Might have been asked before but say I wanted to swap engi to alchemy and then later on swap back to engi, do I get everything back? If not, what all do you lose? Never used this feature but curiosity has struck me on wanting to try other professions.
EDIT: to clarify im speaking on the items that says it gives you back your profession level if you swap away from that profession.
The book for restoring things will restore only quest reward recipes from Legion. All the trainer and looted recipes you have to go back and get again, and you have to level your skill points up again.
If legion is all you have, or you’re not big on making consumables, it’s probably not too bad, but you’ll want to make sure how much reskilling you need to do to use your favorite toys before you make the jump.
Hopefully Rhosaleen answered your question for you. But to expand upon the profession tomes introduced in Legion, they were never intended to allow players to easily swap professions on a whim. The books will only restore the patterns and ranks you already learned from Legion content that were rewarded by quests that cannot be repeated. In most cases, without the tomes, you would never be able to level those professions again, because you wouldn’t have the basic patterns needed.
In BFA, Blizzard did away with most of the quest rewarded patterns for crafting professions due to public complaining about the system. But quest rewarded patterns are still a thing for gathering content, therefore new tomes were introduced for the BFA gathering professions.
But if you drop engineering for alchemy, you will lose all of your accomplishments in engineering, the majority of which will require re-leveling pre-Legion content to re-learn and be able to use some of the toys and gadgets.
Yeah looks like ill lose the mail box, jeeves, reaves, etc and have to go through all the crap to get them back afterwards. Not willing to lose all the cool stuff to make flasks and stuff. Heck I still use a ton of legion engineer consumables with some BFA consumables mixed in. Looks like im staying engi.