The War Within – Professions

If you’ve been reading my blog for virtually any amount of time, you know that I get a ridiculous amount of pleasure out of making gold. At one point, I was at like 7-8 million gold? Buying WoW tokens for myself (and my brother) can be expensive, though, so I found myself at something like 700k about 6 weeks ago. I am now approaching 1.1 million gold. And every single copper of that gold was hard-earned. With it being the dog days of the expansion, plus with MOP Remix active, it is damn hard to make any money. I’ve gotten my ~400k through quests, mostly the dragon racing world quests on numerous alts, and very little through the Auction House. And that makes me a #sadmoose.

So I am going into The War Within aiming to be super organized with my characters and my professions. How organized? Well, I’m glad you asked! Here’s a public (view-only) spreadsheet of my toons and professions. That links to the spreadsheet, feel free to make a copy and tailor it (hah, get it? Tailor?!) to your own needs. And here’s an image.

It’s not final yet. Like I don’t know that I need 4 herbalists and 3 miners, frankly, much less two scribes and three alchemists. Let’s break it down a bit.

Kurn is, as always, going to stick with skinning and leatherworking. The couple of times I dropped skinning for mining, I eventually picked up skinning again. I am not going to drop skinning again, even though you no longer have to go through allllllll the prior expansions again to get to max level.

We’ll come back to Madrana in a minute, because she’s pretty much the outlier.

My shammy (not the baby shammy, that’s a whole other shammy!), has generally been the farm character for Madrana’s alchemy and jewelcrafting since, uh, 2007? 2008? And, I think it was back in Cataclysm, when you were able to gain experience by herbing or mining, I was like this is the ideal way to level a character I don’t know anything about. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown accustomed to my shammy. I spent a lot of time being enhancement/resto and, in more recent years, elemental/resto. But I spend almost all my time on the character just farming herbs and ore. And, because of that, I get experience and I get to level and it’s grand.

Now, because of the experience one gets while gathering, I have decided that I want most of my characters to have at least one gathering profession that doesn’t require killing anything — so herbalism and mining. This explains my evoker (which I still don’t know how to play), my warrior (which I can kind of play but don’t like to play), and my warlock (no idea beyond incinerate and chaos bolt, tbh).

But I sort of know how to play a mage and I know how to play my “grandbaby” paladin (I’ll explain in a minute) and I know how to play my baby shammy and I don’t super know how to play a priest… but I know how to play Madrana.

So because I know how to play Madrana, she can just heal her way to 80 or whatever. I could theoretically do the same with the priest. I just go disc and bubble things, right? hahaha!

And I could do the same with my mage, but DPS queues are still a thing, so I thought, no, I’ll make him a miner, which is currently is. But I also wanted him to be a tailor. So that’s how I started Dragonflight with him.

As to the grandbaby paladin, this is my Dark Iron Dwarf paladin I rolled on Mists of Pandaria Remix. It’s not my “baby” paladin who is, I believe, still sitting on Skywall. I rolled the character with the goal for him to be a miner and a blacksmith, so I could drop blacksmithing on my warlock and pick up mining to feed his engineering. And I could absolutely heal on the grandbaby paladin… but honestly, am I going to? Probably not. So mining to level makes sense.

Then we come to the baby shammy. This is another character I rolled on MOP Remix. She is 65 presently and is destroying things on Timeless Isle (sidenote: DANG, that frog poison still sucks!!!). She is also…

…

… a goblin.

LET ME BE CLEAR, I STILL HATE THE HORDE. It makes me feel sick to turn in quests to Garrosh and to kill Alliance soldiers. I loathe the Horde with every fibre of my being.

So why did I roll a Horde toon?

I rolled a goblin for the racial. Goblins receive 20% off normal vendor prices when the vendor is associated with a rep. It’s the same discount you’d receive at exalted with the rep in question. And goblins get it as baseline. Note that it doesn’t mean you get exalted automatically or that you get access to exalted goods or other things behind a reputation barrier. It just means you get the 20% discount.

So I rolled a goblin (and would have done so if it was Alliance too) for this discount. Do you know how much a single Draconic Vial costs? FIVE GOLD! Ridiculous!!! A single Primal Flux? FIFTEEN GOLD. HIGHWAY ROBBERY!!! Is it the cost of doing “business”? Yes. But eff that noise. With Warbands coming in about a week (July 23), you will have the ability to share a Warband bank with your other toons — even cross-faction ones. So maybe my warlock needs like 100 Primal Flux. That’s 1500 gold. But with the goblin? 1200 gold. It’s not necessarily worth it for 5-10 reagents, but when you scale it up? Hell yes, it’s worth it. And if I can level a toon easily (and holy COW, is it easy!!!), why not do it? (If I feel like it, I may roll an Alliance druid as well. We’ll see.)

So my goblin will not be doing much apart from buying stuff for my Alliance toons, but if I want to, she’ll be able to level via something. I am not convinced I want her to do herbalism and alchemy, but is it ever bad to have a lot of herbs? Is it ever bad to have “too many” toons who can do transmutes? My thinking is no.

Still, I have beta access, so I’m going to check in on some of the things each profession can do before I finalize everything here. I may ditch inscription on the warrior and keep alchemy and get herbalism instead of the other way around. We’ll see!

And speaking of beta, have you seen my latest YouTube videos? Here’s a link to the playlist of my War Within Beta vids.

So, tell me, what are you planning to do with your professions and characters in TWW?