Comments

Comment by Arador

Highest drop rate is from the Raging Fire Souls on the elementals plateau in Nagrand. You need a flying mount to get to them.

Comment by 17690

Also of note, these tend to drop in pairs, so you may end up killing a dozen mobs before seeing one drop; but when they drop you'll more likely get two than one. (of the elementals)

Comment by 20479

thinking ahead really helps, these are fire elementals, bring along some FR gear. at 205FR they arent even doing half as much as normal.

Comment by 17690

While the highest drop rate for Motes is still on the Elemental Plateau, the 2.0.7 patch nerfed the respawn rate on these mobs. Pre-patch there used to be at least one elemental active at all times. Each time you killed one, another one spawned at any of the 20'ish spawn locations. You could easily have 4 or 5 people farming there at once, and not have much downtime. Post-patch, the last mob killed doesn't auto-spawn a new one. This results in substantial downtime with multiple players camping the area. One player alone can farm almost continuously, but 3 or 4 players make grinding here very difficult and slow. This should drive up demand for Primals, and also have the added effect of more PVP to control who gets to farm, but will make farming mroe difficult.

Where before I could farm 4 primals and hour, while two or three other people were also camping the same fire elementals; I now am farming with one other player and both of us are facing downtime as we wait for respawns. And only getting 2.5 - 3 prinals per hour.

Comment by seidule

Vile Fire-Souls (http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22298) do not drop motes at the rate advertised. I suspect the rate looks as high as it does due to the low recorded kill account. I just added about 200 kills to the database so the drop % should go down.

For the record, you can expect Vile Fire-Souls to drop *1* primal per hour -- though you won't have competition for these mobs so it may even out with the elemental plateau unless you have the plateau to yourself.

Comment by 38680

I made a quick outline of where all the best places to farm motes are. Very useful if, like me, you are farming many of them for a recipe of some sort.

Layout:
(Zone) NPC name - Coordinates - % drop rate - link to page at Wowhead

Mote of Air:
(Nagrand) Storming Wind-Ripper - 69.21 (Throne of Elements) - 33.9% - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22310

Mote of Fire:
(Nagrand) Raging Fire-Soul - 69.21 (Throne of Elements) - 34.1 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22311

Mote of Water:
(Terokkar Forest) Crashing Wave-Spirit - 63.17 (North-Western Throne of Elements) - 33.7 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22309

Mote of Earth:
(Blade's Edge Mountains) Sundered Rumbler - (Basically above and all below Area 52) - 18.8 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=18881

Mote of Mana:
(Netherstorm) Mana Wraith - 36.60 and 31.73 (Anywhere above Area 52 and more below. While you're at it, kill the Nether Rays as well, they have just as good of a chance to drop and are mostly in the same area) - 25.8 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=18864

Mote of Life:
(Zangarmarsh) I didn't find any specific place to farm for these because the zone is just rich with them. But I would suggest farming the Bogg/ Starving Bogg Lords and Fungal /Starving Fungal Giants because they are all very close. - The Spawning Glen (SW Zangarmarsh) and East of there is the Quagg Ridge - Very similar drop rates on all 4 mobs that I pointed out, 18.2 to 18.8 - http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22575#00Rmz

Mote of Shadow:
By far the most commonly found mote. This is dropped in almost every zone and can be easily farmed anywhere. But there may be a few exceptional areas just because npcs that drop them are close together, non-elite, and easy to kill. Here's one spot in a few that are exceptional:
(Nagrand) Voidspawn - Again, no specific coords, but all around Oshu'Gun, the bigass crystal SW Nagrand. - 18.4 - http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=17981

Comment by 13727

They can be mined quite often in Fel Iron Deposits, and imo the place with the most mobs is Shadowmoon Valley, in the center where the 'green' stuff is on the map. Even if there is 3 or more people farming them, there is enough to keep respawning. Best to travel on your flying mount, as there is a few mountains around.

4-5 Primals per hour here as a rogue on average, could be more if better at grinding.

Comment by 39962

You should also keep in mind that drop rate depends on the level of the mob.
For instance the Searing Elemental lvl 68 in Blade's Edge Mountains has good droprate. The lvl 67 of it don't seem to drop any Motes of Fire at all.

Comment by 30415

Forge Camp Wrath in Blade's Edge Mountain.

I've yet to bumb into anyone else farming at this spot, minus a couple of times ofcourse - but theres always someone Northeast Blades and Plateau, and this Forge Camp is almost always empty.

There are 9 mobs (Fel Rager, http://www.wowhead.com/?npc=22286 ) and they are located in 3 "packs", draining from a sort of an pylon. You can stand in them and not get attacked before you attack them, so you can easily stand there and grind them without any danger of pulling more than 1 mob or nasty demons & hounds.

Droprate is nice aswell, this is the spot for me until it gets overcrowded as other nice spots in the past. If you're grinding, go check it out =)

Comment by TraX

Have been farming these for quite some time now in NE blade's edge (skald). On 500 kills I got 264 motes = around 53% drop rate

Comment by 58109

As of the latest patch many of the spots have been removed or nerfed. For reference it took me 33 kills on the elemental platuau to make a primal tonight, which is about a 1/3 drop rate. Not too bad, but if it's farmed it is nearly useless.

Comment by 50274

Blizzard has officially made this the most stupid thing to farm in game. I am in a "medium" population server and there are always at least 6 people in the Elemental Plateau and 6 in Skald.

My advice? Farm something else and buy these in the AH.

Comment by 25329

so the bes place to grind them if u do not have a flying mount is? like post-patch?

Comment by fullydead

hey guys i've found the best place is blade's edge not very many people on dark iron and motes sell for 2.5 g also last time i farmed i think it was a hour or 2 but got almost 4 primal and about 3 essence

have fun with the tip....

Comment by fullydead

in less then 10-20 min with getting attcked by ally i got a primal

and a essence

Comment by 68347

Since Motes have a use function, you can drag them to your Action Bar to easily track how many you got while farming.

Comment by 69546

Try Shadowmoon Valley, in the center of map... Good droprate there and not so often farmed

Comment by sirBattleCat

I don't understand why they made it so there are extemely many items that require like a 1000 Primals to make, and so small areas to get it. The best places to get things are places where it feels cramped with 1 or 2 people...farming in itself is bad enough, but having to wait forever and do kill stealing to get kills? :-/

Comment by Bigbadbear

As a miner - you can farm motes of fire pretty easily... just mine Fel Iron Deposits... I get roughly 1, 1.5 primal per play session without even 'hunting' for deposits.
At least gives me a reason to revisit Hellfire Peninsula every now and then ;)

B3

Comment by 87719

I was farming em recently and it was shocking how many times i got ganked at the Elemental Plateu.
So I figured i'd go try somewhere else...
I found a great spot in Blade's Edge at the crystal ridge thingy wich is only accesable by Flying Mount (its the one furthest west) at Forge Camp: Terror there's a bunch of fire elementals that is easy accesable and have a decent drop rate... they usually drop 2 but they occasionally drop 1 (bummer) but noones farming there... and dont mind the infernals and other demons they dont have any aggro rate and can easily be avoided with normal mount.

PS! dont use Flying mount cuz of the flak cannons that shoot u down ASAP

Comment by Alderaan

Another good spot for farming motes of fire is Shadowmoon Valley (center of the map):
details:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=21884#comments

Comment by 59417

I tend to shy away from Elemental Plateau because of the fact that there are usually people there farming it all, and not just for motes of fire.

For motes of fire I tend to go to Skald. There's a lot of elementals there, and they're fairly packed in tight. However, the place is also farmed pretty much 24/7. It's a good thing you only have to kill the imps everyone ignores for that quest from Evergrove, but I digress.

The pro (and con, to some) to Skald is that you can AoE farm this place for the motes. So to you classes who are capable of that, this may be a great place to farm but you're probably going to piss off everyone else around you by farming that way.

As others have mentioned, the Fel Pits in Shadowmoon Valley is another good place. Some might say they're too spread out or there's too much lava, but in my mind that's exactly the point. This fact is a major deterrent for AoE farmers. So, for classes not capable of AoE farming, you can go through this place relatively quickly (especially if you have epic flying).

I am not saying that (insert AoE class here)s should go to Skald and everyone else to the Fel Pits. Just simply some food for thought.

Comment by TheRazielim

Maybe I'm just hallucinating but I think the rate at Skald went down recently (at least last patch, been a while since I needed a Primal Fire for anything really). Spent about an hour at Skald earlier today on my Mage just flattening the Elementals there and got like 1 Primal total, and I know before that would've net me around 3-4. Maybe I just had an afternoon of bad luck, but a few people in guild and other friends said they noticed something similar.

Comment by 112702

I think above poster is right, Skald really seems nerfed. Mobs aren't spawning in the same spots they used to and it seems like forever for them to respawn. Time to find a new spot. x.x

Comment by 48165

Lately on my server (Bronze Dragonflight EU) it seems that every single area that drops motes of fire is farmed to death by bots. It's a sad state of affairs but it seems that the only way to obtain a reasonable amount of them is to farm anything else, sell it, and use the gold to buy Primal Fire on the AH - thereby most likely supporting the people running the bots in the first place.

And this is probably unlikely to change, it appears very much that Blizzard is trying to throttle the in-game economy by limiting the amount of Primals (which are part of almost any useful crafting recipe post-BC) that are obtained on any realm in a given amount of time. Maximum amount of motes per day = total number of mote-dropping mob spawn points * respawn timer. And I don't think Blizzard cares at all whether these are brought into the economy by genuine players or bots.

Comment by Scot

One thing no one has really mentioned is the level difference between Skald and EP. EP is 70-71 and Skald is 67-69 i think. I prefer skald partially because its less farmed and partially because they are so much easier to kill. I tried SMV once, and maybe it was just luck because I didnt stay long, but i got 1 mote out of about 25 kills. Also, as a caster the SMV elementals are the only ones out of the 3 places that will shoot fireballs at you.

Comment by 102766

you can buy these motes from an NPC from stormspire in Netherstorm.... all motes are there.........

Comment by 92167

Does anyone know of an INSTANCE where these may be farmed SOLO by a well-geared 70? The competition over farming mobs is the thing I hate the most about this game, and I would rather farm them solo even if it's fewer drops per hour.

Comment by 106166

Is there any mobs that deal physical damage and drops motes of fire? As in Infernal or something like that? 'cause I'm a Prot Paladin and I can't grind any spelldamage-mobs :S

Comment by Isiah

I'd have to agree with some of the posters here at Wowhead about the making of Primal Fire.
The best place to farm these little pests that's so needed for so many things are by far Skald, as it's fairly easy to be the only one farming these on my server.
So, for people wanting to farm, check out Skald every once in a while, as it's a better droprate per hour compared to the newly nerfed Elemental Plateau.

Comment by sonalita

Since 2.4, by far and away the best place to farm fire motes is off the Incandescent Fel Sparks at the Throne of Kil'jaedon in Hellfire Penninsula. The respawn rate is super fast and I'm getting about a 40 -50 % drop rate (as sometimes they drop 2 per mob)

There is a sweet spot where 3 sparks spawn with no demons nearby. I will let yo discover exactly where ;)

I farmed 20 motes in as many minutes.

Expect fire motes and primals to drop in price on the AH now...

Comment by Vorph

The mobs in Skald in BEM also known to drop them fairly often. Also Angered Nether-Wraith, which only spawns when someone creates a Spellcloth, is guarenteed to drop 4 motes from two different types, and Fire is the one which drops often.

Comment by 163278

The high drop rating is on hellfire ^&*!@ula at 61,18 its 70% chance to drop

Comment by nisx

dunno but after patch 2.4.3 Searing Elemental in BEM droped me 0 motes from 10 kills and after 26kills on Fel Sparks at the Throne of Kil'jaedon in Hellfire i got 1 primal fire only i think they nerfed it alot...

Comment by aphrodytee

I don't know about anyone else but I cannot find the Angered Nether-wraith anywhere outside the Area 52 camp in Netherstorm.

Comment by 410756

Best place to farm these in on the Plateau in Nagrand, you can farm these along with the Air Elementals and they have under a 10 minute respawn time.

Comment by Beikon

I had to get 8 Primal Fires for my turbo charged flying machine so I looked here for good places to farm it.

I can easily say that the Incancdescent Fel Sparks at the Throne of Kil'jaeden in hellfire peninsula are the best mobs to farm motes of fire at level 80. I tried Elemental plateau at first, but after doing 3 aoe pulls I had to wait for over 5 minutes for them to start respawning again ... waste of time.

However, at the throne of Kil'jaeden there will always be fel sparks to kill. It seems like they are forced to respawn if all of them are about to die. The drop rate seemed to be the same as Elemental Plateau but you have 0 downtime (apart from the little flying between each mob). Just bind your flying mount button to a easy to reach key and start killing those fel sparks. I had my flying mount bound to the middle mouse button while I was at this so I could mount easily and fast after each mob.

I got my 8 primal fires in about 20 minutes at the throne of kil'jaeden.

Comment by zenfish

Agree on the Fel Sparks at the Throne of Kil'jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula (61,25 and farther north). However, be sure to go as an herbalist - while getting the 8 primals for my engineering helm I also picked up 46 nightmare vines that grow in the area scattered around the elementals, which are stupidly expensive on my server (frostwolf). Also got 2 greens, 2 essence of fires and a couple of stacks of nethercloth.

Comment by juanvi

Quite good drop rate and they usually appear in pairs so I recommend farming these guys, only counterpart is the spawn rate which is quite slow for 85's who can clean the area in 1 min and have to wait for the respawn for around 5 min.

Comment by 865121

It really depends on what level you are grinding them. If you are lvl 66, like I was, Nagrand and Hellfire North is to troublesome. I accepted a lower droprate in the north of Blade Edge Mountains.
The rate was still quite fair and I needed them to make the adamantite breast for blacksmithing, being between 345 and 350 skill, which is the worst level to manage with BS imho.

Comment by 464052

elemental plateau is terrible,
over 3 min to respawn

Comment by 860460

155 Incandescent Fel Sparks gave me 57 motes of fire. I was farming these to make an ebon shadowbag, which is now a 20 slot bag. Even though netherweave drops like candy, I think getting everything for a frostweave bag is slightly easier.

Comment by 884104

Dealer Najeeb does not sell any of the motes of anything. I flew all the way to Netherstorm and they are not sold by anyone. Just thought I would save others from wasting time.

Comment by jackal187

Another thing that drops motes of fire is fel iron deposits if you are a miner.

Comment by 1170668

Thrown of Kil'Jaeden is by far the best to farm Motes of fire. Got 10 in a bout 40 min at the Elemental Plataeu and 10 in the first 2 min at the Thone

Comment by Nasharak

Went to Throne of KJ today to farm for my Spellfire set. Killed 192 Incadescent Fel Sparks, over ~35 mins. 101 motes and 4 greens.

Comment by Seniade

6.2.2 Throne of Kil'jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula; Incandescent Fel Sparks.

Fast respawns

10mins. & 50 kills

35 Motes of Fire

Comment by Difdi

I can't believe there is no comment at all on these. They look so lonely...

Comment by Magneith

A few other comments here endorse the Throne of Kil'Jaden in Hellfire Peninsula. I've been to all of the places talked about here and that by far is the best place. The Incandescent Fel Sparks are a quest mob, so they respawn fast. I was starting at the eastern edge, moving east>west and then fly back to the start again, 1 cycle: about 3-4 minutes. After you spend a few minutes up there, you will quickly memorise the spawns.

I was 1-shotting these with auto attack on my 90 hunter, so killing these fast shouldn't be an issue, at least 1 every 5 sec on average.

Even with another person farming there for the 20 min of my 1 hr test farm, I still ended up with 196 motes in the hour, +- 5 min, I DCd at one point and didn't start tracking the time properly until a min or so in.

So, that's 19 Primal Fire. A few more minutes would have netted the full 20, surely. Right now on my realm (Saurfang) these are fetching up to 300g each. I was farming them to craft something but decided to see how many I could get.

Having said all that, I was farming between 5 & 6am, but I'm sure other times could yield similar results.

Happy farming.

Comment by Gwytherin

I was farming Motes today, I had 55 Mote of Mana and 33 Mote of Fire in my bag and both of them stopped to dropped.
When I noticed i was not getting any Motes since like 100 mobs, than I turned all Motes I could into Primals and they started to drop again like normal...
This was very strange and I don't know if this can be true but I felt like the hard cap of Motes in your bag are limited to 88.
Please confirm or bust this!

Comment by Nocaco

Throne of Kil'jaeden: 261 Incandescent Fel Sparks killed, 13 Primal Fires acquired. Satisfied.

Comment by 1873182

Note that if you are farming motes (of fire etc) for gold purposes. Then you should definitely farm at Elemental Plateau, specifically Motes of Air as Primal Air sell for over 1k gold these days. Considering Motes of Air drop fairly consistently, this is a good way for making some profit. Happy farming!

Comment by CeldorZ

As to patch 8.1.5, if you are a miner with high enough level of mining, Monte of Fire and Monte of Earth will be mined along with Ores with relatively high rate, such as Fel Iron Ore or Adamantite Ore.

If you are note a miner, then the places to farm for mote of earthe and fire are below, in order from a worse to a better drop:

Throne of the Elements in Nagrand, /way Nagrand:Outland 60 20
Throne of Kil'jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula, /way Hellfire Peninsula:Outland 61 18
Fel Pits in Shadowmoon Valley, /way Shadowmoon Valley:Outland 46.5 51

EDIT. The only issue is that finding Ores in Outland is hard. For some reason the respawn rate is low and there are frequently many miners.

Comment by curledlizard

Hope this helps someone else. Elemental Plateau /way 67.13, 19.98. If I use ranged the drop rate is really low. If I am on top of them I get a drop mote of fire almost every time. Seems to be the same with most of the mote droppers at this level. (takes a bit to respawn so play collect some of the other elementals, play some solitaire, rinse and repeat!

Comment by Greysquall

Just a heads up (10.0, dragonflight), if you decide to mine these make sure you have learned outland mining. Motes don't drop otherwise, and ores drop at a substantially reduced rate (like 1 vs 3 or 4).

Comment by splunge

It took 1 hour to farm 100 motes in the Shadowmoon Valley area on a druid at 6am. Dont forget to mine ores nearby as they can drop motes as well.

Comment by zerei

For anyone farming these in 2026! (For housing decor crafting or whatever.)

As previous comments have noted, they drop just fine from the fire elementals on the Elemental Plateau and the Incandescent Fel Sparks at the Throne of Kil'jaeden in Hellfire Peninsula. However!

The Nagrand elementals are on a fairly long respawn timer
The Incandescent Fel Sparks will stop letting you loot anything from them for an unknown amount of time after clearing them, like they have some built-in anti-loot timer. I have no idea what that's about

So! I would instead recommend the Enraged Fire Spirits around the north, west, and south of the Hand of Gul'dan in Shadowmoon Valley. They drop motes rather consistently and don't have either of the above problems. The lava is annoying because it seems to do percentage health damage rather than a flat amount, so for instance on my hunter I'm actually having to heal my pet to keep it alive while swimming around in it, but a small price to pay. There's also a few fel iron veins around to help supplement the occasional extra few motes and the fel iron itself is also useful for crafting decor.

Hope this helps!

View in 3D Links

Quick Facts

Screenshots

Videos

Mote of Fire

Item Level 11

Use: Turn ten Motes of Fire into Primal Fire.
Crafting Reagent

Max Stack: 1000

Sell Price: 4

Vendor Locations

This item can be purchased in Netherstorm (2) and Terokkar Forest (2).

Guides

Creating a Jeeves for Northrend Engineering Mining Guide Mining for Ores, Gems and Stones. MoP UPDATED

Mote of Fire

Vendor Locations

Guides

Related

Contribute