As any seasoned World of Warcraft player knows, professions are one of the most important aspects of the game. They act as your bread and butter: do as many days as you want, but if you really want to get the gold, nothing works better than having a maxed out profession. As in all other previous expansions, the professions in Cataclysm are exactly the same. Here is a guide I put together that I hope will get you on the right track.
*First of all, there are two different general types of cataclysm professions: primary and secondary.
There are 10 main professions:
-Mining (Gathering): Use a pickaxe to gather minerals, stones, and gems from nodes.
-Herbalist (Gathering): Collect plants from the nodes.
-Skinning (Gathering): Skinning animals for their skins.
-Blacksmithing (Crafting): Using ores, craft armor and weapons.
-Jewelry (Crafting): Using gems, create jewels with special properties that can be set into armor.
-Enchantment (Crafting): Put enchantments on weapons and armor that increase their stats.
-Tailoring (Crafting): Fashion armor from skins.
-Alchemy (Crafting): Using herbs and reagents, create mixtures that grant stat boosts and other temporary effects.
-Engineering (Crafting): Using ores, stones, and engineering materials, craft unusual items with wacky yet interesting effects.
-Inscription (Crafting): Enhances spells and abilities using glyphs.
And 4 secondary professions:
-Fishing: Use your fishing rod to, of course, fish. Fish sometimes works well on the auction house, and if you combine this with cooking you can make some very nice recipes that will give you temporary stat boosts.
-First Aid: Collect cloth from corpses to make bandages. It’s not that important at higher levels, but I’d suggest building it up because you never know when a bandage might come in handy; especially for classes that lack a reliable healing ability, like warriors.
-Cooking: collect recipes and supplies (usually animal meat). Like I said before, cooking gives you some useful stat boosts. Level up whenever you can. If you decide to raid later in the game and have a high cooking level with some good recipes, you will be the best friend of your raiding party.
-Archaeology: New cataclysm profession. Locate, assemble and identify artifacts.
Each character can only learn two of the main professions, but all secondary professions can be learned. The primary professions are your moneymakers, while the secondary professions are more of the practical variety. However, they are all useful in their own way.
*Among the main professions in Cataclysm, there are two types: gathering and crafting. Gathering professions include mining, herbalism, archeology, and skinning. Crafting includes blacksmithing and jewelry making etc. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to combine a crafting profession with a gathering profession. Most of the items you’ll need to advance your crafting profession will come from all the gatherings you do. It might seem tempting to be able to craft your own armor and then enchant it yourself, but unless you have connections, you’ll have to buy all your materials from the auction house, most of the time at greatly inflated prices. Not to mention, as a collector, you can put your own materials on the auction house and make a profit from those who are too lazy to collect the supplies themselves.
Some of the best Cataclysm profession combinations are as follows (crafting/gathering):
-Alchemy/Herbalism
-Leatherworking/Skinning
-Blacksmithing/Mining
-Jewelry/Mining
-Engineering/Mining
*Currently, all professions in Cataclysm can be purchased up to a skill level of 525. For the best results in your crafting professions, try to prioritize crafting items in this order: Orange, Yellow, Green. Items in orange require more materials to craft, but guarantee one skill point. The yellow ones have a percentage chance to grant a skill point on item crafting, but it’s usually pretty good. Green is pretty much around 40/60. If you have the means to make an orange item, do it.
Above all, building a profession requires patience and dedication. However, if you stick with it, you will have mastered one of the most important aspects that World of Warcraft has to offer.