Just wondering what everyone is running. I have tailoring and engineering from BfA and wondering if there’s a better path.
Professions in Shadowlands are basically just a means to make money. Tailoring is probably pretty good for that given the abundance of cloth drops and the ease of shuffling cloth into enchanting mats, as well as the price of Legendary base items. Engineering has never been good at making money, but it keeps all the awesome BoP perks of previous expansions.
I’d keep Engineering, especially if you have a lot of old patterns, particularly the older Tinkers.
Feel free to replace Tailoring with whatever you think will make you the most money on the AH.
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I love Engy for the QoL benefits. Been Engy since Vanilla.
I use Alchemy as my second. Haven’t had much time to play during SL, but once I get back into M+, the 2 hour flask uptime is really nice.
I run Engineering and Mining.
I really only make engineering items as I need at this point. What does make me money is the mining. On my server atm, elethium ore fluctuates between 150g and 400g. The rest of the ore doesn’t sell for quite as much, but it’s a lot easier to collect.
I run herbalism and alchemy. Making flasks makes some pretty decent money, and I have easy access to my own healing pots and oils. Flasks of Power sell for like, 1,500 on my server?
Lw/ skinning is probably the best right now. LW make both mail and leather runecarving and are the real hot sellers still. Even if you are a bit behind the curve on crafting, just the skinning itself would make some good money
personally am engineering, and its a bit lackluster, though the AH in orib and brez for m+ are nice.
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Skinning is good money, but I’d be really wary of trying to get into the Legendary crafting market beyond Rank 1 base items if you don’t already have higher tiers unlocked. You need 15 crafts of each level of each slot of each armor type to make the next tier up, and based on the cost of Heavy Callous Hide on the AH right now, you are looking at going ~1.5 million in the hole just to learn and craft a single Rank 4 base, and then you have to try to recoup costs by selling a ton of Rank 1/2/3 base items, which will not be a quick process.
Not to mention depending on your server the market could be easily over saturated. The 190s won’t last anyone doing mythics or normal raiding long and will have the most up on AH , so they won’t sell well. So before you can make something remotely decent for everyone else, you gotta make the 190s 15 times and work at a huge loss. Even the rank 2s and what not are at a loss.
It just doesn’t seem profitable at all to me unless you started the expansion with it and kept up with it. Also curious how they plan to move forward with professions in 9.1.
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Or, unless you have alts that can make materials for you that you can’t make yourself. If your cost per craft is time and 30 copper, you’d be hard pressed to not make at least some profit.
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That’s true. Though I’m assuming anyone just now trying to decide on a profession aren’t in that boat.
Probably not. My mage alt is a jc and miner, so she can get the essences, but can’t make the bars or the shards, so I’m not really focused on working that angle for money until I can consistently make them without spending half the potential profits on materials.
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Me, meaning this Toon, has been a Skinner, always.
I figured, ‘I’m a Hunter, I’m killing all these beasts, no sense in leaving them to rot.’
What I didn’t do, was pair that trade with Leather-Working.
If I had it to do again, that’s the way I would go, but I have 5+ years invested in Herbalism stopping me.
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Whether you buy the materials or farm them, you still need to factor in the money you could have made by selling them in the final profit margin of the finished item.
Making Rank 1 Mail Shoulders with mats you farmed yourself and selling them for 30k looks great, until you realize you could have made 28k just by selling the Heavy Callous Hide and Heavy Desolate Leather in the AH. Then you have the cost of the missives, as well as the vendor bought items.
Except, those are balanced out by the money you didn’t spend buying the materials to make them in the 1st place.
Sure, you’d have made 28k selling hides and leather, but if you didn’t farm them yourself, that’s 28k you’d have spent to get the hides and leather.
I see myself funneling hides to my LW, and they making ME some armor.
That is the back-handed profit I look to benefit by.
No, you just paid for the materials with time instead of gold. The materials still have value.
My point is that the legendary craft, the thing that requires Leatherworking, is only worth 2k, in comparison to the materials cost. The profit margin on the craft itself is very bad. On some servers they are selling below mats cost because the Rank 1s are flooded.
I originally started as skinning/LW but dropped for herbalism/alchemy after seeing how quickly legendary item prices tanked
yep, they have value. I can vendor them, sell them on the AH, funnel them to my L.W. , or even give them away. I expect before it’s done, I’ll have done all these.
As my L.W. wears leather, maybe I’ll profit through him making both me and him armor. Or not. I’ll certainly benefit. The prices of leather are dropping. I don’t expect I’ll get rich through skinning, or anything, really. np. I’m not chasing gold.
I went skinning/leather working. My mains are Mail and Leather, so it works out for crafting leggos for myself.