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Profession F.A.Q.

 

 

A profession is a craft or tradeskill that player characters may learn regardless of their character class, faction, or race. In the World of Warcraft, there are two types of professions, primary and secondary. Every player may have as many Secondary Professions as he or she desires but will only be able to choose two (2) Primary Professions.

 

Primary Professions

You are allowed to take up a maximum of 2 of these.

 

Most Primary professions are considered either a gathering or a crafting profession, and several of them go nicely together. For example, Herbalism is a gathering profession. A character with this skill is able to see surrounding herbs and plants in their minimap, and can collect them. Another Primary profession is Alchemy, which uses herbs that are gathered by characters with the Herbalism profession. Therefore, Herbalism is handy to have if you'd like to take up Alchemy. The same can be said for many of the other professions.

 

The exceptions to this are Enchanting, which produces its own materials, and Tailoring, which uses cloth dropped from most enemies.

 

Current Primary professions:

 

Gathering Professions	Crafting Professions	Stand Alone Professions
Herbalism Mining Skinning	Alchemy Blacksmithing Engineering Jewelcrafting Leatherworking	Enchanting Tailoring

 

In the next Expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Inscriptions will be introduced. It is thought to be similar to enchanting, as it adds features to spells and abilities, in the way Enchanting adds to bonuses to armor and weapons.

 

Secondary Professions

These are skills that are very handy, and make life a lot easier for your characters. You may have all 4 of these professions, as well as your 2 Primary ones. The Secondary professions are:

• Cooking - Learn to cook food that you pick up from enemies, or from Fishing. Cooked food can add temporary bonuses to a character.

• First Aid - A must. Create bandages and anti-venom potions to heal yourself before, after or mid-fight.

• Fishing - Using a rod and bait, find a nice river, lake or sea shore and try your luck. As well as catching fish, which can be cooked, sold or fed to a Hunter's pet, you occasionally find treasure.

 

What professions are best for a Warlock?
Professions are a personal choice, so the best advice is to chose one you enjoy doing. That said, there are a few choices that can make you very self sufficient and life a little easier.

Tailoring - One of the best professions at later levels due to the requirement of it to make and wear the Frozen Shadoweave Set or the Spellstrike Pieces. Tailoring can be easy to 'power level' when you reach the higher levels though, so you may want to consider purely gathering skills while leveling to sell off the findings and build your wealth. For example, taking Herbalism and Skinning can see you make a nice little pot of gold and are easily done while leveling. Then, upon reaching level 70, you can drop one of them, take up tailoring and burn through the creations to get to the max skill level.

Tip: If you do plan on doing this, make a mule or three to hold all the linen, wool, silk you collect while leveling. This will save you having to go and farm and/or spend up on the Auction House to get the amount you need. This tailoring leveling guide will show you how to get your tailoring skill up from 0 to 375 using only recipes that require cloth and vendor-bought material (thread, dye). This guide is primarily aimed at those who want to switch profession at high level.

Enchanting is often coupled with Tailoring as you can disenchant the pieces you make to either fund your own enchants, or to sell off and return some of the money spent. Another aspect working for this profession is the ability to enchant your rings, something you must be an Enchanter to have done, with more + damage.

Herbalism & Alchemy - The ability to make potions that increase the amount of damage your spells do is one of the main draw cards with Alchemy for Warlocks. While most Warlocks won't rely heavily on the mana potions, health pots can come in handy if you want to life tap away and have a quick heal handy - or if you get in a little over your head. Since Alchemy potions are created from herbs gathered in game, it makes sense to pair it with Herbalism.

Minging & Engineering - Generally taken by the PvP Warlocks, there's nothing like a pair of rocket boots to shoot you towards (or away from) your opponent. Many pvpers also use the grenades/bombs in battlegrounds and world PvP to act as a root or stun. If you stick it out to 350 engineering there are some very good goggles. Finally, who can forget the engineering specific flying mounts?

 

 

Racial Benefits

Some classes have a natural affinity for certain professions. They start off with a bonus in a particular profession that, which is handy, as they can learn recipes or gather items sooner than the races without the bonus. Another benefit is that although they may have had a head-start in a profession, the difficulty of gathering/crafting the item is calculated based on a character's skill before the racial bonus is taken into account. This means if a character has a racial bonus of 10 in a crafting profession for example, they could craft 10 more of an item that shows as "orange" before it goes yellow, than other classes without the racial bonus.

Warlocks have to races with bonuses in professions:

• Blood Elves have +10 in Enchanting

• Gnomes have +15 in Engineering

 

How do I get a Profession?

In order to gain a Profession, you must find an NPC to train you. All professions have trainers, and they can be found scattered across the Warcraft world. Some trainers are strictly Horde or Alliance, some are neutral. Your major cities will have the starting trainers for most of the professions, so be sure to ask a guide. Please also see this trainers list to find more.

 

After you have trained or purchased a Profession, hit "P" to bring up your abilities book. Then, look for a new icon that has been placed in there for that skill. You can drag this icon over to your action bar to make it easier to find and use. To improve at your chosen profession, you must use it. For instance, if you have a gathering profession, such as mining, you may improve only by gathering ore, and smelting it. For crafting professions, you must make items.

 

The items for professions are colour-coded. Easy items to gather or make are green on your tooltip, rarely improving your skill. If the item is yellow, you usually improve by gathering/creating it, and orange items always improve your skill, whereas grey items never do. Red means your skill is not yet high enough.

Character Level Limits
In order to prevent low level characters from mastering high level skills, a certain character level limit is required for each level of profession. You will need a minimum character level to learn a new level of professions. Apprentice requires level 5, Journeyman level 10, Expert level 20 and Artisan requires level 35. Master requires level 50.

 

Can I unlearn a Profession?

You may unlearn a profession and start a new one but this removes the chosen profession. If you were to learn it again, you would have to start leveling it from a skill level of 1 again. You will also forget any recipes you may have acquired in your old profession so they must be reacquired if you take it up again. The new profession you choose to replace it with also starts with a skill level of 1. You can unlearn a profession from your skills tab (the hotkey is k). To do so, click on the appropriate profession, and in the bottom part of the panel is a tiny icon that when moused over will tell you it lets you unlearn your profession. Be sure you really want to unlearn a profession; Blizzard will not undo it if you change your mind!