One of my goals when it came to playing WoW was to be self sufficient. Being able to craft what ever I needed or farm the materials I required was something I wanted to be able to do. Essentially cutting out the middle man that is the auction house. In reality though this is a costly endeavor but my OCD prevents me from saying no! My profession list is as followsArravis-
- Primary Engineering 450/Mining 450
- Secondary First Aid 450/Cooking 435ish
Artorin-
- Primary Leather Working 443ish/Skinning 450
- First Aid 400ish
Gandreolf-
- Primary Enchanting 450/Tailoring 450
Lanora-
- Primary Inscription 445ish/Herbalism 450
Llina-
- Primary Alchemy 450/Herbalism 450
Saravid-
- Primary Jewel Crafting 450/Mining 450
- Secondary Fishing 400ish/Cooking 450
Skyru-
- Primary Blacksmith 444ish/Mining 450
- Secondary First Aid 450
The two characters that are left out of this list are Jadedfury and Skillet because sadly I lost all desire to level up their professions. I think they are both dual gatherer herbalism and skinning. I wonder if my lack of a crafting profession is why I find it hard to level their trade skills?
Jadedfury has 400 ish first aid but I haven't spent the time to level up skillets when it fell behind in the early 20's.
I have epic flying on two of my characters, Arravis and Llina. They have epic flying because they are my primary gatherers when it comes to materials. During BC I made a choice between my Artorin who was my main and Arravis. In the end it made more sense to give epic flying to a pure gatherer as opposed to Artorin who gathered by killing stuff. I'm looking foward to the next time I can afford epic flying because that means I can give it to who I really want too.
Interestingly enough the two characters that have ideal raiding professions are my Mage Gandreolf and my Warrior Skyru. All the rest have atleast one suboptimal profession when it comes to raiding. I'm really glad that Blizzard added bonuses to both gathering and crafting professions but I hope they make strides to improve gathering bonuses.
The crit bonus from skinning is about the only universally useful profession bonus from a gathering professions. Sure the stamina boost from mining is great for tanks but less then stellar when you compare it to the bonuses from the crafting professions.
Normalizing profession bonuses is something I am completely OK with. Having all crafting professions on my characters is something I can never afford to do. Especially since I don't have a dedicated main to focus on.
4 comments:
Isn't that all of the professions? I have a hard time keeping track since my alt-a-holism is spanning three games instead of just the one.
I did at one point strongly care about my WoW professions. Then I ended up with more money than I really had a use for on my main. It's kind of harmful to your motivation to level a trade when it's actually an inefficient use of your time to chase down the materials on the AH instead of buying the finished product.
Also, WoW is not entirely alt-friendly to tradeskillers. It would be kind of nice to be able to cut my own gems on an alt, but that would require a huge number of recipes that are trapped behind rep grinds I have no intention of repeating. Perhaps they should consider making tradeskill recipes account-bound, which was EQ2's solution to this problem.
Yes that is all of the professions. You are 100% correct that it is both a huge gold sink and money sink. Atleast at first anyway. I've found over time though I've made more gold off of the max professions I have then I have put into them.
Professions like Alch, Engineering, Enchanting, JC, and Inscription I've made aboue 3 or 4k gold for each of them. The time sink is a bit more of an issue but really JC and tailoring are the only professions right now that have a huge grind for them.
I think instead of recipes being account bound, that Rep should be account bound. Though I doubt they would remove such a huge time sink being able to share your rep with all of your alts would make acquiring the patterns less painful.
With me though each of my characters are their own entity. So while rep grinds suck... the fact that I don't view it as "ugh now I have to grind this on my alt" but rather "ok now it is time to start this grind so I can get x"
I don't think I would of had this kind of drive if everything wasn't BoE and I couldn't make my own gear. Which is funny because like you said... its far more efficient to gather the mats and have someone else make it for you.
Sharing rep from character to character would be kind of odd, since the other character never did anything for faction X. By contrast, there isn't really any in-game explanation for why some things are bound in the first place.
The specific example of Jewelcrafting bugs me because the baseline profession has access to so few of the recipes. If I level a tailor, I have a broad selection of stuff I can make, and an even broader selection if I buy up unbound patterns from the AH. A jewelcrafter with no rep can't cut anything above an uncommon gem, so it's not even worth having one if you're using rare or better gems. I've actually considered dropping tailoring for JC on my main, even though it goes well with Enchanting and I don't have a max level miner, because that's the only way I can ever see myself getting top milage out of the profession.
Well technically the JC patterns that matter now are epic gems which you get from the tokens. Sure you could gather the rep for the rare ones but the value of them has diminished greatly. Since you can start gathering tokens at lvl 70 for JC it is seemingly easier then grinding rep... well atleast compared to Kirin Tor rep where the only dailies are dungeon and profession dailies that give little rep.
Tailoring also brings up a unique issue. There are 2 factions that you need to be exalted with in order to learn the epic leg kits. Additionally you need Northrend dungeon master for the healing cape and northrend Loremaster for the dps version. To me those present a much bigger block then JC.
Tailoring is also the only profession that gives gear rewards for achievements something that Blizzard originally said they wouldn't do.
I concede your point on sharing rep though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sharing recipes doesn't make a whole lot of sense though since you are unlikely to level 2 characters with the same professions on the same server.
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