Tradeskill Design in Wrath
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Heartbourne on Monday, June 22, 2009 - 17 Comments Tags: alchemy, blacksmithing, enginneering, herbalism, inscription, jewelcrafting, mining, patch 3.0, profession, tailoring
Heartbourne on Monday, June 22, 2009 - 17 Comments Tags: alchemy, blacksmithing, enginneering, herbalism, inscription, jewelcrafting, mining, patch 3.0, profession, tailoring 
When patch 3.0 hit, I dropped Engineering for Herbalism to prepare for Wrath. I thought it would better complement my Alchemy, and raw materials like herbs were likely to be in high demand as people level their professions. I thought that the Lifeblood ability would far outweigh the benefits of Engineering as far as usefulness goes, as the Engineering item enhancements do not stack.Months later, I'm wondering if I made the correct choice. Lifeblood is barely useful in PvE; healers don't expect me to cast a small heal over time and the health I regenerate in that period is unlikely to save me before a healer gets to me. It doesn't provide me with any stats. It is questionably useful in PvP, and I've been eying other professions like Jewelcrafting to provide me with more usefulness in raiding and arena.
Blizzard has very much begun to treat professions like they treat classes: diverse, but all useful. Hardcore raiders will spend thousands of gold to squeeze out another dozen or so DPS, and Blizzard wants players to choose the professions they enjoy, not the profession that they should choose in order to best perform in content. All the different professions have comparable buffs to each class in both PvP and PvE situations, often in the form of bonus stats. These often take the form of special item enhancements, like Enchanter's ring enchants or Scribe's shoulder inscriptions, or passive abilities like Toughness. To me, Lifeblood is not nearly on the same footing. It has its uses in some situations, but having to use another action bar slot or hotkey as opposed to doing an enchant or getting a passive enhancement for a lesser effect gives me a sour opinion of Herbalism's PvE/PvP usability.
As far as money making, some professions have some ability to make money by doing things you normally do while questing and exploring and an ability to make money by spending time on just the profession. Usually, this is in the form of gathering and crafting. For example, engineers can craft epic BoE items and collect from gas clouds they encounter in the world. Miners can mine from nodes that they find while out and about and can smelt ore into bars. Tailors can craft BoE items and have the Northern Cloth Scavenging to find more cloth while killing mobs. Either way, most professions are designed to be able to be lucrative both passively while roaming in the world or by investing time into them. Professions that satisfy this are Enchanting, Engineering, Tailoring, and Mining. I consider these professions to be much more appealing than the others. With the carpets from tailoring, I just may pick up Tailoring on my main (rogue).
Its interesting to note that these professions are generally considered not to have a direct "complement", like Alchemy/Herbalism or Skinning/Leatherworking. For now, if Frost Lotuses weren't selling for 30 gold or more on my server, I'd be dropping Herbalism for something else right now, because it gives few benefits compared to other professions. The only benefit I would miss is being able to track herbs, which helps immensely for some of the Cooking dailies.
As far as effort required, some professions are very easy and some are very difficult. Inscription requires you to stock a lot of herbs, pigments, and inks, and also requires you to sell a wide variety of glyphs to make the same amount of money as the other professions. Enchanting can be difficult to market - many players have an enchanter in their guild or someone they know rather than check the AH or shout in trade. Inscription seems very unappealing on a main for me for this reason and that its hard to "passively" make money. I think this needs work in the long run.
What professions did you choose? Do you ever switch professions, and why?
Reader Comments (17)
While leveling in up to 80 I was Alch/Herb, but with my bad luck at finding herbs i couldnt reach level the skill fast enough. As a rogue, I made the decision to drop them both and pick up Skin/LW. Skinning is really nice due to the extra crit and can be used to make money buy selling Arctic Fur, which I dont do. Instead all my money comes from leatherworking. During my heroic spree I gain many Frozen Orbs and heroism badges to turn into frozen orbs where I can then make Armor Kits which would sell any from 200g to 250g (sometimes 500g) which helped me get my epic flying and 2 dual specs as well as getting back up to 5000g.
As I am now rolling a druid alt I decided to pick up enchant/tailor for the buffs in later levels. Very good combo to use together since you can de the tailor items for enchant mats and cloth is easy to get. At low levels I was making decent money selling all the mats which became usless as leveled my professions
I picked tailoring and set up a bag shop. Ten mins of work in outlands = 1 stack on cloth = 1 netherweave bag = lots of gold in the AH.
Although i will admit that the northern cloth scavenging is really bugging me tho. Now i have over 100 bolts of frostweave and nothing to bloody make it on cos everything in tailoring at the top end is rubbish. (except for the whispcloak.)
Lifeblood is a good complement to Gift of the Naaru. When you would pop that, you can pop lifeblood too.
If you don't have gift of the naaru... well then pop it as soon as you enter melee (or AoE) combat. Treat it as a damage reducer, not a HoT.
I have a jewelcraft now and I've been enjoying it on a low level alt. Between mining and that I make a heck of a lot of gold selling the mats I don't need anymore. I'm looking forward to the high end jewels I can make. :)
With the instability in the markets (at least on my server) I have found that picking a profession for money making purposes is a bit pointless, unless of course you are a strict gatherer. What I have decided to do is RP my professions in a way. My main is a plate wearer so I mine and BS, seemed obvious. Add to that the fact that he is a GM I figured it would be nice to craft armor for lowbie guild members. Rogue is a skinner/LW. Priest, herbs, tailoring. It's kind of silly to make epic gear to sell with your crafter when all someone has to do is buy the mats at half the price you are selling the item for and tip a crafter a few beans to make it for them.
I am an Arcane Mage atm. My guild does Ulduar every week, and Im looking for the best professions. Im an Alch+Herb atm, but I want the extra spl power. I have the Hodir shoulder enchant, so should I go for JC+Ench? Any help/suggestions would be appreciated. Ty!
I've been leveling a new druid with Inscription and I've found the usefulness of scrolls and money-making of glyphs to be very good!
Skin/LW FTW!! Have had them since the beginning.
bonus to crit from skinning and LW gives me the best wrist (+114 AP) and leg (+75 AP & +22 crit) in the game. Descent money making when I take time to farm or make items for peeps.
I've had Alchemy/Herbalism ever since I started playing World of Warcraft, and I plan on sticking with them.
I have jewelcrafting and blacksmithing in preparation for epic gems going in my shiny exclusive sockets.
But to get there I pretty much maxxed out mining 50 times (if it were possible).
I levelled jewelcrafting alongside it, then got all the mats for blacksmithing and put them on an alt, created a guild and shoved em in it's guild bank.
I'd like to add that my death knight has mining and skinning to make gold. It's not easy to make gold with two crafting professions, well, not as easy. Least IMO.
Right now I am a Tailor/Eng. I am going to drop Eng because I don't have a miner and I don't have the money to keep the profession up. I haven't even leveled the profession since I maxed it out back in TBC.
right now im skinning and inscription. skinning so i can get the extra crit and sell the furs and inscription so i can make a lot of money. i buy all the mats for making darkmoon card of the north and sell the cards. i did have to put a ton of money into getting it to 450 but it paid off because it only costs about 100g on my server to make a card and if that card turns out to be a noble i sell it for 400-900g. it paid off very fast for me but i did get lucky making all the noble cards i did so it is a gamble
Lifeblood sucks. I dropped Herbalism for Jewelcrafting and am glad I did.
Tailoring and Enchanting go hand in hand. :D The biggest problem with the combo is no unique gathering skills to make some money selling raw materials. So, it's nice to have on a secondary character, or one that's max level so you can just get gold from Daily quests. However, you can always use cloth drops to make items to DE and sell the DE mats... but more then likely you'll need to DE everything you can get your hands on just to keep the skill leveled up with you.
I always hated crafting pre-WotLK, the items you could make were easy to upgrade after a few dungeon runs, to top off the skill usually required dungeon drops, and getting certain recipes too. Basically, I could just get two gathering skills, and sell the raw mats and make decent money and buy better gear (or the BoE crafted gear) then what I could've made if I leveled up the crafting skill. Not only that, I'd have far more gold with the two gathering skills.
Tailoring though, was one craft that was relatively worth it, I mean, you level it up and make bags with the tons of spare cloth you have after maxing out First Aid. Always useful.
However, with WotLK, they've given us Rep recipe's with solo rep grinds, and daily quests for tokens to get recipes, plus excellent Epic gear right from the trainer, and bonus stats from unique crafted only items. It's a good time to be a crafter I think.
On my Shaman, whom I'm finishing leveling up now, I was level 52ish, and had Mining and Enchanting (Mining was easy money after BC released when I started this character.) I'm level 78 now, and before I dropped Mining, I farmed a bunch of Azeroth ore and used it to level up Engineering.
Engineering was always one of those "mostly for fun" crafting skills, but now with the stat bonuses offered by the enchants, plus the abilities offered, it's good to see Engineering get such loving and be so useful.
I do have a Level 80 that can mine though, so, for me, that made a non-mining Engineer a viable alternative. I was able to farm a significant portion of the ore needed with my miner, and had a ton of other mats saved up that proved to be quite useful as well (had lots of Primals and motes.)
Right now though, my Shaman is enjoying Engineering quite a lot and I'm using the Nitro Boot enchant and Parachute Cloak enchant abilities a lot. I also like that the Gnomish Lightning Generator isn't on the global cooldown and can really add to my spike damage, or help me throw out a bit more while on the move. The Nitro Boots are also nice to get to Max range of my spells very quickly.
JC and mining is a great money making combo. You can sell the ore on the AH for other BS and JC's looking to level their profession. Titanium and Titansteel bars sell well also. The down side is JC is expensive to lvl and you really don't make money until you hit +350 in the skill.
Everyone is always looking for a JC to cut a gem for them so you can stand around the bank and charge for your services to cut/craft items.
I have enough alts so I have all of the professions covered. My main lvl 80 are my gathers and provide mats for the alts I am lvling. It is great to have a JC craft a bunch of cheap necklaces and send them over to the enchanter to DE.
For all you gathers, download the mod "gatherer" from curse.com. You can link it with everyone in your guild so when they find an herb or node, it will alert you and mark it on your map. This way you can narrow your search pattern to the places that are most productive.
Let's see... Tailor/alch on the healer. Skinning/JC on the DPS. Mining/Herbing on the tank. yes, all toons are maxed out, and only JC is not maxed of the professions. Then I have an enchanter (just enough to be able to disenchant everything)/ scribe in the works.
Let's just say I like professions :)
Of these, the ones I have the most use of right now is Alchemy - everyone and their mother need flasks and potions.
Other than that I have maxed out cooking/fishing on the Healer as well -. which is probably the number one most useful thing, both for me and my raidingbuddies.
Interesting article. Thanks for the tips!