2005, twinking low-level alts has become one of the favorite past-times of advanced WoW players around the world. There are many different items to equip to your level 19 twink and enchants galore to turn your feeble little rogue into a hardened, death-dealing machine.

One of my favorite twink items to hit the 10-19 Warsong Gulch scene is the Blood Elf Bandit Mask (WowEcon | Wowhead). The good news for us gold farmers is that it is a favorite item for many other twinks and role-players as well and it can be very difficult to farm … unless you know where and how to look for it.

Unlike the Red Defias Mask, which is bind-on-pickup and only wearable by rogues, the Blood Elf Bandit Mask is wearable at level 5, is non-bindable and can be worn by any class. It is dropped by only one type of mob, the Blood Elf Bandit, who is located on the Draenei starting zone Azuremyst Isle (Wowhead | WowWiki).

A BIG bonus of these masks being non-bindable is that enchanting one with a libram is enormously easy because your main or a high-level friend can carry it with him/her and then simply send it to your twink through the mail.

Farming these masks is made difficult by the fact that there is only ever one Blood Elf Bandit spawned on Azuremyst Isle at a time. Fortunately while his spawn pattern is apparently random, he only spawns in certain locations. There are roughly seven of these locations (or 10 locs, depending on who you ask) and they are all just off the road and in cover such as tall grass, a bush or under a tree. I recommend you use a map mod like Cartographer or MetaMap to pin down his locations as you find them.

A really good map of spawn points is here. While I have not seen him at all of these locs, I have personally found him many times at the following:

• 27,52
• 36,21
• 52,17
• 42,63

But finding him is not impossible, in fact it can be quite easy. First, you will want to use your main character who should be high level. The key is traveling speed – once I got his spawns down, I was able to farm two of these masks in perhaps 15-20 minutes largely because I rode my epic mount from loc to loc. So basically, if you do not have at a minimum the level 20 shaman traveling form I would not try to farm this. If you have an epic mount – you’re full of go.

Even knowing every exact spawn location, our bandit friend can still take a few minutes to actually find because he is standing in stealth mode. Combine that with not knowing which of those points he will spawn at and you have a recipe for a really long night. However hunters and druids have an advantage here with their abilities to track humanoids. This is probably the easiest method of actually finding him and will make for the quickest farming. The rest of us have to use a simple macro to find him quickly:

/target blood elf bandit

When you get near his spawn point, simply spam this macro and if he is there his target frame will immediately pop up for you. Then you can pause a moment to look for that lovely red disk on the ground that shows where he is standing.

Also, because the blood elf bandit is located on Azuremyst Isle, a secluded Alliance starting zone, if you are Horde and want to farm these you will need to sneak over on the Draenei boat located at the far west end of the dock connected to Auberdine in Darkshore (Wowhead |WowWiki). If you are low level or want to avoid confrontation, I recommend swimming beneath the boat, drowning yourself, and then resurrecting on the boat before it leaves port.

So, yeah, do I need to mention people pay *a lot* for these masks? Well, they do. I’ve seen them vary between 10-30 gold – especially at the neutral Goblin auction houses. Right now, WowEcon is putting their global Alliance value value at almost 11.5 gold. If you go through the trouble to put a libram enchantment on it then you can very well sell it for much more.

If you are farming these but not getting the gold you think they should go for, you should study up on Valkor’s Gold-Making Guide. It has 100+ pages full of reference lists and tutorials like how to most effectively use the Auctioneer and Bottom Feeder addons.