State of professions in Wrath

Just a brief overview of what I think of the professions.

Inscription. I love this profession, I have it on 3 toons now, 2 of which are maxed. Yes, getting to max level takes a very very long time (as far as doing the NR inscription research, it will take months to learn everything). However, this is such a huge gold maker you make over a thousand gold an hour on both of my servers. Leveling is good too, you get access to buff scrolls and recall scrolls, so you have 2 hearths every 30 min. Overall very fun profession.

Jewelcrafting. Well, this is pretty horrible to level up. I must say I was surprised as the absolute lack of useful items while leveling. There are a handful of leveling rings/necks that are nice, but usually they are too little too late. However, at end game JC really shines, especially with the epic patterns. The dailies are an absolute pain though, this makes this profession far harder to truly master than others.

Engineering. I just leveled this a few days ago. I love it, i think it would be good for leveling. So many fun options, and great recipes abound. In BC/wrath there are some nice leveling items, including an ilvl200 helm available at level 72.

Tailoring. Easy to level, but you burn through gold. You'll get it back with bags though. Pretty good at endgame, esp BC and wrath have some nice leveling gear. I'd like to see even better gear though.

Leatherworking. Pretty much like tailoring, but more painful! If you dont have skinning or access to a skinner, in some spots its very difficult. A few hidden gems in this prof, and generally pretty hard to make money with (although each prof has nice end game items, the markets are obvious and saturated).

Alchemy. Fun again. So fun, after dropping 450 alchemy on one toon (pre-epic gem xmute), i picked it up again on another toon. The xmutes make this an easy 100g a day gold mine, and everything else is good. There is one spot that is a lose leader, but my 2000g investment I recouped most of it within a few days. I love the discovery aspects of it too, and the specialization is not yet worthless. Woot. This can rival JC or inscription for profit.

Enchanting. Its one of those long slogs. In BC it gets good, but before that, this is a huge gold sink, even w/ leveling. There isn't nearly enough greens while leveling for this to be breakeven. The armor/weapon vellums go a long way though, and due to those this can be profitable, but its a ton of work. Still, there are a handful of enchants that always sell (mongoose, +4 chest, etc). Enchanting in BC was horrible because of all the rep requirements and most of the good recipes were rare random drops from instances. Can you say kill me now? Since the 100% drop rates of BC raid bosses, it makese getting mongoose pretty easy. This issue didn't occur in Wrath, and instead almost everything is bought from a vendor using enchanting materials as currency. I think this is a great move and I finally feel that my max level enchanters are useful, if only for equiping alts. Also this was a major source of profit due to the saronite shuffle, before economies were brought to their knees.

Blacksmith
Actually pretty fun and useful. I haven't gotten this past 150 but already I can see some use out of it with the sharpening stones and rods. However this is significantly more expensive to level than other professions in terms of material and time. From 1-75 you need some 200 copper ore, which is not really realistic given the faster leveling times. This costs are going to have to go way down for cataclysm. For end game, I can see it being a money maker. If i had a nickel for every 'need BS for saronite swordbreakers' i'd be a rich man.

Mining/Herbing/Skinning
As a game with 3 gathering professions, all of these are good money makers and I wouldn't change it. If you start in a new realm with nothing but a level 1 and herb/skin, by the time you are level 10 you should have enough to buy 4 netherweave bags, by level 20 easily enough to afford your mount, and by level 60 easily enough to afford your flying mount. In northrend as of now herbing makes 500-1000g per hour (less now bc of the frost lotus prices decrease). This is in line with the top end professions such as inscription. So it's quite lucrative for these professions as it is, and if you thrown in the inate bonuses (stam/healing, etc), these are very solid and very easy to level professions. The one thing I can see is that in the mid-zones ie level 20-60 keeping up the professions can be hard, since you fly through everything so quickly.

Wrath, my initial global thoughts.

Well, this is an overall review of the expansion.

Professions. Alot of them were reworked to make leveling less challenging/costly. I think the stuff in NR (375-450) was all very good. Engineering finally felt useful, all my professions had great buffs. Now they need to go back and fix 1-300. I also hate the fact that there are basically no recipes, everything is vendor trained. Boring!

Classes. Well, the DK was just awesome, a wonderful, easy to level tank, fun to play with PVP, great for PVE soloing, even replacing the hunter as far as easy. Yet the DK is pretty hard to master, I've played one since it came out and I'm still learning. The other classes feel fine, I only play hunter/dk/druid so far. Hunter changes were definately fun. And the great hunter revamp will probably be as fun.

Druids were just awesome, the preiment raid healer, decent boomkin, challenging cat dps...the bear form just needs a ton of work IMO. Its the hardest yet simpliest to play of all tanks. Aggro generation is just far behind the other three tanks, and you have to massively outgear the dps to avoid getting mobs stripped from you. The other tanks don't really have that issue as much. Either player skill needs to be reinforced, or the other three need AOE threat nerfs, or bears need better AOE threat. Don't get me wrong, its a huge leap forward, but its still far short of what the community expects now.

My expectation is for cat. that the pure role classes like hunters always do more dps than say a druid, and the priest is better than the druid for healing. That doesn't feel like its the case right now, and that's a shame.

Leveling: Really pretty good in wraith, better than BC ,much better than vanilla. I look forward to more.

The LFD thing: Just awesome, its a huge huge boost for blizz to get ppl to do group content easily.

Badge gear: For the most part pretty good, it was nice to get stuff in the beginning to be able to do naxx, and it was nice to not outgear ulduar. Honestly I would like further boosts to trivial content like naxx now. What if the bosses dropped 4-5 badges each, that would make people want to do it again. The weekly raids are a nice step foward, but I like that at the end of BC everyone was still doing kara/ZA then doing their weekly MH/BT raids. That said naxx is way longer than kara, whats up with that?

I'd say much more raids, much shorter. I'd rather have 10 3-4 boss raids than 3 10 boss raids, which is what we have now. The major issue for most players is time. TOC works because its short and if people fail on the first boss, then leave group. But ICC, if you are in the PUG raid you are tempted to go for hours and hours to clear as much as possible. Its just too long to PUG.

Raid releases in general; pretty much everyone agrees that Ulduar was too long in coming and TOC was too soon behind it, which killed it for everyone. I will never see the end of ulduar, i dont have the time right now and only a handful of people are running it for rusted protodrake runs. TOC was nice and short, but the different levels and the long time between that and ICC means that people were sitting on their butts for a long time. ICC is great so far and most people haven't gotten to Arthas. If cat comes in 3 months it would be an appropriate time, but my feeling is that it's not coming until december. How is iCC going to feel in 10 months? Pretty moldy I bet.

PVP server

Going to xfer my alliance DK to a PVP server. Will be interesting. I am already leveling a human priest. It's a low pop server. I'll bring over alchemy/engineering 450/450, and the priest will be inscription/herb. I'm churning out heroics to get the last BOA items before I xfer. So far I have plate shoulder, plate chest; i need cloth shoulder, cloth chest, and ideally 2 trinkets and 1 weapon.

Long time no post

So what am I up to? Well I quit raiding entirely now that I am working again. I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I got all the way through wraith and 5 bosses into ICC. Its too bad I probably wont see the end ICC, but since I can't raid with the great day raid group, i'd rather not raid at all.

To that end I gave them pretty much all my money Alliance side to keep raiding. Raiding is very expensive, so hopefully that fund will last through Arthas (providing the team doesn't break up).

I then made a little DK, and it's such a blast. I've been storming through Outlands and am almost 68 now. I'll probably level this guy and get some decent gear, then see what the future holds.

JC: Rare vs Epics

Jewelcrafting is all about volume like anything else. The AH for epic gems usually looks like this:

Uncut:
1 @ 180
1 @ 190
2 @ 200
10 @ >200


Cut:

1 @ 190
10 @ >190

So you can see there is exactly one gem you can cut and make 10g which probably does not even cover the AH fee. This is again a typical setup. Now, you may have every pattern known to man and be able to cut than one or two gems and sell for 250, but those gems move poorly. Since these gems sell for alot the AH cut is high, and margins are razor thin. I still move a few epics but generally they aren't worth your time.

The serious money is in rare gems. Shh. Don't tell anyone I said that.

Rare gems typically look like this.

Uncut: 40 @ 8g
Cut: lowest is 30g.

So post 5-10 at 29g, and reap that 20g profit (1g AH fee, approx). That's each. I typically move 50 gems every day, about 20g profit each, and buy full stacks when I see them cheap. Since I buy in volume I typically can wait until I get a good deal, unlike epics, whose volume is very low. I'm pretty small time, I only have maybe a dozen rare and epic cuts, the more common/popular ones. I would rather have stuff that sells well than stuff that never sells but may give a nice profit for that one that does sell.

Going for the gold cap

Decided I would try to push for gold cap. Inscription still sells, now on both alliance and horde servers, in around the same quantity and average price. On a good day its 1000g gross. I anticipate things will die down now that the holidays are over. Jewelcrafting is still huge, and the ilvl 245 bracers sell (4 on alliance server (higher pop), 1 on horde server). That's 1000g profit each (but keep in mind the cost of buying the pattern - 1-2k).

Its somewhat amazing the difference that JC brings. My set ups are otherwise identical on both servers, 3 bankers for inscription, some other random junk like patterns. On horde side a month ago I had 20k or 10k or something. I now have 60k. On alliance side I had 10k and now have 25k or something close to that. Epic gems are again mostly a waste of time; they are nice for your personal/guild use, but very little profit due to small volume of affordable cut gems.

Post 3.3

Just a short update.

I didn't really stockpile much in the way of mats pre 3.3; I have some enchanting mats that are still sitting there, and I have some small amounts of other things. I did unleash all the epic gems i was saving (those I didn't put in the guild bank), and made some nice change on those. I'll try to keep that up, and maybe even start doing the JC daily again.

Inscription. Inscription is huge right now on one server and completely dead on the other. On one I make 1k a day right now, and on the other maybe 100g. Same methods, same posting schedule, just that one server has the idea that 5g for each glyph is cool. Well yeah that's sorta profitable, but not really. I decided to get out of that market, I am not going to waste hours of my day for 100g. So i'll sell off my stock, and turn to other areas which will be more profitable.

Enchanting scrolls. Yeah, they are selling, not in huge numbers but definately 1-2 a day. I'll have to make more. This is probably the best source for revenue right now, that and enchanting mats themselves.

Overall there hasn't been huge movements on the market like i'd expect. For one, as my wife noted, its going to take a while to get upgrades. I ran 3 heroics of the new instances, no drops yet, and 3 normal modes, ditto with lack of drops. So its just going to take time. I know there are great things in those loot tables that my toons need, but just haven't seen it yet.

Update:
A week later and epic gems are getting expensive, but not much profit for most cuts. So the raw materials keep going up in price while the cuts remain just above that. So not a ton of money in that market right now. I think the smart JC would have every pattern and only cut what both is moving and is expensive. Hard to do. I only sell the stuff that moves because I don't have many patterns. Inscription is on fire, I am having a hard time finding enough materials to keep in stock. There aren't alot of farmers on this server, or they dont post on the AH. So supply is a constant problem. If i am not buying every day I would run out of glyphs.

So far I'm only up to 20k after buying a bunch of epic patterns and some orbs. I'm starting to get into selling ulduar and TOC craftables for alts, I think there is a strong market but only if the orbs are cheap. People aren't going to spend 5k per item on alts, but 2k? I would gladly spend that much for a 245 level item which is better than what I can get with any sort of PUGing.

Update 2:

Up to 30k now, I'm not entirely sure how much of that is profit. Epic gems are not really moving fast, but rare gems are with a very nice profit margin. However getting low-cost rare gems is a challenge, with saronite being so high. Those prices will drop though. I justt need to find shufflers who are willing to get rid of their rares for cheap. Epic gems are sky high, but just not moving that quickly. Maybe too rich for most people. I'm sure if I had more cuts I could move them faster. Inscription still doing great, still supply issues. Made 10k from inscription alone so far in about two weeks. Nice steady profit.