Professions ( PROF123 )

Learn about World of Warcraft professions, including gathering and crafting, and how they impact the economy. Get tips on choosing the best ones.

To use a profession, click the spellbook icon and then the icon of choice. You can hot bar professions, potions, and other seldom-used items to the right by adding action bars through the options menu.

You can have any of two main professions, and everyone can have the same sub-professions.

Main Professions:

• Gathering Professions (Mats):
• Herbalism - collect herbs from plants.
• Mining - pick away at deposits.
• Skinning - rip the flesh from dead animals.
• Producing Professions:
• Alchemy - turn plants into potions. Grants at least one extra buff from each.
• Blacksmithing - create weapons and armor from ore.
• Enchanting - disenchant rare items into things to buff other items. Tailoring is the best second profession as most of the green items can be made purely from killing humanoids.
• Engineering - make things out of other things, mainly ore. Mostly a "fun" and extra ability profession, not a huge boost to stats.
• Leatherworking - turn skins into leather armor, mail armor later. Also some armor kits to enhance all armor.
• Tailoring - make clothes out of cloths found off dead humanoids. To a lesser degree, you need some leathers.
• Jewelcrafting - turn gems into stuff. Burning Crusade needed. Requires ore.
• Inscription - create glyphs and buff scrolls. The least popular but probably the most profitable. Requires herbs.

Sub-Professions (Everyone can have):

• Fishing - gather fish. Takes a long time to level.
• Cooking - make food for buffs and health.
• First Aid - the most useful and also most skippable one, since some classes can heal and it costs cloth which can be sold.
• Riding - go faster, a simple and essential element of this game. Going faster equals less time spent playing.

Gathering and producing professions often go together. It would be very difficult to take on Alchemy and Engineering without a way to get the materials (mats) for either, unless you find them in small quantities from dead enemies or purchase them at the auction house or trades. Keep in mind that mats are always expensive on average, with the rare cheap auction for high-demand mats.

Enchanters and Tailors have no true collecting counterpart. Enchanters can disenchant any green or higher items found like anyone else. Tailoring requires none of the gathering professions, so those two solo professions are made for each other, as you can sew up items to disenchant!

First Aid is the only truly useful sub-profession. Fishing and Cooking require a lot of secondary effort, and First Aid can be the only way some classes can heal themselves consistently, even in end-game boss fights. A little bit of health can be the difference between death and staying alive long enough for a heal.

Hunters really must take on Fishing and Cooking to feed their pet, unless you don't mind it living off of found/bought foods.

Early on, it's cheap to add professions, so you can pick up a few, see what they require, and drop them for whatever you may want instead. It's also possible, early on, to add gathering professions and sell on the Auction House (AH) for silver, and then later drop for something more serious.

Late in the professions, all of them will require the others to advance. This does not mean you can't advance or need to take them up, it just means you'll need to rely on other players, the auction house, or your guild to help you acquire what you need.

All professions will not naturally advance no matter how much time you spend leveling in Outland; it will usually take staying in Outland a little longer to advance these professions to 350, the minimum to pick up Northrend recipes. So you can consider doing quests for a bit in Outland, or just hunt down mats, but again, you won't level as fast as you would in Northrend.

Jewelcrafting has interesting benefits at level 80. At level 80, you can spend 10000 honor points for gems from the Jewelcrafting quartermaster in Stormwind (SW) or Orgrimmar (Org). Aside from Jewelcrafting, everyone can buy these and sell them in the AH, just keep in mind some are much more profitable than others.

Warning: The latest patch replaced the rare gems with new epics, which is instant gold.

As of patch 3.3, frozen orbs are easy to get, so getting to 450 isn't that hard.