Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to my blog, where I previously said a whole bunch of things were “Future!Kurn’s” problem, and I am now regretting it… 😅
Okay, so let’s talk about The War Within, in general, and then, more specifically, professions.
The War Within
There is just so much to do. I want to clone myself — not my toons, but my actual, physical self, because there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do.
That said, I did take the time afforded me in early access and I dinged 80 on Kurn at some point on Saturday.
Oh, apparently at 8:14pm ET. 😂
I decided to prioritize getting Kurn to 80 because that would allow me to skip the intro on other characters. By Saturday, I’d already brought over my shaman (double gatherer), and like, look, it’s a great intro, loving the story overall, but I did not need to do it, uh, 11 times on 11 separate toons. So I did it once on Kurn and then on the shammy and then I pushed to get Kurn to 80 and all that jazz so I could enable the skips.
That said, I feel like I mostly took my time in levelling? I did a lot of sidequests in a bunch of places and so was very nearly 80 when I finished the campaign. I felt as though the Isle of Dorn and the Ringing Deeps (which, btw, has been SUCH a lagfest pretty consistently that I can hardly stand to be in the zone) were very slow — in a good way. I got to explore places, pick up side quests, skin things, all that jazz. And then as soon as I got to Hallowfall it felt like it was just GO GO GO GO. And I’m not complaining about it, either. It was really, really cool. I was exhausted afterwards, but it was totally worth it.
As to Azj-Kahet, I really haven’t done a lot there apart from the alliance thing and all that jazz. Literally just the campaign stuff, so there’s a lot left for me to explore.
I have done exactly one delve, the Earthcrawl Mine, which I’d done once on Beta, and now once on live. I want to do more delves, but there’s so much to do! So delves can wait a bit.
I really like the story, too. Do I occasionally want to smack Anduin? Yes, but we have to remember (or those of us who didn’t play Shadowlands have to understand) that he’s been through some severe trauma. So it’s okay. As we have to give ourselves grace when we’re going through a difficult time, we have to give others grace. So Anduin gets a pass from me for now.
I’m really enjoying the story. I want to unlock the Earthen (there are a number of quests to do that which I have yet to do) and learn more about them. I’m looking forward to seeing what our involvement in Azj-Kahet will mean. It’s very promising from a story point of view, IMHO.
Professions and Such
I have to admit, I did not expect the profession treasures to be so numerous and so easily found. There are two for each profession in each zone and each treasure gives you 3 points in that profession. So that’s 24 points alone from treasures. As a result of this, if we look back at my blog post and see that when it comes to going past 40 points in Leatherworking, “that’s a problem for Future!Kurn”. Well, the future is now and I still don’t really know what to pick. 😅
Leatherworking
I did put 10 into Flawless Fortes and then 30 into Epic Ensembles… and then I started putting points into Learned Leatherworker. I’m not at 5 points there yet, so I’m not 100% sure if I’ll go into the resourcefulness, multicraft or concentration specs. If I’ll be crafting a lot of reagents and intermediate-type crafts, multicraft seems like the place to go, otherwise resourcefulness to save mats, right? Concentration is tempting at this stage in the expansion because I have not been careful on it. It’s hard when you’re at a rank 4 thing and you can make it a 5, you know? That’s several thousand gold difference in terms of profession equipment at this early stage.
Basically, Epic Ensembles has been a good choice for me and with some rank 2 mats, I can guarantee a rank 5. I’ll call that a win, especially because as my own equipment gets better, I’ll be able to do it with rank 1 mats.
Skinning
Tanning is going well. I decided to go to 20 in Tanning and then start putting points into the specific leathers. Waiting an hour between charges of Sharpen Your Knife was just annoying. Also, they just hotfixed (on Monday) the fact that LWs could waste their SYK skin action on “trivial creatures”, so that’s good. I’ve wasted three of those cooldowns on “trivial creatures” who, honestly, didn’t seem all that trivial to me!
Blacksmithing
Good lord, everything takes a bloody Core Alloy! Thankfully, they’re not that hard to make and you can also find them in chests and stuff like that. But good lord, I go through Bismuth awfully quick.
I’ve hit level 50-something as a blacksmith and I’ve put in 10 into Means of Production, then 10 into Tools of the Trade and I’ve just got a couple points in Trade Tools right now. What I really need to do is go treasure hunting on all my toons for all their professions. Still, I can reliably make rank 3 things with crappy mats. Also, are Null Stones hard to find OR WHAT? I’ve picked a ton of Null Lotus, and some imperfect null stones, but not nearly as many as the herbs. And things in BS require Null Stones. So rude. Anyway, getting there, making money, it’s all good.
Engineering
Engineering is such shit that I may actually drop it.
… I won’t, and I know I won’t, but oh MAN, it sucks. You have to do the Invent process daily. This requires 25 Pile of Rusted Scrap, which can randomly drop from TWW mobs, but also can be in chests, and I’ve found like 15 of them in an ore node at one point. But this is such a pain in the ass because I’m on my warlock and I hate playing my warlock.
Oh, and that’s not even the half of it! Once you invent, you can then basically “deconstruct” or whatever the “invention” and then get some notes. If you get 15 pages of notes, you can make them into an organized pack of notes and THAT is what you learn new schematics from. It took me three days to learn my first thing, basically, and it wasn’t even a piece of profession equipment.
I am so not impressed. Should I have read more about this or tested it on beta? Yes. Did I? No. Do I regret that now? Yes. But I will continue to complain about it because hi, I’m Kurn, and I drink red haterade.
Jewelcrafting
Not doing great here, honestly, just because I have a lack of mats. All my Bismuth is going to Blacksmithing and such, so while I’ve accumulated a bunch of points, I haven’t spent any because I’m not even 25 in JC yet. Fail, but that’s my bad.
Enchanting
I’m going for the mana oils. Not much to report yet because everything is so expensive, good lord. I disenchanted most of my greens and sold 100 (?) Storm Dust for like 10k or something on Saturday? I regret it a bit.
Tailoring
Yep, Textile Treasures it is, but I haven’t had much of a chance to get out there into the world and see how much cloth drops. I’ve made some cash on low-rank profession items, though.
Inscription
The evoker, who makes Treatises, has almost discovered them all.
What I, the person playing, have discovered, is that holy shit, ink is hard to make and so is Boundless Cipher. To make one Treatise, I need 2 of the Apricate Ink, which makes the Cipher, along with 5 Arathor’s Spear. THEN I need to make either two more Apricate Ink ortwo Shadow Ink. Oh, and then 2 of various other reagents, leyline residue, crystalline powder and… something else like viridescent spores? Or something? All of that to make ONE of these suckers.
Also, I’d made a couple earlier on Monday and couldn’t use them… and then was informed in Trade that you could use them later on. We must have been blocked in using them until worldwide launch. So that’s going okay, even if it’s expensive. It’ll pay off.
As to my other scribe, I’ve barely touched my druid because Darkmoon Cards are flooding the market right now. You can put together a full deck for under 2k, possible even under 1k. I am saddened by this and will need to rethink my druid.
Alchemy
Slow going, friends, slow going. Madrana’s getting there. She needs to get the points in ominous, but is at the point where she could craft a Blasphemite if, you know, she had the 80 transmutagens. My other alchemists are nowhere near this level of progress… and that’s okay.
Mining
This is going swimmingly. My double-gatherer has 10/40 in Plethora of Ore and then is 45/45 in Bismuth! This means I can, theoretically, mine a full Null Stone from a Bismuth node. But, more importantly, I can refine the ore from rank 1 to rank 2 and to rank 3. That’s only for Bismuth, but that’s okay. My other two miners are making (slow) progress with Ironclaw and Aqirite.
But, there are also camouflaged ore and herb nodes!
So yeah, good progress, and I’m feeling good about this.
Herbalism
Having even just the Botany spec unlocked makes farming so much easier. Love it.
That said, most of my herbalists are starting out with Bountiful Harvests and one is already 40/40, I think. The others are going 5/40 and each focusing on a separate herb for now.
Gold
I’ve made about 300k gold since Thursday night. Well, my warband bank has increased by that amount. Each character started with 5k gold on them and some have dipped back into the bank and some haven’t. Regardless, it’s been a pretty decent weekend and I expect this week and next weekend to be booming as well.
I also picked up a Spinner’s Amulet of the Harmonious that was like a 3/8 or something? 561 or 564? It was BOE and blue and I sold that sucker for 58,999 gold. Gotta love those drops. :)
What about you?
So, have you jumped into The War Within? What’s your priority? Tell me about it! :)
All right, folks. Here it is. The very long profession post for The War Within. Note that these are, as always, just my opinions (and I always have a lot of them) and that there is a Comment Policy in place here. Please don’t be a jerk, thank you kindly.
In the past, when trying to untangle something to do with holy paladins or something, I would often try to explain it here on my blog to see if I really did understand the thing. I’d be in the middle of writing something and go “oh, wait. WAIT. HOLD THE PHONE,” and then go test something at 2am or whatever.
When it comes to planning for The War Within and professions, I have been researching for like, a month. At least. Are you excited yet??
Kurn’s Characters
Let’s start out with the fact that I have eleven level 70 characters ready to go for early access on Thursday, August 22, at 6pm ET. Here is my spreadsheet of professions for the various toons. Please feel free to make a copy for yourself and organize your own stuff!
Okay, so if we look at the spreadsheet in question, we have 11 characters and have this spread of professions:
Uh, yep, that is, in fact, the case. In my last post about this stuff, I had 4 herbalists and 3 miners and 3 alchemists. As I’d mentioned in the last post, I want all the characters I can’t play well to have a gathering profession, because then I can at least level them. I am very bad, for example, at being an evoker. I still don’t know what 97% of the skills do. I die frequently. I am just bad.
Part of that is because I just don’t care enough to be better on those characters. I could go to Icy Veins or something and figure out the right spec and the right rotation and I did spend some time doing that in Dragonflight, but ugh, doing that for all these characters? All eleven? No thanks. I dislike playing a warlock, I don’t enjoy playing a warrior, and, like I said, I am just bad at being an evoker. So, at minimum, those three toons need gathering skills. The evoker already has herbalism, it’s largely how I got her to 70 in Dragonflight. The warrior? Hah, the warrior was a boost when I bought The War Within. And the warlock? I was already 65-66 by virtue of profession quests most weeks and then I just took him out and did stuff for a week. (While healthstones didn’t properly cool down, just FYI. That was unfun.)
Anyway, the only two toons who don’t have a gathering profession are Madrana (I am not dropping alchemy, which I have had since the day I rolled her, nor jewelcrafting, which I’ve had since it was introduced in Burning Crusade — I spent days in The Exodar!) and the priest, who’s an alchemist and enchanter. This is because I am confident I can level Madrana within a gathering profession and, at the very worst, I can do all kinds of follower dungeons with the priest. I still sort of know how to heal, after all. But everyone else needs a gathering profession for the time being to get up to 80.
(80? Dear God, I feel like I should be prepping to run Azjol-Nerub and Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom. Which I guess we kind of will be, given the theme of this expansion and its focus on the Nerubians. But you still get my point, right? As I was levelling my latest timerunner, an Alliance druid, to 70, I kept muttering to myself “look, you’re not in the Mana Tombs. You’re not in Auchenai Crypts. You’re not queued for Sethekk Halls. THIS IS BETTER.”)
So, yes, it’s to help with levelling characters I don’t want to kill things on and such. But, it’s also to help with making gold. Let’s talk about that, shall we?
Kurn’s Herbalism Plans
In The War Within, you have three Herbalism trees for your profession. They are Bountiful Harvests, Botany, and Overloading the Underground. Much like in Dragonflight, if you put 40 points into Botany, you gain the ability to pick herbs while mounted.
However, I have just saved myself 160 points of Herbalism in the early game because:
One of my planned herbalists is a druid, who can already do that
I’m actually annoyed that I bought the Sky Golem, because I have an engineer who was boosted in Pandaria and, therefore, learned how to make the Sky Golem. I even had 21 of the 30 Jard’s Peculiar Energy Source I needed! I even had a few of the 30 Living Steel I needed! So why did I buy a Sky Golem? It’s because I had run out of time. 21 of the Jard’s means I needed 9 to make the golem, which means nine daily cooldowns consisting of 90 Ghost Iron Bars, which is 180 Ghost Iron Ore. That doesn’t even include the Living Steel mats, which is TRILLIUM. Yeah, no, wasn’t going to be able to build it in time — which is my fault. I didn’t think I had any of the Jard’s source, but, lo and behold, I had 21. Crazy. Anyway, I looked at my spreadsheet tonight and decided to buy the Sky Golem. I went to The Undermine Exchange site and looked up Sky Golem. I clicked on it and scrolled down to where it shows the realm data and I clicked to sort by price. At the time, the cheapest was for about 23,987g (something very close to 24k) on the Dragonflight server. So I created a new alt there, withdrew the money from my warband bank, then purchased it on Dragonflight, put my leftover cash (and the mount) into the warband bank and then learned it on a toon over level 30 (the requirement).
While I will put points into Botany eventually, I’m not going to do it right at the outset. I’m probably going to learn it as my second tree, but I will only learn it, and I won’t put points into it. Upon learning the specialization, “Gathering herbs in Khaz Algar will replenish 1 Vigor. +30 Deftness while gathering herbs.” You don’t need to put points into it at all, just open it up, and you’ll get those perks. I’m planning on getting to 100 Herbalism pretty quick on at least one character — it’s probably just a couple of hours of farming if you get some special nodes and such.
So if I’m not putting points into Botany, where I am putting points?
Bountiful Harvests.
In case you’re not aware, the WoW devs have realized there’s a problem with the increase in gathering skill leading to fewer rank 1 herbs/skins/ores. Eventually, rank 2s and 3s get devalued in comparison. After not playing for several months and coming back this summer, it was ridiculous that I could buy a rank 3 Bubble Poppy for less than a rank 2 sometimes, and it always cost me less than a rank 1! So the key in all gathering professions is going to be in your ability to pick, mine, skin and refine your herbs, ores and skins. To do so, you need 40/40 points in Bountiful Harvests to refine to rank 3. You only need 20/40 points to refine to rank 2, but I think it’s really going to be worth it to drop your first 40 points directly into Bountiful Harvests.
From there, it sort of depends where you’re going to farm. You will want to max out one of the sub-specs to 40/40 because it’ll allow you to find Null Lotus more often while picking that specific kind of herb. So if you want to herb the crap out of Mycobloom (which is the most common herb, like Hochenblum was), max the heck out of it to allow you to more easily come across the Null Lotuses. Null Lotuses are, of course, used in the making of flasks, so this is going to be an important ingredient as we approach raiding and Mythic + dungeons. Looking at the calendar Blizzard provided, normal dungeons are open as of early access (to those with early access) on August 22, while heroic dungeons open on the global launch on August 26. Just over two weeks later, on September 10, Normal and Heroic raids (plus LFR Wing 1 and Mythic 0, heroic seasonal dungeons, etc) open up. The following week, September 17, Mythic raids and Mythic + dungeons open up.
Early access theoretically will not grant a long-term advantage to people. In this recap from a November, 2023 interview with Ion Hazzikostas, it states:
Players will be unable to do Mythic 0/Mythic+ dungeons, loot the best items from rares, access weekly profession cooldowns and profession specialization points.
Now, there’s two schools of thought on what the heck this actually means.
Players won’t be able to spend any accumulated profession specialization points until after the reset on Tuesday, August 27, or Wednesday, August 28 (depending on region).
Players are only unable to access weekly profession quests (like craft 2x of this thing, or give me 16 ore, etc) and are unable to get a spec point from the Algari Treatise books.
Far be it for me to actually link to the WoW forums, but, uh, there’s a few threads and this one seems less hostile than some.
I think the second school of thought makes more sense. Just don’t implement the weekly profession quest thing until reset and don’t allow people to use the treatises until reset. It seems way easier to implement those things rather than not allow people to open trees and use points, right? I would hope it’s a limited effect, but I am also somewhat prepared to get no points until August 27. Which would suck. But at least I’ll be herbing and mining and skinning?
Why am I talking about this? Wasn’t I just talking about important dates in WoW? Why yes, yes I was. So why am I talking about points and stuff?
It’s simple. If we just miss out on like, 3-4 points in the early access, that still leaves 2 or 3 weeks of full specialization points (knowledge points?) to cash in on the surge for flasks and potions and all the things so people are ready to raid or do mythic +.
For the gathering professions, let’s say 3 full weeks of getting (and this is an estimate):
3 points from a profession quest
1 point from an Algari treatise
5 points from random gathers
3 points from the epic random gather item
So that’s 12 x 3 = 36 points, which does not count the bonus for the first node of that kind.
For Herbalism, there are five kinds of base herb nodes:
Mycobloom
Blessing Blossom
Arathor’s Spear
Luredrop
Orbinid
Then, there are four (?) empowered types:
Crystallized
Altered
Sporefused
Irradiated
AND there’s Lush, like there was in Dragonflight
Now, assuming you can get each of the herbs in each variant type (and you may not, I’m not sure), that means:
5 from the base nodes
5 from the variants on each (5)
So that’s another 30 points.
Given perfect luck in nodes and such when it comes to Herbalism, you can theoretically get 66 points in the first three weeks. Don’t quote me. I don’t know if you can get, say, an Altered Arathor’s Spear or an Irradiated Orbinid. (Also, I’m bad at math, in general.)
This means that you, as an herbalist, have a choice. Do you go for the ability to refine herbs first OR do you go for the ability to find more Null Lotuses on a single type of herb? You can’t do both before raids come out, not even in the three weeks before mythic raids/mythic +.
For those of us with multiple herbalists, this isn’t an issue. One herbalist can get the ability to refine the herbs to max rank (40 in Bountiful Harvests) and any other ones can focus on the actual nodes, leading to more Null Lotuses. (I should note that I just spent like an hour herbing and mining in the beta and I got like 2-3 Null Lotuses, without any skill in a specific node and just flying around the Isle of Dorn. Of course, I didn’t have much competition, so your mileage may vary on live servers.)
For those with just a single herbalist, I gotta go with the ability to refine herbs to max level. This is something that will be useful throughout the entire expansion. Even if you max out every single spec tree and node within that tree, you will still be picking rank 1 herbs as we await the Midnight expansion, probably in the next 18-24 months. People will still want flasks and potions and fancy stuff in a month, two months, 12 months. And they will almost certainly still want max-rank herbs. At the beginning of the expansion, it becomes even more important that they’re max-rank because not everyone will have blue profession gear yet, and so people will need to use Concentration to max it out. If Concentration takes 5-6 minutes per point to regenerate, this severely limits how much of anything crafters can make. The higher quality the materials (the herbs, ores, skins), the easier it is to max out the final product. As time goes by, it’ll still be important to be able to refine these things to a max rank, but the demand will be mostly earlier on. (In my opinion.)
So, my plans:
1 Herbalist to go 40/40 in Bountiful Harvests to get the refine to ranks 2 and 3
Other Herbalists to go 5/40 in Bountiful Harvests to open up the various nodes, probably starting with Mycobloom, and then go 40/40 to get more Null Lotuses
Whew. Is that it? Are we done?
Not even close… 😅
Kurn’s Mining Plans
Herbalism and Mining are very similar in terms of trees. You have three specializations and Bountiful Harvests equates to Plethora of Ore, while Botany equates to Mining Fundamentals and Overloading the Underground equates to Mastering the Mysterious.
That said, there are a couple of major differences here. The first is that Mining Fundamentals is a freaking 60 point node and it’s at 60 points that you can finally mine while mounted. 60! Outrageous! 😂 Similarly to Botany, though, if you open up the spec, you restore 1 Vigor when you mine, so this is useful to bear in mind.
Plethora of Ore is likely where I’ll start out, but the interesting thing is that each ore has its spec and it’s within that spec that you can learn to refine the ore. Bismuth, which is the common ore, has a 45 point spec and it’s at 20 points you can refine Bismuth — and only Bismuth! — from rank 1 to rank 2. At 40 points (out of 45), you can then refine Bismuth — again, only Bismuth! — from rank 2 to rank 3. Filling out the spec allows you to stop damaging Null Stones when gathering Bismuth. What’s a Null Stone? Looks like it’s going to be a very in-demand mining gather. I don’t think it’s exactly the equivalent of Khaz’gorite, because it’s not an ore, exactly, but it’s a byproduct of mining.
Okay, let’s look at how many points we can realistically get in mining in three weeks, like we did with herbalism. Again, this is an estimate:
3 points from a profession quest
1 point from an Algari treatise
5 points from random gathers
3 points from the epic random gather item
So that’s 12 x 3 = 36 points, which does not count the bonus for the first node of that kind.
For Mining, there are three kinds of base ore nodes:
Bismuth (the most common)
Aqirite
Ironclaw
Then, there are four (?) empowered types:
Crystallized
Weeping
EZ-Mine
Webbed
AND there’s Rich
AND there’s Seams
Now, assuming you can get each of the mines in each variant type (again, I’m unsure), that means:
3 from the base nodes
6 from the variants on each (3)
So that’s another 21 points.
That means that we can estimate about 57 points in the first three weeks, assuming things go perfectly and you’re able to get every combination of node and such.
So, what do we do here? What is going to be most in-demand? Like the herbs, I think it’s going to be the refined ores. I’m looking at putting in 10/50 into Plethora of Ore, then unlocking Bismuth and just slamming in the next 45 points into it to get me able to refine Bismuth at ranks 2 and 3 and get undamaged (?) Null Stones. That brings me to 55 points, and then I can start in on another node. I don’t know how frequently we’ll come across Ironclaw and Bismuth once we leave the Isle of Dorn, nor do I know how prevalent Aqirite will be elsewhere, so depending on market demand, we’ll see where my next 45 points go.
It’s at this point I would also consider maxing out the 60 points in Mining Fundamentals. With the initial rush out of the way, now we want to go for efficiency. Without a mount like the Sky Golem, we have no way to avoid putting points into this tree. You can just go for it after maxing out a single kind of node in Plethora of Ore, in my opinion, and I’m thinking about it, too, since it will save so much time on every. single. node. for the rest of the expansion. We’ll revisit this in the future.
As such, my plans for my four miners:
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Bismuth, then max out that node
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Aqirite, then max out that node
1 Miner to go 10/50 in Plethora of Ore to unlock Ironclaw, then max out that node
Now that I can refine those three ore types to max, I will probably have my fourth miner start filling out Mining Fundamentals (to 40) and get Rich Deposits and Seams maxed out
… I don’t know about you, but I’m already tired thinking about all this. 😅
Kurn’s Alchemy Plans
We’re going to skip Skinning for now, because I have four planned Alchemists, so let’s get these multiples out of the way before we get to the singles.
Compared to everything else, Alchemy is ridiculously simple. I’m planning to put 10 points into Thaumaturgy and then 20 points into Gleaming Transmutagen, so I can make Blasphemite with the Gleaming Glory transmutation.
The only trouble here is that you need 80 Gleaming Transmutagen to do that. This took me about two hours of research to figure out: You need to use Thaumaturgy until you discover one of three new transmutes: Ominous Herbs, Ominous Call or Ominous Gloom.
You also need to drop another 15 points into Thaumaturgy: 10 more to unlock a new subspec and then 5 into Ominous Materials, so that you can discover those things. So it’s only at 45 points total in Thaumaturgy that you can start doing Thaumaturgy to discover one of the transmutes above. I finally discovered Ominous Herbs. The wow-professions page says you have to do it on certain mats, but it may be outdated because I did it on Ominous Transmutagen and it just took A SINGLE use of Thaumaturgy on 20 Ominous Transmutagen and I learned Ominous Gloom.
Doing Ominous Gloom granted me a bunch of stuff including 23 Gleaming Transmutagen. And then it promptly went on CD for 24 hours. Luckily, I can reset that on the beta. Another one gave me 21 Gleaming Transmutagen. 22 Gleaming Transmutagen on the next. Then 23 on the next. So we’re looking at a minimum of four transmutes to get enough Gleaming Transmutagen to create the Blasphemite.
… or are we?
Turns out that if you push Thaumaturgy to 35/55, “Performing acts of Thaumaturgy now grant Gleaming Transmutagen.” So I tried it out on 20 Luredrop and I got… 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. 20 Gloom Chitin got me… 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. 20 Blessing Blossom? Yep, you guessed it, 3 Gleaming Transmutagen.
The good news is Thaumaturgy doesn’t have a cooldown. The bad news is it’s 20 of each item for 3 Gleaming Transmutagen. While we will definitely want to get to 35/55 in Thaumaturgy eventually, it’ll really only be when mats calm down a little in price or if we have a ludicrous number of spare mats. It’s probably best to go back to Thaumaturgy to get to 35 after you’ve started making your Gleaming Transmutagen regularly through the transmutes.
So, my four alchemists are all going in this direction unless there is A LOT of Blasphemite on the market. As far as I’m aware, only alchemists can make Blasphemite… Could be worth a lot.
That said, flasks and potions are both smaller trees now than they were in Dragonflight, so if you’re not all about the transmutes, or if gold is a bit tight, Potent Potions looks great especially if you’re out there raiding or pushing mythic +. The Bulk Production potion subspec, at point 20, says: “The first potion you craft per day will grant you 5 soulbound conjured copies at max quality.” That is going to be so much cheaper for those of you doing fun raiding/dungeoning things!
Still, I’m aiming for the transmute game for now.
What next…?
Kurn’s Inscription Plans
Oh, right. Having two scribes is kind of a late decision, all things considered. To say that I have made a lot of gold over the years by virtue of Darkmoon Cards and Inscription would be the understatement of the century. I think I topped out at like seven million gold at some point?
So, they’ve changed how Inscription works with Darkmoon Cards in The War Within. You no longer craft the cards, as I understand it. You find them. Like… out there. In the world. 😒 How dare they make us LEAVE THE COMFORT OF THE CITY? 😂 And as you spec into each deck, halfway through you get a point that gives you a 50% higher chance to find the damn things. And then at 30 points, you can “learn how to transcribe other Khaz Algar Darkmoon Cards into Darkmoon Cards of (the deck)”.
Given that my scribe is my Evoker, whom I cannot play worth a damn, as previously noted, I was not thrilled. I was basically just going to give up on making tons of gold with Inscription… and then I levelled my druid on MOP Remix and now hi, hello, I have an 11th character to do something with. Since it’s a druid, obviously it’ll be an herbalist (also as previously noted), but it’ll also be a scribe. The druid will be my “go forth and see what drops” toon for Inscription. So I’m going to:
Take Archival Additions. Oddly, as of Beta (11.0.2 (56110)), once you open Archival Additions, you can go through Cryptic Collection and then select any of the decks without depositing any points in any of them. I don’t know if that’s intended. If it is, heck, pick a deck and drop 15 points into it so you can start getting cards to drop. As you get more points, drop them into the same deck so you can basically recraft other cards into your cards.
If it’s not intended, it’s the same theory — max out one deck before moving on to the next. It’ll just take some extra points.
But for my evoker, who will spend her time herbing and crafting the new Algari treatises and such, she’ll go into Pursuit of Knowledge. Like Dragonflight, the treatises are discoveries while crafting treatises. Just selecting Pursuit of Knowledge gives you the Inscription treatise. On beta, I crafted my first Inscription one and then discovered Blacksmithing. Then I crafted that one and I learned Leatherworking. So it probably won’t be too hard to grab them all and it doesn’t require any points that I can tell so far. They are still BOP, so these will need to be requested through crafting orders.
(Honestly, I think something is weird with Inscription with the lack of needing to drop points in. I guess we’ll find out at launch.)
Okay, what’s next on the list… all the single-toon professions, I guess.
Kurn’s Skinning Plans
Oh, this is just rude. In the Tanning tree, we have Tanning and then Luxurious Leathers and Concrete Chitin. You have to max out both the leather and chitin subspecs to be able to refine both to rank 3. 😒 And in order to even get to both subspecs, you need to put in 30 points into Tanning. So that’s 40 points into both leather and chitin subspecs plus 30 into Tanning, which is 110 points. Bloody hell. On the one hand, may as well get started here because… I’m going to want rank 3 leather and chitin to work with as a leatherworker myself. On the other hand, ugh, it’s not appealing to me. But I’ll probably take it anyway and start with Concrete Chitin, just because I’m a mail wearer myself. So 10 points into Tanning, then 40 points into Concrete Chitin, then going back to Tanning to open up leather and continue the process. But I’m not happy about it!
I looked at the Harvesting tree and, frankly, I noped out for the time being. I love the idea of creating stuff I will need for cooking and stuff, but there’s so little information about cooking and fishing (no, I will not go into those in this post) right now that I can’t make an informed decision about picking up Harvesting at this point.
Luring looks fun, but I’ll worry about that last, I guess.
Kurn’s Leatherworking Plans
Okay, on to Leatherworking. I’ve had LW on Kurn since the first day I ventured out of Shadowglen. (Skinning is something I’ve dropped and picked back up a couple of times, but never LW!)
While I am interested in learning how to craft armor for leather and mail wearers, the awesome thing about leatherworking is how much profession equipment it can make, so that will likely be Kurn’s focus to start. In Dragonflight, leatherworkers could make 8 pieces of profession equipment or accessories: LW Smock, Skinner’s Cap, Floral Basket, Durable Pack, Protective Gloves, Jeweler’s Cover, Smithing Apron, Alchemist’s Hat… and the blue versions thereof. It looks to be the same in The War Within, with 8 green recipes (all learned from your trainer) and 8 blue recipes (all purchased with Artisan’s Acuity).
As such, Kurn’s first 10 points will go into Flawless Fortes (note that’s pronounced fortays, not forts) and then I’ll go ahead and max out Epic Ensembles. Of note, at the max rank, you’ll use 5% less Concentration when using concentration on professions equipment. Not sure where I’ll go after 40 points, but that’s a problem for Future!Kurn.
Kurn’s Blacksmithing Plans
Similarly, Blacksmithing also has 8 profession equipment recipes and looks to be the same as Dragonflight, so that’s the direction I’ll go with Blacksmithing. However, it gets much more complex in Blacksmithing. Because of course it does. 😅
First up is 10 points into Means of Production, then unlock Tools of the Trade. Doing this unlocks your own blue hammer, so you don’t have to pay any Artisan’s Acuity to learn this one.
Then, there’s a choice between Trade Tools and Trade Accessories.
Of the 8 profession equipment recipes, five aretools and three are accessories. So I’m going to go with Trade Tools first and max it out and then move into Trade Accessories, although it looks like you have to max out Tools of the Trade to get the other subspec, so we’re looking at 60 points in Means of Production before we can open up the other of Trade Tools or Trade Accessories.
I’m suddenly really glad I have like 11 days off work around the launch… 😅
Kurn’s Engineering Plans
Engineering, like Blacksmithing and Leatherworking, has a number of recipes for profession stuff too! It’s got 7 types of things, unlike the 8 for the other two. It’s somewhat even, with 4 tools and 3 accessories. Thankfully, the tree is less complex than Blacksmithing.
First, I’ll drop 10 points into Engineered Equipment to open up Inventor’sNecessities. Drop 5 points there and then I can move to Profession Gear, where I can max that out for 30 points. Boom. 45 points and done for now. Again, I’m not sure where I’ll go after that, but it’s still Future!Kurn’s problem.
Kurn’s Jewelcrafting Plans
Jewelcrafters can make four profession accessories, but I don’t think I’m going to spec that way at first, shockingly. Given my army of alchemists, I am probably going to go into good, old fashioned Gemcutting. So I’ll drop 10 points in there and then move to Ruby. All the cuts (Emerald, Onyx, Ruby and Sapphire) will improve your ability to cut Blasphemite as well as the type of gem, so it’s really what you prefer. I think I’ll go Ruby just because I like crit as the main stat. So I’ll learn that and then I can automatically open one of the subspecs from there, which will likely be the Quick Ruby because who doesn’t like crit and haste? I’ll then max out Ruby and continue to put points in Quick Ruby. That’s 60 points in and beyond that is, you guessed it, Future!Kurn’s problem. 😂
Kurn’s Enchanting Plans
Okay, we’re getting into the last couple professions here and, let’s be clear, I’m a noob at them. I have very little idea what the hell I’m doing here.
Truthfully, when it comes to Enchanting, I’ve been looking at Gleeful Glamours. This kind of stuff is always somewhat popular, but it’s not necessary like actual enchants are. That said, these are in the same spec (Ephemerals, Enrichments, and Equipment) as things like Mana Oils… And those will be needed by raiders and such.
So I might just go 5 points into EEE, then 10 points into Material Maestro, followed by 0 points (to start) in Optimal Oils. This gives me the Oil of Beledar’s Grace recipe, which is for healers.
Then I might go back to 10 more points in EEE and pick up Deceptive Decorations for the Gleeful Glamours, and we’ll see if the healer mana oil outsells the glamours, I guess.
I could go straight for Everlasting Enchantments, except that I don’t know squat about who needs what. There will always be a huge market for those, so I don’t mind taking my time to learn about them and get into the market Later ™.
I will want to eventually get into Supplementary Shattering to get the multicrafting bonuses for the Deceptive Decorations, but that can wait. And I don’t know that I need Designated Disenchanter unless it’s super hard to get enchanting mats. Again, we’ll have to see.
Kurn’s Tailoring Plans
Okay, finally we come to Tailoring. My tailor is also a miner and is a mage, so I kind of know how to play him and he’ll be Out There in The World. As such, it’s very tempting to just go all out and max out Textile Treasures to maximize my chances of getting cloth while out in the world. Note that Nerubians count as humanoids, so “your chance to find cloth from humanoids” includes them.
Then again, dropping 10 points into Quality Fabric and then opening up Spellthread to learn Weavercloth Spellthread is bound to be worthwhile.
I will probably pass on Threads of Devotion for the time being since I only have three cloth-wearers in my arsenal and the priest and warlock won’t be doing too much of that “fighting” thing.
This leaves us with From Dawn Until Dusk. This is where the cooldowns occur — the Dawnweave Bolt and the Duskweave Bolt. Either way you go, it’ll be 60 points to fully max out one of the two: 10 points in From Dawn to Dusk, then 30 in Duskweave or Dawnweave Tailoring and then 20 in Duskweaving or Dawnweaving. To pick up the other, you need to drop another 20 points into From Dawn to Dusk, then another 50 to max out the other one, for a grand total of 130 points to max out both. As such, it’s probably best (at least to start) to only focus on one or the other.
I think I’ll max out Textile Treasures, then head to From Dawn to Dusk and get one of the two (unsure which yet), then max that out. That’s like 120 points total, so that’ll keep me busy for the foreseeable future!
Don’t Forget your FREE 200 Artisan’s Acuity!
The War Within’s equivalent of Artisan’s Mettle is Artisan’s Acuity. Here’s how to get 200 free acuity in a very short video I made from beta.
Your Turn!
What are you planning on for your professions in The War Within? Check out the Wowhead TWW Profession Calculator and share your builds with me!
My dudes (and I use that in the gender-neutral way), are things ever borked in the 11.0 patch! It’s actually kind of funny. Even funnier are the chunks of people who are like “eff this, I’m cancelling my sub” and stuff like that. Hi, is this your first patch? 😂
That said, things are kind of broken at the moment. I can’t withdraw more than like 4200 gold out of my bank’s guild bank? And Warband banks are unavailable. They’ve activated an error message that indicates someone else is using your bank and I’m like, “I assure you, that’s not the case, Blizz.”
As someone who has been playing this game, off and on, since 2005, this all amuses me. As someone who works in tech, I totally get it. Any time you’re working with databases, like “what items does this character own?” or “what transmogs does this character have access to?” and that sort of thing, you have to be super careful. Err on the side of caution. Always. This is why maintenance days are on Tuesdays — to launch things on a Thursday or Friday is just asking for overtime on the weekend.
To read some of the comments in the blue posts on the forums is to lower one’s IQ by a chunk. Someone posited that the warbanks were linked to the beta and that’s why they weren’t working. Like, my dude, no, warbanks are on an entirely different server, that is not accessible by the live servers. That’s why you have to copy your character or make a new, premade one. Never mind the fact that the servers are not likely to be hardcoded. If anything, there’s probably a database entry saying “Kurn has characters on these 18 servers, so make the Warband Bank accessible to all her characters on all those servers” and there’s probably a piece of code saying “if she creates a new character on a new server, please add that to the list”. Or something akin to that.
Then there are people saying that they’re quitting because the game is super broken at the moment. Well, okay, yes, there are bits that are broken. I can’t withdraw a lot of money from my guild bank right now. Some class/spec combos don’t have their new talent trees fully implemented. All of this, though, is going to be temporary.
I have read that some people have lost achievement progress. I guess it’s possible that I have, too? I wasn’t paying much attention to any achievements, to be honest, but I saw someone lost out on their Molten Front achievements by having them reset to 0 or whatever. THAT would suck. I hated the Molten Front dailies. So what do people have to do there? Well, if the devs can retrieve that data (and, presuming they took backups, they can), the decision is will they? Manipulating data is an extreme pain in the ass. Especially if the data’s format has changed from one point to the next point.
Actually, looking at my armory, it looks as though my progress to the loot 200,000 gold achievement has been wiped. I’m at 0/200,000. Now, to be clear, I spend most of my time making money through the auction house, so even though I make a ton of gold, I do not loot a ton, especially since I stopped raiding. But clearly, I should have more than 0 here.
And when I was logging into various toons on Tuesday, when the servers finally came up, I got “Nagrand Slam” on Madrana. So whatever character(s) of mine had different parts of that done, now has been applied to Madrana. Technically, they have to make sure we all have the right achievements applied to the right characters, too. So this becomes incredibly finicky work if something goes awry and you have to move the data from an old backup to the new format. Trust me. It’s not fun and is incredibly time-intensive, especially validating all the data.
That’s another thing, people are complaining about how nothing was tested, blah, blah, blah. Listen. Any time you mess with data, weird shit can happen, okay? I have seen SUCH weirdness occur in the tiniest edge cases possible. Regular use? No problem. 95% of cases? No problem. That last 5% is where the problems are.
I basically do technical support for a living (although not for Blizzard), and this one day, someone was complaining that a product belonging to the company I worked for at the time wasn’t working. Worked fine for me. I asked the customer what time zone they were in. They were in France, which is UTC+1 or +2, depending on the time of year. I, being in Montreal, am in UTC-4 or -5, depending on the time of the year, so I’m 6 hours back. So I messed with my settings and such and made the product think I was in France. And, sure enough, from 6pm to midnight, and only 6pm to midnight, the problem was visible to me. I switched back to my regular timezone, and there were no issues.
So please trust me when I say that this shit is hard. And that they’re working to diagnose what the problem is, then if they can fix it, then should they invest that time and money into fixing it (if they even can), and then how long the fix should take. And they’re weighing all of that. Does it matter to me if I’m at 0/200,000 gold looted? No. Does it matter to me that I can’t withdraw more than about 4200 gold from my guild bank? Yes. Does it matter to me that I can’t use the Warband Bank? Yes. So they’re going to have to do all kinds of thinking and talking about things to see if they can resolve it, and then if they should resolve it. Obviously, the Warband Bank is going to be fixed, so will the guild bank thing. Those are likely to be technical issues that can be resolved. The achievements? I would say probably, but I’m not sure how easy it’s going to be for them to do.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on 11.0.
In the meantime, I had a hilarious time healing on beta as Madrana…
There’s a lot more than just the first couple minutes, you can actually see me starting to heal stuff around the 15-16 minute mark. Watch me lose my tank instantly. Watch me battle-rez! Watch me panic! It’s pretty funny, I promise.
In other news, going back to professions, I think I’m going to keep alchemy on my warrior and drop inscription. I already have inscription on the evoker, and alchemy does have useful cooldowns, such as something called Blasphemite, which is through Thaumatergy and Gleaming… something or another. Coalescence? So I’m mostly (?) okay with having 3-4 alchemists. I’m going to have to be diligent about transmutes and stuff, though, like I was in Pandaland, where I was doing trillium bar transmutes on 3 toons every day.
So, what weirdness have you encountered? What are you up to before the pre-expansion event?
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.
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!
I wasn’t going to take part in the MOP Remix. I really wasn’t. I did not like the pandaland expansion. I think the thing I liked most about it was farming Zandalari Warbringers.
And yet, when I realized levelling characters would be trivially easy and those characters would end up on live after Remix ended… I was intrigued. You see, I have like seven toons. Kurn, Madrana, a shaman, a dracthyr evoker, a mage, a priest and a warlock. Do I know how to play the evoker, the warlock or even the priest properly? Absolutely not. In none of the specs. So why do I have them?
The shaman is a miner/herbalist and started out as a draenei and has always been my farm toon for Madrana. (She is now a male dwarf.)
I had to roll a dragon this expansion because, uh, dragons. My dragon is an herbalist/scribe.
My mage is a miner/tailor. I’ve had this mage since my brother convinced me to create one with him on a PVP server. Once I hit 30 and got WTFPWNED every single time I logged in at the Southshore inn, I transferred. Fog’s warrior transferred later. This mage started life as a human female and is now a dwarf male. I LOVE the dwarf male emotes, okay?
My priest is an alchemist/enchanter. She came to be because my brother “needed” a healer as he levelled his paladin. He tanked. I “healed”. (I literally put him on follow and threw out some heals and read or watched TV while we did this, much of the time.) The most exciting thing the priest has ever done was a full BRD run with my brother tanking after just the BRD prison popped. My brother was like “that’s IT?!” when the instance officially ended and asked if everyone wanted to keep going. We did, so we cleared the instance. And then I read someone’s blog that sounded SUSPICIOUSLY like our instance run! The blog is now offline, but it was sisters, I believe? Who were a shadow priest and resto druid? Hots’n’dots or Dots’n’hots or something like that.
But I hate the warlock. I really do. He’s presently level 64 and has only levelled via profession quests.
So I was like, okay, if I can level easily to 70 and that toon moves to live in a couple months, just before the War Within launches… then I can pick up mining/blacksmithing on the new toon and drop blacksmithing on the warlock and pick up mining and keep engineering.
For those of you keeping track, that means:
Kurn: Skinning/LW
Madrana: Alchemy/Jewelcrafter
Shammy: Mining/Herbalism
Dracthyr: Herbalism/Inscription
Priest: Alchemy/Enchanting (still needs levelling to 70)
Mage: Mining/Tailoring (still needs levelling to 70)
Warlock: Mining/Engineering (still needs levelling to 70)
New toon: Mining/Blacksmithing
So I rolled a male Dark Iron Dwarf paladin. (They have +5 to Blacksmithing.) I’m levelling him ret in the world and holy in instances. Here, have a look at me healing 3 MOP Remix dungeons!
MOP Remix is interesting. I don’t know that I like it for the experience, but another toon to 70 without too much trouble? Doesn’t sound bad, frankly.
So are you in Remix? What have you done? What should I not miss out on?
Oh, and, please note that I am no longer active on Twitter. I have moved to Blue Sky:
In Vanilla WoW, I had a hunter named Kurnmogh. Kurn was my main. Did everything with him. I was a skinner and leatherworker and got Finkle’s skinner and skinned Core Hounds (when people would remember to loot their bloody hounds!) and I enjoyed farming Black Dragonscales for the Black Dragonscale Mail set…
And I created a paladin, Madrana, and decided she should get herbalism and alchemy.
When Burning Crusade arrived, I elected to drop alchemy in favour of jewelcrafting and drop skinning in favour of mining. So Kurn would supply Madrana with ore until I could afford to just buy ore outright.
It worked nicely but I swapped Kurn back to skinning to supply my own leather for leatherworking.
Classic WoW saw me actually change things up. I rolled a hunter, Kurnmogh, who was a miner and an engineer. And Madrana became… an herbalist and alchemist. Okay, so I didn’t really change things there. But I didn’t pick up JC when BC Classic came out. So now, a week away from Wrath Classic, I’m sitting here with mining/engineering and herbalism/alchemy on my two level 70 toons. I also have a level 62 toon who is also an herbalist/alchemist. (Sue me, I like transmutes in the later expansions.)
And then, this weeekend, I was going through the professions and found… the Figurine – Sapphire Owl.
Okay, to be clear, it’s not like I didn’t know about it. As a JC through from BC to present day (even if I don’t actually play retail much), I knew about the Sapphire Owl. I used the Sapphire Owl in Wrath.
I didn’t remember how good it was until I looked up the stats. +42 intellect? Two sockets? Add 16 int in each and you have a trinket with 74 intellect that will restore 2340 mana over 15 seconds every five minutes. Now the mana restoration isn’t all that amazing, let’s be fair. A Runic Mana Potion is basically double that. And, later in Wrath (Ulduar, while facing Vezax), I remember having a mana pool of over 30,000, fully buffed, with a Flask of Distilled Wisdom. So, like, 2340 mana is not the selling point. The 74 intellect is the selling point. I even used that trinket (along with my Pendant of the Violet Eye) for that fight, because it’s all about the size of the mana pool.
So now I’m looking at my toons… Kurn is 70 and mining/eng, Madrana is 70 and herb/alch and my priest is 62 and herb/alch.
But am I even going to play that much?! No idea. So not sure if it’s worth it!
For anyone playing a holy paladin seriously, though, I highly recommend Alchemy and Jewelcrafting as professions. Engineering is interesting too, if only for the haste tinker on gloves, which you can use every minute. Early in the game, the haste will be useful, but could be overkill later in the game when you naturally hit having a 1s global cooldown.
The reason I stick with alchemy is the mercurial stone that is a solid trinket to start with and gives you 40% more mana per mana potion. Instead of ~4300, we’re looking at about 6k mana per potion with the stone equipped. That is not bad. Plus, you get the Mixology perk, which is super nice.
If you decide to power-level alchemy or JC, check out the guides at wow-professions.com.
So, what do you think of my choices? What are you going to enter Northrend with as your professions? Let’s hear it!
Thanks to Kristen for a few questions about Classic WoW! Today, we’re tackling tips about Professions. Curious about Classic? Tweet me with your questions: @kurnmogh
1) Jewelcrafting and Inscription and Archaeology don’t exist
That’s right. There are no gems that increase any stats. There are no glyphs. There’s no milling, no prospecting. There’s no digging. This means that herbalism only funnels into Alchemy and that mining funnels into Blacksmithing and Engineering and that there’s only three secondary professions, not four.
But Kurn, didn’t the Darkmoon Faire exist? What about Darkmoon trinkets?
Yes. The Faire existed, but, sidenote, there were no quests to skill up your professions! And yes, there were Darkmoon trinkets. However, they were not crafted. Each and every card that made up a deck was a drop. The Aces were drops from dungeon bosses. The Ace of Portals, for example, was a drop from Darkmaster Gandling. The 2-8 of each deck were random world drops. What’s a random world drop? It can drop off of anything, anywhere. While I’m sure there was a level cap on this (probably mobs 50+), that’s still a lot of randomness to collect a deck. It was hard. And then you had to wait for the Faire to arrive to turn it in. And guess what? One month, the Faire would arrive in Goldshire, and the next, it was in Mulgore. Yeah, good luck going to hand stuff in at your opposing faction’s starting zone.
And the trinkets weren’t even that good!
Arguably the best trinket from the decks was the reward for the Portals Deck, which was Darkmoon Card: Twisting Nether. You will note that there are absolutely no stats on this trinket. The only thing it does is give you a 10% chance to rez.
That said, Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon, from the Beasts Deck, is good for a healer. The Darkmoon Card: Maelstrom, a reward from the Elementals Deck, is good for melee DPS. Darkmoon Card: Heroism, a reward from the Warlords Deck, is meh. A tank might use it, particularly while undergeared, or a DPS might want it for grinding mobs to lessen downtime. Honestly, underwhelming. But they all are. Truthfully, trinkets in Vanilla were awful.
Anyway, TL;DR: no Archaeology, no Jewelcrafting and no Inscription and, as such, no digging, no gems, no glyphs and no good Darkmoon trinkets.
2) Fishing, Cooking and First Aid are all useful
Let’s look at First Aid. Not only does bandaging restore a fair amount of health at higher levels (2000 health back over 8 seconds), but it’s really useful to heal yourself when you’re about to die. Players over the last few years don’t think of their own health, don’t use their personal cooldowns, don’t use health potions, don’t use healthstones. As someone who has raided as a holy paladin more often than not, especially back in Vanilla when AOE healing was rare, please, I implore you, train your First Aid and carry bandages with you everywhere you go.
Tip: It is okay to stop DPSing to bandage yourself. I promise.
So the first time my guild killed Lucifron, the first boss in Molten Core, I was dead. Why was I dead? Well, it couldn’t be avoided. Lucifron had this nasty ability called Impending Doom, which caused 2000 shadow damage after ten seconds. So anyone with a dispel magic would have to dispel the entire raid (no mass dispel!) and hope they got everyone before the dot exploded.
There I am, with my potions on cooldown, my bandages on cooldown and my healthstone gone (they were single-use back then!). And I get hit with Impending Doom. And I have less than 2000 health. And I know I’m going to die. But everything was on cooldown. So it wasn’t my fault. And it wasn’t the healers’ fault, either, because they were busy healing and dispelling. So I died. The goal is to stay alive as long as possible, through any means necessary. That includes bandages. RESPECT THE BANDAGEZ.
Fishing and Cooking, as I’ve mentioned previously, go hand-in-hand and can be incredibly useful for late-game buffs. That means raiders are going to fork over their hard-earned gold for your fish or various foods.
Additionally, fishing is basically required in order to summon Gahz’ranka in Zul’Gurub! (Who, BTW, drops the Tome of Polymorph Turtle. Back in the day, you had sheep and that was it, unless you got lucky off Gahz’ranka, which is why people to this day still call it “sheeping” something rather than “polymorph”. Then Polymorph: Pig appeared as a trained skill, IIRC.)
Oh, one of the few appearance-changing items in the game at the time, Savory Deviate Delight, can always be relied upon to be bought by people who want to turn into a ninja or a pirate. The recipe is simple, one Deviate Fish, and Mild Spices from a trade vendor. The Recipe: Savory Deviate Delight drops from mobs in the Barrens, so it’s well-worth taking the time to visit there. (And, you know, immediately leave General chat for the duration. Ugh. Barrens chat.)
3) Herbalism and Alchemy
Much like today, herbs and potions/elixirs/flasks are always going to be in demand so long as people are running challenging content. Whether that’s level 55+ dungeons like Scholomance or a 45-man Baron run in Stratholme or stepping foot inside Zul’Gurub or Molten Core or tiptoeing down to Onyxia, alchemy’s products will always be in demand, from the major mana and even health potions to the flasks.
As such, herbs will also always be in demand. Some good ones to stock up on include Ghost Mushrooms, Golden Sansam, Dreamfoil, Mountain Silversage, and, of course, Black Lotus, as every flask recipe in the game requires one and they’re super rare. Oh, and Icecap is definitely useful, too.
Tip: Tauren get a natural +15 boost to herbalism.
Herbalism and Alchemy obviously go very well together, so I’d recommend picking up both if you grab one.
One major difference between Ye Olde Days and now is flasks require Alchemy Labs to create them. Right now, on retail WoW, you can create all your flasks or potions or elixirs or transmutes anywhere. In town, on a mountain top, inside a dungeon, anywhere. In Vanilla WoW, there were exactly two alchemy labs, special areas where you could create flasks. Do you know where they were? Well, one was inside Blackwing Lair and the other, more reasonable one, was inside Scholomance. And I’m not talking two rooms in, either. Both are placed well-inside these instances. As such, your flasks not only take materials to make, but also time and effort to get to Scholomance (more reasonably than BWL) and to clear down to the alchemy lab. Flasks are expensive, requiring the very rare Black Lotus herb, other herbs, plus the time and energy to craft them. Alchemists would likely do well to make sure they have materials for a flask any time they go to Scholomance. Of course, it would be helpful to have a flask recipe, right? Right.
So where do you get flask recipes? Not from a trainer, oh no. They’re drops. The caster flask recipe, Recipe: Flask of Supreme Power, drops off Ras Frostwhisper, in Scholomance. As such, if you’re an alchemist, even if you don’t know the recipe for a single flask, kill Ras and you might get that recipe. So make sure you go in loaded with Dreamfoil, some Mountain Silversage and, of course, Black Lotuses and Crystal Vials, even if you don’t know any flasks, because you might luck out with Ras.
Recipe: Flask of Distilled Wisdom, typically the healer flask, drops from Balnazzar in Strat Live. (Fun fact: I was using these in Wrath because there was literally nothing better for healing for a holy paladin.)
Tip: For money-making, focus on Flask of Supreme Power, Flask of Distilled Wisdom and Flask of the Titans and try to always have mats for at least Supreme Power when you visit Scholomance.
4) Tailoring & Enchanting
Tailoring and Enchanting are a good pair of professions for a cloth-wearer. Enchanting will always be in demand and, as a tailor, you can disenchant stuff you create for dust, shards, etc. However, it’s important to note that, back in the day, there were no enchanting vellums. That means you had to actually find an enchanter and ask them to perform the enchant for you, usually with your mats, and then you definitely wanted to tip them gold, depending on how difficult the enchant was to farm up. Crusader? Tip a lot. Fiery? Less so.
The flip side here, for enchanters, is that it’s hard to level up enchanting because you can’t just enchant vellums to sell! Still, it’s always going to be in demand once you get to max, or close to max, level. However, just like now, the most valuable enchants are generally the ones that take effort — or rep — so be prepared.
As to tailoring, some of the neat patterns you can get as a tailor give you an item that is BOP, so you can’t sell it, so it’s worthwhile for you to be a cloth-wearer as a tailor because then you can equip those items. For example, the Pattern: Robe of the Archmage is able to be looted by anyone and sold, but the ROBE ITSELF is BOP, so only a mage would want to create it, because it’s class-locked to a mage. (Fun fact: the alcove to the right on your way up to Mother Smolderweb is where the mobs that can drop this are.) Meanwhile, Balnazzar in Strat Live drops the Pattern: Truefaith Vestments, and Truefaith Vestments? BOP. And class-locked to priests. Meanwhile, Darkmaster Gandling in Scholomance drops the Pattern: Robe of the Void, which gives the BOP Robe of the Void, class-locked to warlocks.
Of course, beyond the sweet armor you can craft yourself, tailors also make… bags. Bags are going to be at a premium. 16-slot bags are typically the best bags you’ll use in Classic. Finding a Traveler’s Backpack is basically like hitting the jackpot. Meanwhile, one of the best bags is the Mooncloth Bag. It’s identical, except it’s crafted and it will likely be expensive (which is good for you, as the tailor!). Why? It requires:
Mooncloth. The recipe itself is hard enough to get, as it’s a limited-item available from a vendor in Winterspring. Making Mooncloth requires two Felcloth and it’s on a 4-day cooldown.
Pattern: Mooncloth Bag. As to where this comes from, Wowhead is saying Lethon, who’s one of the green dragons, but it also used to drop off of random, high-level mobs. Keep an eye out for it and snatch it up immediately if you see it.
Until you get that, you can at least try to get the Runecloth Bag recipe, which may be sold from Qia in Winterspring (same one for Mooncloth), which is a 14-slot bag, which really isn’t bad comparatively. Easier to make and it’ll be in super-high demand.
Tip: Make friends with a skinner because each bag requires 2 Rugged Leather.
5) Skinning and Leatherworking
And speaking of skinning and leather, let’s look at Skinning and Leatherworking, my favourite professions, period. I started out with these professions in Vanilla and didn’t change for eons. It was towards the end of Vanilla that I swapped to mining for a while (Thorium Ore and Arcane Crystals sold quite well!) before, yes, dropping mining and going back to skinning. Skinning is really the only way to get “enough” leather to supply your Leatherworking. The other bonus here is that you don’t have to wait for a node to respawn. Skin what you kill.
Tip: Don’t loot everything at once. Loot one corpse, then skin it. Repeat for as many dead bodies are around you. Otherwise, people can skin your kills.
Also, there are Leatherworking Specialties that will mean you can’t craft certain items while you can craft others. You were, at least until Burning Crusade, stuck with your specialty, so choose wisely! That said, unlike the Tailoring patterns I mentioned previously, these items are not BOP, so even if you pick the “wrong” specialty, you can sell stuff and purchase what would benefit you more. The specialties are as follows:
Elemental Leatherworking: Meant for rogues (and feral druids)
Tribal Leatherworking: Essentially meant for moonkins/resto druids (there’s a decent couple of melee pieces in here, too)
Dragonscale Leatherworking: Gear for hunters and shammies
I don’t have a comprehensive list of all the items yet, but that should change at launch, or closer to it. Still, those are decent guidelines.
It’s important to note that, outside of the specialty gear, a leatherworker creates both leather and mail gear, while a tailor is just cloth gear and a blacksmith is just plate. Leatherworkers can sell to rogues, druids of any kind, hunters and shaman (12 total specs – 13 if you count holy paladins in search of spellpower mail!). As such, especially if you can get a couple of rare recipes, it’s definitely worthwhile to be a Skinner/Leatherworker. I made a lot of money off the Black Dragonscale Leggings, personally. That said, don’t be a paladin and skinner, because a paladin can’t wield a dagger like Finkle’s Skinner. (They can, however, wield the Zulian Slicer, but ZG won’t be out for a while yet.)
Additionally, a skinner is really important for a guild. Why?
Pristine Hide of the Beast can drop from skinning the Beast in UBRS and is a valuable reagent for some great gear.
Core Leather: Skinned from Core Hounds in Molten Core, Core Leather is necessary for several fire-resistance recipes and more. For the love of all that’s holy, LOOT YOUR HOUNDS SO YOUR GUILD SKINNER CAN SKIN THEM. Ahem. Thank you.
Tips: Don’t skin as a paladin and pick a leatherworking specialty that will ideally benefit you.
6) Mining and Blacksmithing
I’ll talk about Engineering later, just know that mining is useful for just those two professions. That said, miners not only collect ore, but smelt them into bars. Smelting is no longer part of the profession in retail — raw ore is used by Blacksmiths and Engineers — but it was a big part of the profession in Vanilla. A great way to make some money is to buy cheap ore and sell expensive bars. Or, combine bars to make a different kind of bar. A Bronze bar, for example. You don’t mine bronze, you have to take a Copper bar and a Tin bar and smelt them together to get the Bronze bar. Additionally, mining Thorium Veins in the later stages of the game meant you could get Arcane Crystals. These, in turn, are used in a transmute with a Thorium Bar to create the very-popular Arcanite Bar. Some of the best weapons and armor in the entire game require many of these, including Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. The precursor, Sulfuron Hammer, requires 50 Arcanite Bars, for example.
Tip: Be friends with an alchemist and tip them well for using their transmute cooldown. It’s a 2-day cooldown.
As to Blacksmithing, full disclosure, I never had a Blacksmith back in the day. However, you do have a choice between Armorsmith and Weaponsmith, which is then further broken down into Axesmith, Hammersmith and Swordsmith. You’re not going to be making money off these recipes, largely, because the materials are end-game items from Molten Core in many cases. You should select what you think will be most useful to your guild. In most cases, this will be Armorsmith.
7) Engineering
This is another profession I have little experience with. But, true story, one night, we all convinced our buddy Majik to drop… I think it was enchanting (?) in favour of Engineering. Specifically, goblin engineering. And we helped him to level it, helping him buy mats and all that. Why? Field Repair Bot 74A. This is partly because a group of us could never find a tank and so we’d 5-man stuff with three clothies, my cat tanking, and a priest. We all died. A lot. Anyway, we made him become an engineer for the repair bot/vendor bot. And the jumper cables were fun, too.
Anyway, my point is, Engineers are useful. You can be either a Gnomish Engineer or a Goblin Engineer. Like Leatherworking, you’re stuck with the specialty, so again, choose wisely.
Which to choose? Well, Goblins get the jumper cables, so if you’re a hunter or a rogue or a night elf who can avoid dying in a wipe, that’s useful. You can try to rez a healer. Goblins also tend to have more, uh, explosives. Gnomes have more utility items.
Engineers can also craft scopes for increased stats on ranged weapons as well as ammunition (yes, guns and bows and crossbows all need ammo!). Their Thorium Shells can be turned in for Thorium Headed Arrows. Man, even just writing this makes me feel like I should make my hunter an engineer, but I genuinely love skinning dragons and crafting armor… Anyway, probably a good choice for a hunter.
Next Time…
Whew. That was a lot of information. I hope it was useful! As for myself, I’m planning on Skinning/LW for my hunter, Herbalism/Alchemy for my paladin and Tailoring/Enchanting for my mage. My brother is, I believe, aiming for Mining/Blacksmithing on his warrior, Engineering/Leatherworking on his rogue (he’ll get the ore from his warrior, the leather from me) and Tailoring/Enchanting on his mage.
Next time, we’ll have some more general bits of advice, this time about various zones. Stay tuned!
Hi, folks! How the heck are you? How’ve you been in the last, oh, two and a half years?
Overall, I’ve been doing well. However, an update on my life is not while I’m writing today. No, today, I’m writing because I can’t sleep and because WoW Classic is coming out on August 27, 2019.
Naturally, I am psyched. Anyone who has spent any appreciable amount of time reading this blog or listening to various podcasts of mine will be wholly unsurprised that I am psyched. (Also, my brother is psyched! TOGETHER, WE ARE SO EXCITED.)
That said, since the launch date announcement was made, I’ve been wondering if the 13ish years or so since I first started playing WoW (October of 2005) have perhaps dulled my memory a little.
I know that I have rarely had as much fun in this game as during the Tier 0.5 questline. The thrill of getting my Rhok’delar is still, to this day, a highlight of my WoW career, if you will. Downing Venoxis for the first time on April 1, 2006 (no, for real!) was amazing because it was my first real raid boss down. So I had a lot of fun back in the day. Just the fact that I have frequently said “back in the day” over the course of the last decade or more proves that I have some very, very fond memories of Vanilla WoW.
However, having played Vanilla WoW for more than a year before Burning Crusade came out, I remember a lot of things that, well, sucked. I thought I’d write a bit about them here. Now, it’s important to note that I am not in the Classic Beta, so if you are, please feel free to let me know if I’m dreadfully wrong about something. What I’m talking about is based entirely on my Vanilla experiences and memories, and perhaps some Wowhead Classic info.
Getting to 60
Listen, I don’t care who you are, or how much you love levelling — getting to 60 was a grind in Vanilla. For quite some time, there weren’t enough quests in the world to get you to 60. A common happening was people getting a couple of stacks of mage food and water (yes, separate stacks, if they were mana users!) and hitting up the Eastern Plaguelands for a few hours. Regularly. Now, I know that they did fix this at some point and I would presume that’s prior to the patch we’ll be starting at, but it was still a pain to get to 60. It took me 30 days played — full, actual, real days of my life — to get to 60 on Kurn. It took me less time on Madrana, but I did get a lot of experience by healing my way through dungeons.
Mounts
No mount until you’re 40, no epic mount until you’re 60 and you should expect to spend a fair amount of money on that epic mount unless you’re exalted with your Alterac Valley faction. Or a paladin, in which case get ready for an epic quest chain that culminates in a really difficult fight in Scholomance. Or a warlock, in which case you should expect a truly insane quest chain that ends with craziness in Dire Maul. (Why yes, I HAVE healed both of these encounters on my paladin, thank you for asking.)
Combat Ratings/Stats/Skills
Defense rating. Hit rating. Parry thrashes. Alllllll of these were things you had to be aware of. Now, to be fair, I only ever made sure I was hit-capped when I was fighting Magmadar in Molten Core, because I had learned Tranquilizing Shot from the drop off Lucifron, so it didn’t really make too much of a difference to me until I realized its importance in Burning Crusade. But defense rating mattered if you were a tank. Knowing you could get parry-thrashed was literally something I only learned in Wrath of the Lich King, but has been around since Vanilla. Oh, and who can forget weapon skill?
Hot tip: if you’re level 60, go to the Blasted Lands and beat on the Servants of Allistarj around the Dark Portal for a couple of hours to grind up your weapon skills. They’re basically unkillable unless you kill the thingy they’re bound to, so you can keep beating on them to level up your weapon. Or, better yet, work on your weapon skills as you go, swapping weapons whenever possible to make sure you get them up there. There is little that feels more like you’re wasting all of your time than upping your weapon skills.
Ammo
Dear hunters, Blizzard hates you and, as such, you have to use a dedicated bag slot as a quiver or ammunition pouch and you have to use arrows or bullets. Well, you don’t have to, I don’t think, but you should because most of those quivers/pouches have a ranged hasted bonus. Also, ammo could be expensive! There was rep-based ammo you could buy that did more damage than the typical stuff, but hooooo boy, was it expensive. Also, you could run out of ammo. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR AMMO. (Who me, speak from experience? Never!)
Reagents
Mages had to carry Arcane Powder for Arcane Brilliance. They also had to carry Runes of Teleportion and Runes of Portals. Paladins had to carry Symbols of Kings for all their greater blessings (which only lasted 15 minutes apiece, FYI – compared to the normal ones that lasted 5 minutes!), plus Symbols of Divinity for Divine Intervention. (Okay, real talk, I HAVE MISSED DIVINE INTERVENTION SO MUCH AND I WILL HAPPILY CARRY ANYTHING I HAVE TO IN ORDER TO CAST IT AGAIN.) And so on for druids and Gift of the Wild/rebirth (battle rez) and and priests and fortitude. Basically, if you had a buff, you had a reagent for the longer version of it.
Spell Ranks
Now, let’s be clear — I always trained up my spell ranks and I made great use of spell down-ranking, particularly as a holy paladin, so to me, this isn’t something that was unpleasant. However, other people not training their spell ranks was a thorn in my side throughout, well, my entire WoW career until they removed ranks entirely.
Keys
Again, I loved the hell out of my keys. I really, truly, absolutely did. What I did not love was the bag space they took. In my research, I see that the keyring was added in Patch 1.11.0, so this should be available in WoW Classic, once you get your first key. This is good because no one wants to wait for someone to fly all the way back to Ironforge to get the key they left in their bank so that they could enter the instance. Which instance? MANY INSTANCES required keys. The back door to Stratholme required a key. Dire Maul North and West required keys. Scholomance required a key. UBRS didn’t only require a key, it required you to FORGE the Unadorned Seal of Ascension with gems from bosses in LBRS and then it became a RING. At least the patch we’re starting out with has a bunch of Unadorned Seals dropping and many gem drops in LBRS.
I should note that Engineers with a Powerful Seaforium Charge or rogues with levelled lockpicking could open most locked doors.
Rep & Cooldowns & Professions
Kurn was a skinner/leatherworker from day one. In the last 13 odd years, I’ve dropped skinning for mining on at least two separate occasions. I always come back to skinning. And it served me well in Vanilla! I was a dragonscale leatherworker (and thus made FREQUENT trips out to Peter Galen in freaking AZSHARA) and could craft the entire Black Dragonscale Mail set. Actually, Kurn can still craft every single dragonscale recipe in the game, thank you very much. And even the Red Dragonscale Breastplate, the recipe for which only dropped off of General Drakkisath in UBRS. But it was a pain to get to 300 skinning and especially hard to get to 300 leatherworking. What was more of a pain was doing the various rep grinds to get those sweet patterns.
Timbermaw Hold to Revered to get all kinds of feral Druid leather patterns
Thorium Brotherhood to Revered for all kinds of fire resist stuff including Black Dragonscale Boots
Cenarion Circle to Exalted to get nature resist stuff and some sweet agility mail
I don’t think I did quite all of that at the time. I probably got to Honored with Timbermaw and definitely got to Honored with Thorium Brotherhood. To be fair, I did not have it bad. I did have a cooldown (Refined Deeprock Salt – every three days!) and not a ton of rep to grind.
However. Did you know that it takes two Felcloth to make one Mooncloth? And that you can only make one Mooncloth every four days? And that the recipe for Mooncloth is only available once you reach Friendly with the Timbermaw?
There are a lot of things that no longer have cooldowns that once did, and the grinds for the reps are a lot harder than they once were. Exalted with Timbermaw can take you a day now, but back then? Back then, it was a months-long undertaking.
Oh, and one other thing — flasks were super rare because you could only make them at an alchemy lab. That meant either Scholomance or Blackwing Lair.
Respecs
This was pre-dual spec. And respeccing cost gold. And it got quite expensive to swap back and forth. It wasn’t uncommon for people to level as one spec and then eventually respec into their “raid spec” that they would use more frequently. For example, when my brother hit 60 on his druid, he went from being a life-long bear to being a resto druid. This is about when he started levelling a rogue…
Meanwhile, I levelled my paladin as holy from day one. It took me forever to kill things, but damn, did I ever know how to heal things. Back in the day, a holy priest as known as the only kind of healer you really wanted in a dungeon with you. I did a Strat UD run at like, 56 or something on Madrana as holy, wearing a bunch of Blue Dragonscale mail (didn’t have the bonuses that came with wearing all plate back then), and the ret pally in our group, who had been a bit wary of me, was like “HOLY CRAP, I HAD NO IDEA PALLIES COULD HEAL SO WELL”. Honestly, the fact that any healer can heal any instance these days is something I’ll miss, because it was legitimately difficult to heal a bunch of things as a paladin back in the day.
And?
There are other pains from Vanilla, I’m certain of it. These are a few. And I don’t even mind a lot of them. But they’re things that came up as “oh mannnnnn” moments as I’ve been thinking about Classic.
What are you looking forward to most about Classic? What are you least looking forward to about it? Are you even going to play Classic?
(Spoilers abound for Legion, especially around Leatherworking. You have been warned.)
I’m quite enjoying Legion, but there are a couple of issues I have with professions. Don’t get me wrong, this is probably the best expansion since Wrath, I just have some… questions and comments regarding professions.
First of all, everything Gravenscale and Dreadleather for a Leatherworker goes grey at 780, assuming you don’t have any rank 3 recipes. By itself, this is fine, in my opinion. I knew we’d have a challenging expansion in terms of professions when I had to hurl myself off various cliffs and waterfalls, chasing a moose. (That’s a whole other story!)
The problem here is the acquisition of the various Rank 3 recipes. Let’s look at Gravenscale stuff:
Armbands: From elite Skrog Tidestompers/Wavecrashers at a ridiculously low rate
Grips: Drop from Advisor Melandrus in Court of Stars (Mythic only dungeon)
Hauberk: Drop from Latosius in Black Rook Hold only on Mythic
Treads: Drop from Cordana Felsong in Vault of the Wardens
Spaulders: ???
Girdle: Strap Bucklebolt in the Underbelly in Dalaran for 1500g and 500 Sightless Eyes
Leggings & Helm: Exalted with Valarjar
Of these items, the cheapest to make are the Armbands, which require no Bloods of Sargeras, though 110 Stormscale. The Treads, Girdle and Spaulders (who even knows where that recipe drops?!) all require 12 Stormscale and 2 Bloods of Sargeras, which is at least somewhat better than the Leggings, Helm and Hauberk, all of which require Felhide. (Though, interestingly, the Hauberk does not require Bloods…)
Of all of those items that drop in dungeons, none are a 100% drop rate.
It seemed to me that getting the Rank 3 belts for Dreadleather and Gravenscale were my best option. It took me a couple of hours, but I got all the crap I needed in the Underbelly and got my recipes (both Rank 2 and Rank 3, btw).
I was able to get to 790 pretty quickly, as my new hobby is farming basilisks for scales and Bloods of Sargeras, and then, disaster — the recipes turned green. Still, it wasn’t intolerable. I was able to get to 795 with a bit of effort and then 796 and finally, 797.
Ladies and gentlemen, getting from 797 to 798 required that I make nearly 40 belts. (I think the official count was 38, as best as I can tell.) That is 456 Stormscales (not a problem) and 76 Bloods of Sargeras. That’s where the problem was. Look, make it take 10, even 15 crafts to level up on a green recipe, but 38?! THIRTY-EIGHT. With two BOP items for each?! Ridiculous.
I guess RNG worked out for me though because I got from 798 to 799 on 13 belts and then, hilariously, I got from 799 to 800 with one single belt.
I hit 800 Leatherworking last night, before the Darkmoon Faire arrived, which was my goal. I don’t think that waiting for a monthly event should be your best chance of getting those last five skill points. I mean, it was good to know it was happening and, had I been stuck under 800 before the Faire left, I certainly would have taken advantage of it, but I don’t think it should almost be a requirement. I managed to get to 800 LW the old-fashioned way and I’m pretty pleased with myself, but the journey to 800 was difficult and I have spent way too much time killing way too many basilisks. (Current count is somewhere over 3000.)
And now, now we turn to Skinning, because there are some Issues.
First, I should note that miners and herbalists have it good, these days. No one can steal your node. Nodes exist for everyone and deplete for people individually. This is a great change. As someone with at least two herbalists and one miner, I can appreciate this. (I don’t want to talk about the quests related to these yet, though. More on that when I’ve maxed out those professions.)
Skinners, however, get screwed.
In this expansion, they got rid of mob tagging. On the whole, a great change. If you tag the mob, other people can tag it and you can all loot after you defeat the thing. (Well, same-faction tagging, anyway.)
Skinners, though, have the problem in that they need to have everything off of the corpse before we can skin. So if I’ve looted the body but my brother, Fog, who killed it with me, has not, then I cannot skin the corpse until my brother has looted the body too.
This is problematic for a couple of reasons:
Some people just don’t loot their mobs (which I do NOT understand at all! Looting is practically the whole point of the game!)
Other skinners will purposely tag all your mobs, let you do all the work and then deliberately will not loot, waiting for you to leave before they loot and then can skin.
The fact that when you loot, you loot ALL nearby bodies makes things even more difficult, because you can start skinning a couple of mobs and then other skinners can come running up and skin the rest. This used to be mitigated by not looting a corpse until you were ready to skin it, but that hasn’t worked since before AOE loot was introduced. This not only is still a problem, but is exacerbating the problem of other skinners purposely tagging your mobs, because if you loot one of them, you loot them all, giving them the ability to loot and start skinning when they feel like it.
That said, I’m pretty good at dealing with this nonsense, personally. If someone tags my mobs, I will go forth and tag ALL THE MOBS and just sit back and wait until they take off. I will feign if needed, I will get my pet to feign, and they may end up dead due to pulling all of the mobs. The lesson here is that if you’re a jerk to me, I will do whatever I can do to kill you in-game. Don’t mess with me, I farmed Elemental Plateau in Burning Crusade!
But we shouldn’t have to do that. If I have tagged a mob initially, you should not be able to prevent me from skinning it. Period. That’s where the problem lies.
Additionally, skinning in Suramar is a nightmare if you have a small cap on your Ancient Mana, because if there’s Ancient Mana on the mob that you cannot pick up, surprise! You can’t skin the corpse. That needs to be remedied ASAP and is, honestly, one of the main reasons I haven’t done a lot in Suramar yet.
Finally, Felhide. This is only acquired by skinning the Felhide Gargantuan when it shows up as a World Quest. This severely limits the number of Felhides that exist at any given time. On the one hand, that’s fine, because it means Felhides are valuable, but on the other, the demand and supply rise and fall with the RNG of the World Quests. I’d rather they be an extremely rare skin, even rarer than the Bloods of Sargeras, to be honest. There were two Felhide World Quests today and the price of Felhide is currently hovering around 300g apiece. Last Sunday, it was around 800g apiece. Do miners and herbalists have this RNG-World-Quest nonsense for any of their items? Honestly, I’d love to know.
Anyways. I’m enjoying the expansion overall. Kurn is 110 and I’ve still got a lot of quests to do in various zones. My shaman is 101 due entirely to mining and herbing and I’ve got Madrana halfway to 101 after opening up her class hall. (Loved the Dalaran Crater bit, check out this screenshot. We’re twins! Lightforge Armor and the Stormpike tabard FTW!)
Oh, and I’ve finally hit more than a million gold. Yay! How’s Legion treating you?
a) I actually resubbed for 30 days shortly after pre-ordering the expansion last Monday (and by “shortly”, I mean “within four hours”)
and
b) I boosted a warlock from 1-90
I know, I know. The poll results said I should boost a brand-new monk. I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. I have absolutely no desire to play a monk outside of a tiny bit of curiosity when it comes to mistweavers. I did not want to play a monk.
Similarly, I kind of thought it, well, silly, to play a warlock. I already have a ranged DPS class with a pet — my hunter. So why the warlock?
Well, the first reason is because I’ve always been interested in warlocks in terms of a playstyle. DoT management has always intrigued me in theory. The second reason is that I’ve tried, on more than one occasion, to level a warlock. It never goes well (even with heirlooms — and I even have the heirloom RING!) and I have no interest in levelling a character from 1-90 or even 1-60 and then boosting from 60.
The third reason is that hey, I don’t much like the other options I felt I realistically had and so went with the warlock. It was the second choice in my poll, so why the heck not?
I’ll say this up front, I’m a bad warlock. I’ve spent about an hour at the training dummies and I am just not doing a great job. Part of this is UI-related (I need a good dot timer that ISN’T DoTimer because DoTimer keeps crashing my WoW, oddly) and part of it is that I’m sure I’m just not comprehending the subtleties of the class yet. Happily for the rest of the population, I have not grouped up for anything at this juncture, because I clearly don’t know what in the hell I’m doing and do not wish to inflict my idiocy on other people. You’re welcome! :)
That said, part of the reason for even using the boost was to help my professions along in the sense that I have:
– skinning/leatherworking on Kurn
– alchemy (elixir)/jewelcrafting on Madrana
– herbalism/mining on my shaman
– alchemy (potion)/enchanting on my priest
– alchemy (transmute)/inscription on my warrior
Those are all maxed. This means that, on Eldre’Thalas, I am missing just blacksmithing, engineering and tailoring as primary professions. I might bring my mage back from Skywall (at some point) and drop his herbalism for tailoring… but the point is, I wanted my boosted character to have blacksmithing and engineering.
Now, I could have, perhaps I should have, rolled a death knight on Eldre’Thalas, levelled five levels to 60 and then boosted that to 90, with 600 BS/600 Engineering. But I thought about it and realized that I really have zero desire to play a death knight. I don’t enjoy tanking and I enjoy melee DPS even less than I enjoy tanking.
So I boosted the warlock to 90 (male dwarf, FYI) and have the plan to make him a blacksmith and an engineer.
Problem: OH MY GOD, THE MATS.
It was brought to my attention that, previously in the expansion, Blacksmithing was changed and one is now able to use just Ghost Iron Ore to level to 600.
@kurnmogh Is this where I tell you that in 5.3 you got a way to power level Blacksmithing just using Ghost iron? ^^
Ultimately, though it was good to know, it was kind of useless because Engineering requires many of the same materials as Blacksmithing. Additionally, the total number of pieces of Ghost Iron Ore required is over ten thousand. Even though it’s abundant and I could buy a bunch I’m sure, if I had to go mining in the old worlds for things like Thorium and Cobalt for Engineering, then I decided to do it “old school” for Blacksmithing, too, by just going around and mining for both professions while I was going to be out there anyway.
Total pieces of various types of ore/stone needed for BOTH Blacksmithing AND Engineering the old-school way: 5593.
Total pieces of various types of ore/stone needed for BOTH Blacksmithing AND Engineering with the “new” BS Ghost Iron Ore method: ~12000.
… yeah, OLD SCHOOL IT IS.
So, I made a spreadsheet because things just got complicated. Of course, it doesn’t include things like “Alicite” or “Wool Cloth” type materials. I have most of that stuff just lying around in my many bank tabs of my bank guild. I just tracked the stones and ores. Of course, in order to count up all the ores I needed, I had to look up the mats at various guides and then MULTIPLIED the number of bars they were asking for by two, in many cases, in order to come up with how much ore I needed. That’s not the case with things like Thorium, but is the case with something like Adamantite. So I broke down the number of pieces of all the types of ore needed for Blacksmithing and then did the same for Engineering. Then I hauled out Altoholic and searched through all my toons (on that realm, excluding the Apotheosis guild bank) and put in a column stating how many of these things I already had. Turns out I had a lot of Rough Stone, Coarse Stone and even Dense Stone. I also had a lot of Iron Ore. Then I put in the “Total I Need” column at the end, showing me how many I needed to have IN MY BAGS after mining to ensure I’d have just about enough. In the case of Copper Ore, I had to mine 369 pieces. In the case of Thorium, 609 pieces.
So I designated Saturday, March 15th, as #MININGDAY2014. Here’s some of what I did.
So. Much. Thorium.On to Fel Iron.Adamantite took a long time, but was marginally less awful than Fel Iron.The worst, to date. Cobalt was painful.
So I did everything through Fel Iron Ore on Saturday, did Adamantite and Cobalt on Sunday and plan to tackle the rest later this week, as time allows. I’ll also be spending some time on Timeless Isle, practicing being a warlock, once I get around to doing a bit more reading.
As an aside, I’m finding something really interesting is happening since I’ve been back: many people are acting as though I don’t know what in the hell I’m doing.
Guys, I may have taken a break for over a year (17 months minus a week in there around Christmas, actually) but it’s not like I don’t know how to play the game. Sure, I didn’t know about the Ghost Iron Ore method for Blacksmithing, but even still, I discounted that method once I had learned about it, because 10,000+ pieces of Ghost Iron Ore versus fewer than 6000 pieces of stuff just doesn’t make sense to me, especially because I had to mine some of the old stuff for Engineering anyhow.
And yet, 90% of the comments I’ve received about this have been challenging my logic for choosing to mine old-school materials.
I know people are mostly trying to help and some are confused by my choices, but for crying out loud, I didn’t play for 17 months. It’s not like I forgot everything I ever knew about the game. ;) It’s changed, but it hasn’t changed that much. And it’s not as though I don’t keep up on the vast majority of changes. Or as if I don’t do my own research on things. While it’s really interesting to be on the side of things where I have to look stuff up and I have to confirm various things, it’s less interesting to be repeatedly challenged by people who think they know better.
To be honest, it’s making me think a lot about how I’ve acted in the past, when I’ve been on top of my game and have known things with absolute conviction. While I maintain that any advice I’ve given out in the past about this game has, at the time, been accurate, I can’t help but wonder if newer people (or at least less-knowledgeable people) were frustrated with the advice I’d offered to them. I know that I’m right about certain things (old-school mats vs. Ghost Iron Ore in this particular situation, FOR ME, for instance), but part of what fatigued me over the course of my WoW career was the constant questioning of my decisions. Have I, at some point in the past, caused fatigue or frustration to someone else when I’ve genuinely been trying to help? I’m not talking about feedback to people in my raid groups or guilds, but random holy paladins who were, as I saw it, Doing Things Wrong in random dungeons in the past. Or hunters. I mean, okay, the melee hunters in this Wailing Caverns run I once was snarky to, I’m not apologetic about. At all. :P I mean people to whom I offered unsolicited advice.
I’m trying to figure out which scenario I’m running up against here…
1) People are offering me advice and are trying to be helpful, despite the fact that it is actually not going to help me in the least.
2) People are offering me advice and are trying to be helpful because they think they know better than I do.
While I’d really like to believe the majority of people offering advice fall into group 1, I can’t help but think there are at least a few in group 2 and possibly some people who are both.
Again, this is causing me to be introspective. Every time I’ve offered advice to someone, I have tried to be helpful and have tried to make sure that the advice WOULD be helpful. But I know that many times, I’ve seen the problem as a very basic “oh, they don’t know about X, Y or Z, LET ME INFORM THEM” problem, thus falling into category 2. Have I been wrong in the past? Is it a lot more nuanced than I’ve seen it? Should I have been less willing to offer advice until I was certain someone needed it? I don’t know. I can’t help but think that if I didn’t offer advice, then maybe no one else would have. I can’t help but think that if people keep their mouths shut and adopt an attitude of “not my problem”, the community suffers. And what if people who are obviously struggling don’t ask for advice? What if people just sit there quietly, unsure of what they’re doing, but remain silent rather than open their mouths and be thought a fool?
Even after an extended break, I didn’t think I’d ever be on the “oh, no, Kurn, do it THIS WAY” side of things again. But apparently, I am. It’s a weird thing to go from being someone who knows damn near everything there is to know about the game to, well, not knowing, for example, that Blacksmithing is available to level from 1-600 with just Ghost Iron Ore. The last time I was this out of touch with the game itself was before I hit 60 on my first toon. And I don’t know if I like it. No, okay, I don’t like it. And I definitely don’t like being challenged by others on my various decisions, but I’ve done that to others in the past. I’m not even sure that the random, unsolicited advice I’ve given in the past is altogether justifiable, although I would think that telling a death knight “tank” to use Blood Presence is, you know, something they should do regardless of how tactfully that may or may not be put…
I guess I’m just trying to work out how I feel about people’s recent behaviour towards me and how my reaction to that may mirror how other people may have felt when I gave those others unsolicited advice. I mean, I’m thankful that people want to help me out. I appreciate the sentiment. And I like talking to people about the game. But maybe doing it in a way that is less challenging and more helpful (but not condescending!) is a better way to get one’s point across. Yeah, I’m wondering how I could do that, myself. Certainly, it’s a fine line to tread, but I know that I’d be more receptive to advice given in such a manner and I imagine others would be, too.
—
Today, March 17th, 2014, is the last day that you’ll be able to buy Kurn’s Guide to Being a Kick-Ass Raider at its introductory price, by the way! The launch sale ends tomorrow, so don’t hesitate to check it out!
