How to Ingest Minerals and influence secondary stats — a guide to Earthen food in World of Warcraft

Since Tuesday’s patch when Earthen officially unlocked for players who had completed the storyline, there’s been a bit of mystery around our new mineral friends and how their racial — Ingest Minerals — actually works. As it didn’t work on the beta, testing for Ingest Minerals couldn’t truly happen until the expansion went live and the race unlocked. So today I, as our resident Earthen, will be going over how the racial works for you and what you need to know.

Earthen, having not succumbed to the Curse of Flesh, are unable to eat normal human food. While this seems like great flavor (pun intended) along with some of the other things we have seen from NPCs around Dornogal, this has created a problem: how do they eat food and get raid buffs (or just restore health/mana)? Enter their racial: Ingest Minerals.

Ingest Minerals allows for eating the following gems for the following buffs:

• Amber: Stamina
• Emerald: Haste
• Onyx: Mastery
• Ruby: Critical Strike
• Sapphire: Versatility

Split-stat gems will only give the primary buff (so a +180 Haste/+60 Crit gem will only give Haste).

The biggest complaint prior to release was that the racial appeared to have an issue: while the Well Fed buff was permanent, it doesn’t give main stat like Feast of the Divine Day, but only secondary stats like The Sushi Special. Additionally, Earthen couldn’t eat mage food to recover health and stamina, which looked like it might be a problem. These issues were compounded over the past few days as the Earthen were unlocked and it came to light that their racial was giving only +383 Secondary Stat. This was a problem — this meant that being an Earthen was a DPS loss compared to playing any other race.

Thankfully, Blizzard was listening and announced the following yesterday, September 4:

I can happily announce that this hotfix has gone live and ingesting a gem now gives you +562 of a Secondary Stat. They’ve also solved the issue of not being able to eat mage food: Belga, an NPC that is listed as a “Flavored Gems” vendor, sells three recipes — Crunchy Rock Candy, Spicy Rubies, and Sour Topaz Bites — which can now be ingested by Earthen. Crunchy Rock Candy now acts as mage food for Earthen and can stack up to 200, so make sure you keep a few stacks in your bags for emergency eating! Spicy Rubies are a very cheap way to get the +Critical Strike buff, while Sour Topaz Bites currently only give health and mana back with no additional bonuses.

As a final note: you do not need rank 3 gems at all, as the rank of the gem doesn’t change the stat buff you get. Do yourself a favor and buy whatever is cheapest on the auction house if you’re not a Jewelcrafter (and make sure to check the split-stat gems too to see if they’re cheaper!) because you’re getting the same benefit regardless.