I’m sick. I feel like Mike Tyson sucker-punched me right between the eyes. And I’m sneezing. So instead of continuing my series on trap dancing, I’m going to use this professions post I’ve been holding onto and go back to bed. I’ll write up a few bosses in the trapdancing series tomorrow.
Your professions can make you money and help you raid. Deciding on which ones you want is important, because if you change your mind, you could waste a large sum of money. You need to figure out what you’re looking for. Are you trying to get a dps bonus for pve? Are you trying to make money? Do you want to be able to fill a specific roll in a raid? Sometimes your guild will ask you to pick up a profession because they need someone to have it. For example- enchanting allows you to shard drops that nobody needs, and the abyss crystals from those disenchanted epics can be used for some of the most expensive enchants in the game.
To start with, let’s go through some of the serious pve bonuses you get from professions.
- Jewelcrafting gives you the ability to wear special jewelcrafter only gems that are almost twice as strong as regular gems. Delicate dragon’s eye gives 27 agility and matches any of the colored sockets
- Blacksmithing gives you two extra prismatic gem sockets
- Engineering gives you BOP epic goggles
- Enchanting gives you a ring enchant
- Leatherworking gives you a superior bracer enchant, as well as a cheaper leg reinforcement
- Skinning gives you a small amount of crit
- Alchemy gives you mixology– increased duration and strength from flasks and elixirs you can make, as well as mad alchemist pots– same as a runic mana pot but cheaper, also gives health, and has a random potion effect
- Inscription gives you an extra glyph slot and a shoulder enchant
- Herbalism gives you a self heal
- Mining gives you some stamina
Many of the craftable entry level epics that people consider “pve bonuses” are bind on equip, so you can buy them. That’s why engineering doesn’t have anything listed here for the best crafted gun. I got mine from an engineer and never had to level it myself.
Of all of these, your best DPS increase will come from jewelcrafting. Those prismatic gems with 27 agility are currently the best out there. They also allow you to avoid having your meta gem requirement force you to wear any gems but the red agility ones unless you’re going for a socket bonus.
Next up is blacksmithing, enchanting, leatherworking, alchemy, and inscription. Each of these gives you about 64 attack power. Lastly, you have skinning, herbalism, and mining. Negligible benefits, but real money makers if you can stand farming.
Honestly, the money making potential of these professions is supposed to be a trade off compared to its PVE utility, however this is not always the case. People over on the elitist jerks gold making thread swear that jewelcrafting and inscription can be real money makers if you stay in for the long haul. Jewelcrafting is currently the best PVE bonus. The downside I guess is that (I hear) it costs upwards of 7000G to powerlevel it.
I picked blacksmithing and alchemy. Alchemy because I was drunk when deciding what I wanted, and figured that saving money on flasks would make it worth the relatively cheap cost to level. Blacksmithing because I wanted to be able to take advantage of the old trick of crafting and DEing mid 70 northrend craftable greens. Now that that trick is no longer profitable, I keep it because it cost so bloody much to level. I’ll probably get jewelcrafting on my healer alt, but he’s going to be stuck at 71 until they release dual specs.
Inscription does not give an extra slot, just the really nice shoulder enchants.
I know from experience that you can make an incredible amount of money from jewelcrafting. The meta’s sell very well, and once you have all the patterns you want/need you can use the tokens to buy the prismatic gems (not bop) and sell them for even more. At 200-250g per day just for a 5 minute daily it’s possible to make a lot of money for a small amount of time. Powerlevelling JC does suck, but spend 2 days on a miner and buy the rest of your mats and you can get all the way to 325ish for only about 1k gold.
I only came out down 1k gold or less powerleveling my JC skills.
@CJ- fixed, thanks.
@Darraxus- yeah, apparently having access to DEing makes it much less costly. The 7k number I got was if you have no way to reclaim any of your costs and have to buy all the mats.
One thing to remember about Alchemy…
While the benefits from Mixology are about the same as Leatherworking / Inscription / Enchanting / etc. they REQUIRE you to have a flask or potion active. The other professions are passive self-enchants, so you know they will be with you all ways.
My Alchemist gets full benefits from potions / elixirs / flasks in a raid, because I rarely go without self buffs there. However, when I’m in a BG or soloing I tend to not use consumables. Thus, I don’t get the benefit from my tradeskill.
Oh, and I LOVE Alchemy. LOVE IT. At one point I had max Alchemy on three separate characters.
@Dorgol I’m warming up to it… my main never sees the outside of Naxx unless it’s to visit dalaran for a minute or travel to malygos, so for me alchemy is just about a 100% uptime from the benefit :)
I’m gonna go and get JCing up soon… just need some capital first.
re: mixology and BGs
There is actually one flask that’s quite nice for non-arena PvP – the Lesser Flask of Toughness. With mixology, it’s 2 hours worth of 82 extra resilience. Persists through death like all flasks, and the mats are trivial (4 deadnettle and 1 goldclover).
Diggin’ the blog, Har. I’ve already referred one guildie to your how-to-use-the-spreadsheet post. Saved me a lot of time. ;)
(sorry I’ll be more mindful of the reply buttons in the future)
Thanks :)
Don’t forget that as new, epic gems are released with later WOTLK content, JC will lose some of it’s value and Blacksmithing will start gaining on it some!
Yeah, I’m going to take the opportunity of 3.1 to go and rewrite everything I’ve done, including this profession post. I imagine that if the epic gems are better than the prismatic ones though, we might eventually see epic prismatics.
About engineering.. they have 340 haste on gloves every minute, its best enchant on gloves in the game imao, btw tooltip still broken http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=54999
+ 3.1 bring some news :
# Flexweave Underlay now grants passive agility in addition to its normal effect.
# Nitro Boosts now grant passive critical strike rating in addition to their speed boost.
About googles, it uselees maybe only in pvp.
And sorry for my amazing english skills :)
Haste is very low itemization for hunters- once our steady shots are under the global cooldown, there’s very little we can get out of it. Even if they’re not, you’ll get very minor returns on haste.
Lastly, I’m going to redo many of these when 3.1 comes out. As of now, however, engineering is useless.