How were vanilla professions?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

This post is a little ranty, and it entails my first experience with a present-day retail profession. I added a TL;DR at the bottom if you’d prefer I get straight to the point.

Long-time WoW player. Started shortly after vanilla launch, skipped Legion, played casually every other expansion.

Yesterday, I got on my main in BfA and figured I’d spend some of this money I saved up starting a profession. Every expansion I always took gathering professions, since they were simple, fun, and were a straightforward avenue towards making gold. So I took up Jewelcrafting.

I was in for a rude awakening.

I maxed out Kul Tiran Jewelcrafting within an hour or so. I attribute this to two things:

  • the overabundance of gold I had easily stockpiled (mostly from quests, WQ and selling gray junk and quest rewards.)
  • the oversimplification of the profession. Take gem, turn it into the finished product, done. Even when the recipes went green, I was still racking up frequent skill points.

I went from 85k gold down to 78k, and then bumped back up to around 81k after I sold a bunch of the stuff I made. This is including the cost to research all of the recipes at the trainer. So now what? I start researching the profession more. Most of the more useful recipes require a bunch of “Expulsom,” and ingredient you get from scrapping gear. Sometimes. Occasionally. Oh, and it’s Bind on Pickup. Also, some of the gear I can create is Bind on Pickup and requires a whoooole bunch of materials you can only get from raid bosses. Which can be killed only once a week.

So I can sell cut gems, basically, unless I can manage to farm normal, heroic and mythic raids on a weekly basis. I could already see from leveling the profession that I sold most of the cut gems at a loss, based on how the market looked at that time. And that’s if I even have any uncut gems to craft. There were only so many on the AH and I already bought them all. I could sift through ore for gems, which is another expense unless I mine it exclusively. Then I read that the market for cut gems has diminished in this expansion due to the lack of socketed gear. The gear I make is easily replaced and not worth the inflated price tag.

Suddenly, I felt empty inside. I just finished my profession, basically. In an hour, and yet I felt like I failed at something. I realized what many of you on this forum were talking about regarding how hollow WoW has become. My profession has little value, it felt extremely dumbed down, and I don’t feel like I have much to contribute to the community with. I didn’t have any fun.

Experiences like this make me understand truly why others look forward to Classic. I hope I have more fun with professions over there.

TL;DR: Could any of you tell me how professions were in vanilla, or your experiences, since I never really bothered with them back then? Were they better than they are these days? If so, how?

4 Likes
2

Way, way better. Engineering is required for PvP if you want to actually rank.

Armor professions actually make pre-raid BiS gear.

Alchemy is very profitable and always useful since consumables are required for both raiding and PvP.

3 Likes
3

What Twiinkedd said…

Enchanting was pretty useful too.

4

Yeah, I think they hit Enchanting pretty hard, too. You can only enchant like, three different slots or something to that tune, now. Ugh.

5

Vanilla Professions summed up - Run here, run there, get this, get that, spend this, spend that & still have to beg your guildies for required mats…only to sell or consumer for 1/3 of the effort.

2 Likes
6

They were WAY WAY better. I can go into detail if you give me a certain profession as this would be a wall of text if I were to explain all of them. Every profession was extremely important in the game and could either net you a lot of money, provide your guild with much needed stats for raiding, or just straight up win you fights single handedly.

1 Like
7

Lol what? Not even close…

6 Likes
8

k… Alchemy. Fight me. Mind you black lotus on farm.

9

Also the secondary professions were way more interesting, impactful, or actually existed (RIP first aid). Fishing and cooking were legitimate ways to make some cash and craft some buffing consumables if you had the right recipes. First aid was really beneficial for classes that didn’t have any heals. Also the Sunday fishing contest in STV was just all sorts of a fun :poop:-show

10

Alchemy probably makes you the most money from pvers and pvpers? Resistance potions, free action potions, mana potions, health potions, flasks for raids, elixers for raids, you get SO much money from alchemy.

If you really wanted to, which isn’t suggested, you could just sit on the AH all day and buy herbs and then make them into potions and sell them for twice the amount. You aren’t begging anyone for anything.

3 Likes
11

I haven’t even begun blacksmithing on this character, but professions do seem very underwhelming in retail. Since I don’t raid I highly doubt I’ll be able to craft anything better than what I already have. And yes, some of what I have is crafted gear I bought off the AH, getting the random stats you want make that way too tempting and more efficient than doing it yourself 10 times to get the piece you desire.

I miss the old days when you could actually craft bops that were better at your level than what someone else without that profession could get. That made sense, like if I’m a tailor I should know how to craft good cloth, right? Other than engineering letting you use the Boralus AH, I don’t see too many reasons to even have a crafting profession currently, and that’s just wrong.

1 Like
12

This will work very, very well for the first few months. Alchemy is the profession that allows for sitting in town and making a ton of gold.

13

You’ve obviously never played on a populated “progression” server. Gathering herbs will be hard if not even unattainable for months. Herbs on AH will be ghastly over priced due to demand… your gold farming won’t suffice for the amount needed vs. buying crafting & reselling. Mind you it will only be like this at the beginning of each various phase. Will likely die out after all phases have been completed.

14

Oh god you’re comparing farming ores/herbs on a private server

:man_facepalming:

Lord give me strength

5 Likes
15

No… I am comparing to when AQ gates opened vanilla, to Naxx release Vanilla & yes private servers as well… the population and farming techniques will not be far off from retail. ACTUALLY private servers have increased spawn rate times & STILL face situations listed above. Simple supply & demand economics.

1 Like
16

Private servers have stupidly fast respawn timers (which is why they are always flasked).
On feathermoon there were only a few potions that you could get away with making a profit from if you bought the mats yourself, resistance potions being the most notable. Even then though the profit margin was small. Blacksmithing was a money pit from hell itself since most of what you made was worth less than the materials used to craft it.

17

Okay even though private servers shouldn’t be referenced when it comes to anything actually inside the game… you do not need to gather to make money from alchemy. You can just sit at the AH all day, buy supplies, make potions, and sell them for twice the amount you bought them for. It’s the easiest profession to make money off of.

1 Like
18

That’s why you only crafted the things that made money lol pretty crazy thought.

19

You still needed to grind all the junk that was worthless so you can get to 300 so you can learn the patterns that were worth something (assuming you were lucky enough to get those patterns to drop). Even then, you’d make more by selling the raw materials than you did with the finished product.

Edit: this is in regards to blacksmithing. Alchemy had a decent profit margin (as stated before)

20

I don’t think your quite understanding here. Supply & demand will drive costs of herbs & ingredients needed to craft through the roof. Costs will be severely inflated so unless you have so much gold you don’t know what to do with it all then and only then will you make profit from playing the AH…average player won’t have this amount of gold saved. Second top guilds will be out buying you faster then you can whip up a taco bell fart. They’ll have world spawn points on farm as well as AH. So like I said right before phases your’e making squat diddly off any professions until hype dies down. - Take it from a vet.

2 Likes