So been a while since I played but I read you can gather anything starting from a skill of 1 to make leveling it up faster by not restricting you to lowbie zones. Before my DK went off to Northrend at level 68 I picked up Herbalism and Mining to make some easy gold harvesting stuff I come across. I just hit level 71 and my combined skills of Herbalism and Mining is FIVE, thats 5 points. Yes the obvious has been done and I am tracking both of them. So why dont I see any nodes when Im out questing? When I first leveled through Northrend back when it went live I remember tripping over nodes there were so many of them. Im flying around places I know they should be and not even seeing them on the ground. In contrast, when I was leveling through Outlands I saw Nodes everywhere. However, that was before I had the skills.