I am a returning player to WoW and I have played next to none of BfA and have not experienced the profession system in the new expansion. However, I began leveling a new character and chose mining and skinning and I quickly saw the new system for old professions. They split up the expansions into their own groups. That’s fine, however, it put me in a specifically difficult situation in terms of mining which is why I’m posting this. I leveled my mining all the way to the last true ore you find out in high level vanilla zones, and I used it as much as I possibly could until I can get no experience from smelting the ore or mining the small veins, and getting a very, very small amount of xp for the rich veins. The only two unlearned orange vanilla patterns left are both instanced-learned BRM recipes. This means I would have to go incredibly far out of my way to max out my mining at 300 either way I did it. And to this I ask: is there even a point in trying? Now that the leveling is split up and I can’t use next expansion ore veins to continue to level my mining, should I even bother with it? I also read that you do not need to level your professions through previous expansions to pick it up in BfA, although I do not know if that is true. So, should I even bother to max out my mining at 300? Do I need it to progress to outland/northrend mining and other future expansions? And finally, are professions even worth doing while leveling anymore because of this? If so, which ones should I do? Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read all of this, I know it was a mouthful. Any and all suggestions and tips/info are welcome.
You need 75 skill in Classic for your professions to access the Darkmoon Fair quests. Other than that you don’t need to do previous profession levels, especially for double gathering. This is assuming you aren’t interested in transmog collection or recipe completion.
One major note is Engineering. Engineering has a number of items such as portals, Jeeves, MOLL-E, tinkers, etc that require some skill in various expansions to use.
Another is Inscription. While glyphs aren’t as useful as they were there could be some you want and they may be spread out among the expansions.
You can argue there’s no point to any of this. It’s a game. It’s just something to do. I still aim to max out the profs on all tiers on all my alts because it isn’t all that hard and it makes me satisfied to do so.
Posted this in another thread, but I’ll put it here too.
I’d like to see them either add a quest line or something to make old recipes useful. Like a quest line in classic, or WoD to bump the item levels or damage or whatever to the current expansion.
I think this would entice players to learn the older recipes. Take me for instance, I am newly returned (haven’t played since Panda), started a new Lock and picked up engineering, no real need to learn anything except BFA engineering.
If they made the old recipes relevant, I’d definitely level all up.
Thoughts?
Edit: Says 85, but I hit 120 yesterday.
Engineering is probably the profession with the greatest number of still-relevant old recipes. Like the goblin glider cloak addon from pandaria, or jeeves and moll-e from wrath, or the loot-a-rang from Cataclysm (Findle’s loot-a-rang from Draenor is an inferior copy, being limited to only work in Draenor), or the gnomish army knife from draenor… but that’s because it has the most things that (a) do something useful (b) in whatever zone you’re in © that don’t get less useful in stat squishes. Certainly it has plenty of things that don’t meet those criteria… but most other professions have even fewer things that do.
There is still relevance to the old professions just for the fact that people are still crafting and gathering in the old professions. If you are a gatherer you can still fetch big bucks for materials on the AH. Have any eternal fire? Post it and get rich quick, just as one example.
I have one character with each crafting profession and a couple of chars with the various gathering professions. Currently im on a big transmog kick so i am crafting all of the reasonably easy to obtain appearances (typically blue or green) in all of the gear professions.
For your specific question about mining, getting 300 skill level in classic mining is actually kind of difficult. You basically need to smelt dark iron bars out of dark iron ore found in Blackrock Depths. It is a bit of a process and not super necessary unless you are a completionist. Herbalism and Skinning are much, much easier to level to 300.
If you are looking for some profession guidance, wow-professions . com is actually really good, they have lots of levelling and farming guides for all professions in all expansions.
Much like all old content, old professions are mostly for flavor nowadays with the exception of Northrend Engineering which is absolutely essential for repair bots and Jeeves (which also requires some outland engineering items).
I found the hilarious thing is that some of the older Alchemy recipes weren’t changed correctly.
Some of the flasks and potions from previous expansions are now more powerful than later expansions. LOL
Actually, that is because you are reading them at a lower level and the newer ones scale with level but the older ones do not. Once you are the level that you can use the newer ones, they will show a higher number.
There once was a bug that made the newer ones show a number that was 50% of their strength and that has since been fixed as far as I am aware.
The point is to feel sad, after you spend days leveling your engineering in the old professions and see for example, Dark Iron Bomb (285 Engineering) do only 9 damage, when all the enemies you meet have thousands of hit points.