Pet Bombling and Lil' Smoky

Here is the link for the PTR patch notes. According to the notes, the day patch 3.3.3 hits live servers, "The Pet Bombling and Lil' Smoky non-combat pets are no longer Bind-on-Pickup."

I want my share of gold from the pet collectors, so I leveled my death knight's engineering skill yesterday. I also stopped by Gnomeregan to pick up the schematics. Gnomeregan can be found just outside of Ironforge, and is easily soloable by a level 60 death knight. You may need to run the instance multiple times before both schematics drop for you (it took me two runs). The Pet Bombling schematic drops from the end boss, and the Lil' Smoky schematic drops from these mobs. Note that the schematics are bind on pickup and that you must have engineering as one of your professions for them to drop. It's worth mentioning that though the pets require engineering skill of 200 to craft, one of their ingredients, Fused Wiring, can only be learned at skill level 275. Engineers might be able to make some gold selling Fused Wiring. The people buying will be mostly pet collectors looking to buy the mats so they can bypass market price and get their pets for the cost of a tip, and maybe a few engineers who only leveled to 200. Fused Wiring is easy to make in bulk though, so expect high prices until people catch on, and then a crash. Jewelcrafters might be able to sell Delicate Copper Wire, while miners should be stocking up on Mithril, Truesilver, Iron, and Gold to sell after the patch.  Because it wasn't very expensive on my server, I bought up all the gold on the auction house... gyrochronatoms shouldn't be easy for my competitors to make unless they planned ahead like me.  I bought all the cheap truesilver too.

Once you have obtained your schematics, you'll want to gather enough materials to craft lots of pets. It seems that the bottleneck as far as the ingredients is going to be Heart of Fire for the Pet Bombling and Core of Earth for Lil' Smoky. Even if you aren't an engineer, you may find it worth your while to stock up on these before the patch. I'm guessing the prices will skyrocket shortly after patch day. Your first stop should be the auction house, where you should hopefully be able to pick up a few of these for cheap. After that, you'll have to either ask in the trade channel or farm them yourself. A good place to farm Heart of Fire is from the flame type monsters which can be found all around the center of Un'Goro Crater. If nobody else is there, the flame monsters should respawn faster than you can kill them, so no downtime. Core of Earth can be farmed from Desert Rumblers in the far northwest corner of Silithus. There arent enough Desert Rumblers to be able to farm without downtime, but the respawn rate is decent and it's the best place I've found. Be warned, the drop rate for both Heart of Fire and Core of Earth is about 5%, so you should expect to kill about 20 monsters for each drop.

A final note, any pets created before the patch will be soulbound to the character who crafts them, and there is no way of knowing if existing pets will unbind on patch day. It's possible that only pets which are crafted after the patch will be bind on equip. With this in mind, I strongly recommend that engineers hoping to cash in on this change to their profession gather the needed materials before patch day, and wait until the patch hits before actually crafting the pets.