Effraeti brings us a colourful topic on Blog Azeroth this week :
Professions are fun for some and a necessary evil for others.
Some of us have farming professions. Some of us have crafting professions. Some of us have a little bit of everything! Professions are leveled because they fit our style of play, help us in raiding, allow us to outfit our alts, and make us money.
What professions do you have on your main? Do his/her professions fit their personality? Why did you choose them? If you chose professions based on your character and not on gaming needs, would that change some of their professions they use?
(This can include the secondary professions of archaeology, fishing, cooking, and first aid too!)
Such a long and detailed post this is going to be, as you know, I never do anything by halves 🙂 Here is my story…
My beautiful mage, started life as a human, having no idea this world would capture her heart and soul, forcing her to rethink her ideas and profession choices multiple times. I wish, when I had started this game, someone had said to me that end game raiding and PVE was going to be the thing that sucked me in. I had no idea when I picked up my professions what that would mean at level 60. I found out though.
I started as a herbalist/Alchemist. I wanted to make potions because they sounded more useful than anything else in the game. I wasn’t going to loot awesome things like that off mobs was I? From memory I did not level my professions at the same time I levelled, so I got to 60 and then got my herring/alchemy to max. I also had to get first aid maxed as well because back in Vanilla days, DPS didn’t get healed unless they were actually important to a fight. We had to bandage or pot, but back then you could have multiple pots per fight…so it wasn’t all that bad.
Anyway at some point during Vanilla, I dropped my herbalism, to take up enchanting because apparently that was more useful – i don’t remember why I thought that, anyway, I got stuck one day on something and i was amazed at the prices of the mats to continue levelling, so I dropped it and picked up herbalism again. Off I went picking flowers. INSANE!!!
Then BC hit, and OMG you have to have tailoring because you are a mage and spellfire gear is the only gear, so off went herbalism and I picked up tailoring. What a waste that was, I would have preferred I stayed as a herbalist and made some money. The patterns were cool, but I was out of them pretty quickly from memory and it was a hell of a lot of mats for pretty much no gain. I still think tailoring is a pretty useless profession because (as I believe of all crafting ones) you need to be clearing content consistently for a very very long time to even be able to see the patterns drop, and to acquire enough of the mats to make said items, by which time they are no longer useful.
I would drop tailoring in a heartbeat if I could get a refund of all the mats I used to make all the stupid stuff and all the training.
I would much rather all my toons have gathering professions or professions that I can buy the items for, like enchanting or JC, which is funny since I have never even considered levelling a JC and my enchanter never does anything useful 😀
My mage has all her professions maxxed, Tailor, achy, cooking, first aid, fishing and Arch. I have started levelling some of the other toons I have simply for the darkmoon faire as a way to get pets and mounts quickly. The only exception being that I have never and will not likely ever start Archaeology on another toon. I had enough trouble keeping my temper under control with my mage, and I still really want to collect the mounts and pets. I just can’t bring myself to farm the items with a system that is so fucked it can send you in circles for 10 minutes and then eventually pop up where you started. GRRRR, angry even just thinking about it actually.
When they had mentioned it at Blizzcon, I had imagined some sort of system like herbing or mining, just things in the wild you would fly over and they would sparkle at you and you would pick them up. How lovely…man what they delivered was horrific (and I generally like everything Blizzard come up with) and so far from what I imagined, but my OCD kicked in and I had to have it done on my mage.
My Druid is a herber/skinner, so is my Shammy ( I never thought the two of them would be on the same side and server), my pally is an enchanter (max) for the stam to rings and engineering but only like level 12 or something, my warrior is a blacksmith and Miner – neither maxxed although they are both in the 300+ area, my priest has mining and inscripting, but her mining is at about 3 and her inscription is about 420, my hunter is a LW and I do not even think she has a second profession picked up yet. I tried to cover everything, so if i ever had all my toons on the one server I would be mostly self sufficient, but I suck at levelling them, mostly because it is too expensive and I don’t have the time. I am generally running LFD, or Raiding or levelling…so I don’t have time to just stand there and burn money – although I do LOVE professions 🙂
Anyway some other fantastic posts on this subject, another big week so far :
Confessions of a Grown up Gamer