Any Vanilla pros out there know the two best gathering professions while leveling? I was thinking Skinning/Mining, but I’ve heard Herbalism makes more money than Mining. What do you guys think?
1 Like
It won’t much matter to begin with either way for two reasons.
Firstly, no-one will have money to spend on trade goods in the Auction House.
Secondly, a significant number of people will be rolling their first character as dual gathering, and this will effectively flood any market with these goods.
The short term solution will be that most will end up vendoring their gathers, whether herbs, ore or leather. On that basis, the best judgement might be that which you can gather most of, which might tend to indicate skinning and herbing.
2 Likes
Yup skinning would be just for some extra vendor trash.
Herb is good if you wanna stockpile useful herbs for later.
Mining is mostly nice for farming arcane crystals.
Enchanting can be nice just to enable you to shard items. Keep in mind shards won’t sell for much early on.
Really if you want to make gold your best bet is to farm things that drop good vendor trash. Most types of beasts fit this desciption. Professions get to be more useful as the economy develops.
2 Likes
This, although some are better than others. It’s up to you, the player, to identify the choicest bits of vendor trash and which mobs they tend to drop off of at a high rate, and farm accordingly.
Edit: I’ll add that with a little patience, even a very low level character can start building up a stockpile of gold using this method.
Skinning and DISenchanting.
Anything else just wastes time, from a leveling/speed perspective.
Mining /herbalism without a mount is a waste, better off waiting until 40 or even 60 before bothering, then doing it all in one shot.
The only exception I debate on is tailoring for my lock… Since I’d get into the bag markets early, have cloth from 2 characters to feed it, and have less room for skinning with soul shards in my inventory…I’d also be able to farm up robe of the void mats while leveling.
Even so I’m not sure it’s not just way faster to just level up and come back and aoe bomb early instances or just dm:e spam for gold and buy the cloth to power level it at 60
1 Like
Enchanting at the start of a server can be a good jump-starter to your wealth if you’re able to be one of the first to craft wands and start shouting it in your race’s first ‘town’ (ex. Brill).
What’s the long-term storage situation in Vanilla? I think guilds won’t have banks and bags that have more than about 8, maybe 10, slots in them are hard to find at first. Mail is a bit of a PITA compared to now when sending stuff to and from alts (maybe addons could help with this). All that and herbs stack to only 20, right?
If you are creating stockpiles waiting for others on your server to have the money to spend on stuff (like herbs) you’re stockpiling to sell later, how many alts do you think you’ll need?
I made sure to always pick up gray vendor trash when I played vanilla. If my bags got full and I wasn’t at the end of a dungeon, I would check which trash was cheapest and ditch it to keep looting. I don’t recall anybody I ever grouped with wanting trash loot, but those coppers and silvers added up and I was never short of funds for skill training or other things. (Edit: Just heard on ClassiCast that beasts were the best gold per kill in the open world for vendor trash, plus whelps and spiders for particular alchemy mats.)
As for professions, I was an enchanter & tailor. I could disenchant items for materials and make basic magic things and bags that always sold on the auction house. Later on, I had several alts do alchemy and tailoring for potions and mooncloth (which was heavily time-gated). Potions, mooncloth, and mooncloth bags were my cash cows until Burning Crusade came out.
1 Like
Was enchanting expensive to level? It felt expensive to me in BC - heavily subsidized by alts, I have not done it in classic.
I’d say Skinning and just about whatever else is a good idea.
Skinning is always a good pick because you’ll be killing beasts anyways and even just vendoring the leather is basically like picking up more grey vendor trash.
If you’re planning on going for, say, Alchemy then I’d get Herbalism to stock up on herbs and then drop Skinning for Alchemy later. Same with Engineering or Smithing (but with Mining obviously). Enchanting works well too, mostly just for disenchanting, but you can get a LOT of cash from vendoring quest rewards vs. disenchanting them.
It had a higher opportunity cost because you could make gold AH’ing greens or even just vendoring them. It was good paired with Tailoring because you could just DE whatever you made to skill up and Tailoring doesn’t have a gathering partner like other profs.
1 Like
Enchanting could be pretty expensive to level in vanilla—only engineering was more of a money sink. Each was definitely a choice for the long haul. Enchanting will probably be best for income at very low and very high levels, the latter only with significant investment in getting desirable enchants.
Disenchanting only gets you so far, in terms of both leveling the skill directly and providing mats to enchant your own items over and over. If you’re lucky you can give away enchants, with your mats, just to level the skill (I remember the spam in trade chat well). But then, not only are you wasting those mats when you could have just sold them, but you’ll need to spend money or time to acquire enough mats to level your enchanting this way. If you can manage to make good wands at every level, you might do okay, but it’s been so long I don’t remember how easy that was.
As Darjull pointed out, tailoring is a great skill to pair with enchanting for leveling. Disenchant the items you make with tailoring just to level it, and use the results to do enchants to level that.
The best course for enchanting is to find out what rare enchants are wanted by other players and go get them. You may have to do quests or run dungeons many times to do so. But once you have them, you can offer those enchants for a fee, and the customers supply their own mats. If you’re the first to get a desired enchant, you will get a lot of money.
If you don’t want to invest this time while leveling, I’d say go with something straightforward like skinning.
Ion said something about QoL changes for mail at blizzcon. It should be pretty easy to use a bank alt in Classic.
anything for Alchemy. as people will be buying a crap ton of pots. for raiding etc.
i do my own skinning/mining, thats not something i would be willing to buy from the AH. i would use those to make myself gear.
i always combine skinning + LW or mining + BSM.
this isnt current wow, so the majority of players will be self reliant (aside from maybe bank alts). your best bet is to sell what ‘everyone’ needs.
people are not going to be like now, sacrificing gathering skill to just buy it from the AH. in rare occasions if they NEED to make that potion/pot, they might buy one.
professions worked much differently back then. gear and such, important for progression- didnt rain down from the sky just because you farted. you depended on those for most of the game (if not all, in Alchemy’s case).
potions, pots, bags etc- that is how you get rich fast. make them yourself and then sell them.
Goldshire Inn RP Table Dancer
4 Likes
Id assume you need a bank alt for each gathering profession or crafting profession you plan on leveling. You get them 8 slot bags early on and first 2 bank slots. All that costs about 2 gold. That gets you like 64 slots which should be plenty for blacksmithing lw or alch atleast to 200+.
2 Likes
exactly. that is why any argument for guild banks is invalid. that is how we did it back then and we will do it now.
opened bank slots with largest bags you can get (18) and you have a personal guild bank. plenty of space for everything you need and you dont need to trust someone else with them.
Looked it up – 28 slots in the bank plus up to 7 slots for bags. Bag slots cost 10s, 1g, 10g, and then 25g each for the last 4 slots. Using 8 slot bags that gives you:
8x (2+4) = 64 (more when you buy the last 5 bank bag slots)
+16 in backpack (wonder if they’ll do the +4 for SMS protection? I’ll assume not for now)
+28 in bank
That’s 108 slots per bank alt, significantly more when you get some money and can buy more bank slots and bigger bags. ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
largest bag size is 18. not 8.
Horde-side I always go mining and engineering.
You can make an item called “Deadly Blunderbuss” that is used @ level 22 in Ashenvale for a quest called Warsong Supplies. The reward is a rare that is either mail gloves, cloth belt, or leather boots.
It usually costs nothing if you have materials, or maybe 10s.
I stockpile about 25 at a time and head to Ashenvale or the AH and sell them for 70s-1g.
Mining early and stockpiling also assures I can bundle engineering kits to help people go 1-175 straight shot. I sent mats and saved all my cloth, light/coarse/heavy stone to alt toons I used as banks. I sold these bundles for 50g once people were approaching 60.
The Deadly Blunderbuss alone put me around 85g pre-40. Questing and vendoring, another 50g. Usually 135-150g (if I found a blue or two) before 40 was not uncommon for me Horde-side.
If I was Alliance I always went skinning and mining. Mining just to boost my own engineering later. Skinning just to vendor trash. I didn’t make as much gold Horde side but I never had an issue getting a mount.
1 Like
skinning is awful for making money. you won’t see any kind of real returns till 60, and even then it’s minimal.
pick up engineering and be the first to make deadly blunderbusses