WoW The War Within Professions Guide

Jonas Author

Created - 09.12.2024 Updated - 10.12.2024

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The WoW The War Within professions might just be your quick way to riches in the game. But to get to that point, you’ll need all the help you can get to max out the profession of your choosing. On this guide, we’ll show you the best way to max your profession so that you can get rich fast.

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In Dragonflight, we saw a massive overhaul of the profession system, and the same structure will carry forward into The War Within. While the core mechanics will remain familiar, there are a few notable changes, such as the addition of Concentration and the Ingenuity stat.

Whether you’re a crafter or gatherer, you’ll find plenty of opportunities to make gold and gear up in this expansion.

Where to Learn the New Professions in WoW The War Within?

In The War Within, professions can be picked up early in your adventure. Unlike previous expansions where the main city hub was introduced later, The War Within introduces Dagal, the new central hub, almost immediately after you begin on the Isle of Dawn.

Within Dagal, look for the Forge Grounds, a dedicated crafting district. Here, you'll find trainers for every profession. Whether you’re starting from scratch or building on past experience, this is your go-to location to pick up the Catalgar professions and start leveling them up right away.

Do You Need Dragonflight Professions?

No, you don’t! The professions from Dragonflight are entirely separate from those in The War Within. Your progress from the previous expansion doesn’t carry over, so even if you skipped Dragonflight, you’ll start on an equal footing with everyone else.

This clean slate ensures a fresh experience for all players.

When Is the Best Time to Level Professions?

Deciding when to focus on professions depends on your playstyle and goals.

If you pick up a gathering profession like Mining, Herbalism, or Skinning, start leveling as you quest.

• Track Nodes: Make sure to enable node tracking to gather everything you come across.
• Earn Gold: Sell gathered materials on the Auction House early on for maximum profit, as prices are generally higher at the start of a new expansion.
• Gain XP: Gathering provides small experience boosts, helping with character leveling.

Crafting professions often require significant material investment, either through gathering or purchasing resources.

• Gather or Save Gold: At max level, gathering becomes easier, and material prices may stabilize, reducing costs.
• First-Craft Bonuses: Completing recipes for the first time provides character experience, though you’ll still need to complete the campaign for progression.
• Gather Everything: Each node grants skill-ups until you near 100 skill. After that, focus on empowered nodes for the final levels.
• Skinning: This is even easier—just skin every beast you encounter. By the time you hit level 80, you’ll likely max out your skinning skill. If not, find areas with high beast density for quick farming.

Leveling Crafting Professions

Crafting takes more strategy compared to gathering.

Recipe Skill-Up Colors

• Orange Recipes: Always grant skill-ups.
• Orange with Numbers: Grant multiple skill-ups per craft—focus on these for efficiency.
• Yellow Recipes: Have a chance to grant skill-ups.
• Green Recipes: Low chance of skill-ups.
• Gray Recipes: Grant no skill-ups and should be avoided if your goal is progression.

Prioritize Efficiency

Focus on orange and yellow recipes to maximize your skill-ups while minimizing material use.

The Importance of Skill Level

Your profession skill affects more than just recipe availability—it directly impacts the quality of your results.

For Crafters

• Difficulty Scores: Each recipe has a difficulty score that determines the rank (1-5) of the crafted item. Higher ranks yield better results.
• Skill Requirements:To achieve higher ranks, you’ll need:
  • Higher profession skill levels.
  • Better-quality materials: Most materials have three tiers, with higher tiers increasing your crafting skill for that item.

For Gatherers

• Higher skill levels increase the quantity and quality of materials gathered, boosting potential gold earnings.

By focusing on improving your skill levels and using the best resources available, you can achieve the highest-quality crafts and maximize your profession’s potential in The War Within.

The New Concentration Mechanic

A brand-new mechanic introduced in The War Within is the concentration stat, designed to help you craft higher-tier results. Concentration allows you to increase the rank of a recipe by one, making it easier to hit those higher-level outcomes.

For example, if you can craft a recipe at rank four but want a rank five result, you can spend concentration to guarantee that higher rank.

This feature provides flexibility, letting you decide when it's worth spending concentration to guarantee a better result and when a lower rank might suffice.

Your concentration pool regenerates over time, so it can't be used continuously. You can hold up to 1,000 concentration, with each crafting profession having its own dedicated pool, meaning you won't have to worry about sharing concentration across professions.

The Role of Profession Stats

Along with concentration, there are other profession stats that enhance your crafting experience. One such stat is Ingenuity, which gives you a chance to refund concentration that you spend.

This makes concentration use more efficient if you have a high ingenuity stat. However, expect a bit of RNG (random number generation) to influence the outcome.

Additional profession stats include:

• Resourcefulness: Provides a chance to refund some of the materials used in crafting, making it cheaper to craft items.
• Crafting Speed: Speeds up the crafting process, which is especially helpful when crafting consumables like potions or flasks.
• Multicraft: Grants a chance to create additional items with the same materials. While this is beneficial for intermediate materials like alloys or consumables, it does not affect crafted gear.

Gathering Professions and Stats

For gatherers, the higher your skill, the more likely you are to collect higher-tier materials, which always sell for a premium. Each gathering profession has unique stats:

• Finesse: Increases the chance of gathering more materials.
• Depthness: Speeds up your gathering process.
• Perception: Increases your chance to gather rare materials.

If you're not into the complexities of crafting, gathering remains a great option with more straightforward benefits.

Specializations and Progression

Each profession offers up to four specialization trees. When you hit skill 25, you'll unlock your first specialization, which significantly impacts your crafting path. Keep in mind that you can only pick one specialization, and once chosen, it cannot be changed.

The trees offer various bonuses, including increased skills, new recipes, or special effects, depending on your profession. To unlock anything in these trees, you'll need profession knowledge, which is specific to each profession.

• Gatherers: Gain profession knowledge randomly while gathering, especially when empowering elemental nodes for the first time.
• Crafters: The primary source of knowledge comes from the first-time crafting bonus. By crafting new recipes for the first time, you’ll earn knowledge. Make sure to craft each new recipe at least once to maximize your knowledge gains.

Another major source of profession knowledge for crafters comes from NPC crafting orders, which can be accessed through the crafting order menu near profession tables.

Completing these orders rewards profession knowledge, and some work orders can even help you catch up if you're behind in knowledge accumulation.

Once you’ve unlocked your first specialization, you’ll continue unlocking additional specialization trees as you level up.

The second specialization becomes available at skill 50, the third at skill 60, and the fourth at skill 75. Your initial specialization choice is critical, so take your time to research and plan which tree to prioritize.

As you approach skill levels 50-70, you may notice that you hit a wall with no more trainer recipes available. To continue progressing to skill level 100, you’ll need to unlock specialized recipes, many of which are tied to your specialization choices.

These recipes, which are often the highest-tier crafted gear, will stay orange until you reach skill 100, ensuring that you can continue leveling up while crafting top-quality items.

When choosing a specialization, consider the recipes that will help you reach your goal—some offer epic crafting recipes that can be essential for your progression in the game.

Best Professions In WoW The War Within

Professions in The War Within build on the systems introduced in Dragonflight. You’ll be earning Profession Knowledge to invest in specialization trees, equipping Profession Gear to enhance stats and crafting efficacy.

You can also use a tiered ranking system for both raw materials and crafted items. The crafting order system will also play a more significant role this time around, so keep an eye on updates there.

If your goal is to make gold with minimal effort, gathering professions remain your best bet. Whether you’re mining, herbing, or skinning, there’s always a market for raw materials—especially early in an expansion.

Mining

In The War Within, mining introduces new ores and metals across the zones. Additionally, you’ll encounter Empowered Nodes that grant special bonuses. Using a unique ability, you can overload these nodes to increase your haul and activate special effects.

Specializations

1. Plethora of Ore: Increases general mining skill and boosts yield for specific ores.
2. Mining Fundamentals: Grants a Vigor point whenever you mine a node, enabling constant dragonriding. It also allows mining while mounted.
3. Mastering the Mysterious: Enhances your Elemental Overload spell for more materials and node bonuses.

Herbalism

Herbalism mirrors mining in structure. You’ll gather new herbs across the zones, encountering empowered nodes with similar overload mechanics. Additionally, the Verdant Seeds system returns, allowing you to plant your own herb nodes for extra materials.

Specializations

1. Bountiful Harvests: Boosts skill and unlocks higher-tier materials.
2. Botany: Grants Vigor from herb nodes, enables mounted gathering, and introduces new bonuses for seed planting and using Mulch to increase node yields.
3. Overloading the Underground: Enhances the effectiveness of overloaded herbs and lets you use the ability more frequently.

Skinning

Skinning maintains its core gameplay—harvesting leathers and rare materials from beasts. New materials include Kiten and Carcasses, with rarer items offering substantial gold-making potential.

Specializations

1. Tanning: Reduces RNG by allowing you to guarantee a Carcass or Hide drop from your next skin.
2. Harvesting: Focuses on other materials like meats for cooking, rare monster drops, and fishing-related items.
3. Luring: Introduces bait traps to lure larger creatures, effectively creating your own skinning nodes.

Higher-tier materials will be harder to obtain. Instead of progressing naturally to tier two or three, you’ll always start with tier one, improving chances for higher tiers as you increase your skill and gear. This change makes higher-tier materials rarer and more valuable.

Crafting

For those willing to invest time and knowledge, crafting professions can yield significant rewards. Whether it’s armor or utility items, crafting is ideal for players who enjoy customization and specialization.

In The War Within, crafting orders are essential for maximizing your crafting profession's potential and making gold.

• Crafting for Players: Many crafted items can't be directly sold. Instead, players submit crafting orders through the system. Specializing in high-rank recipes can position you as a go-to crafter.
• Private Orders: To make serious gold, you'll need to advertise in trade chat to attract private orders.
• Patron Orders: These NPC-driven crafting orders will provide profession knowledge and accuracy points, which are critical for advancing your specialization.

Why They Matter:
Crafting orders are essential not just for earning gold but for gaining knowledge to specialize in your profession’s trees. If you’re serious about crafting, understanding this system is non-negotiable.

Enchanting

Enchanting is a unique profession that doubles as both crafting and gathering. You can disenchant spare gear or loot to acquire enchanting materials, making it an excellent option to pair with tailoring or to use as a standalone.

• Passive Gold Income: Disenchant gear and sell the materials. Early in the expansion, enchanting crystals and materials are often in high demand, giving you a chance to profit.
• Crafted Enchanted Crests: These items, essential for crafting high-tier gear, can only be made by enchanters. Unlocking these recipes and fulfilling crafting orders is a lucrative opportunity.
• Enchants for Sale: High-tier enchants, especially Rank 3, are highly profitable. Getting ahead by acquiring recipes early and crafting these enchants can earn you significant gold.

You can either focus on disenchanting for passive income or dive into crafting and selling enchants, depending on how much effort you want to invest.

Tailoring

Tailoring allows players to craft cloth armor for every slot and create Profession-Specific Bags that grant unique bonuses. These bags are expected to be high-value items early on, so tailoring could be a profitable profession.

Specializations:

1. Gear Crafting: Focuses on creating cloth gear for specific slots.
2. Dawn and Dusk Gear: A set of embellishment items with varying power levels.
3. Intermediate Materials and Threads: Improves spell thread crafting and overall tailoring efficacy.

Leatherworking

Leatherworking enables crafting of both leather and mail armor, covering multiple classes. However, due to specialization limits, you won’t be able to craft all high-tier items immediately.

Specializations:

1. Leather/Mail Gear: Tailors to specific classes and armor types.
2. Embellishments: Adds unique features to crafted gear, which could become valuable depending on their power in the current season.

Note: Rank 5 gear is where the money is, but it’ll take time and specialization to get there.

Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing offers some of the most diverse crafting opportunities, including all plate gear and a wide variety of weapons. Here’s why it’s a top contender:

• Gold-Making Potential: Plate gear ensures steady income, while weapons cater to almost every class, exposing you to one of the largest markets. Weapons are often the first items players craft in a new expansion or season, creating high demand.
• Specialization is Key: You’ll need to decide early between weapon types (e.g., daggers or swords) since you can’t max out all crafts at once.

Specializations:

1. Ever-Burning Forge: Buffs this unique mechanic. Though currently underwhelming, it could improve with future updates.
2. Means of Production: Focuses on non-gear crafts like tools, weapon stones, and crafting alloys.
3. Weapon Smithing: Dedicated to various weapon types.
4. Armor Smithing: A large tree covering every piece of plate gear you can craft.

Jewelcrafting

Jewelcrafting shines again with its ability to craft gems, rings, and necklaces, making it a strong gold-making option.

• Simplified Specialization: With just two main categories—rings and necklaces—it’s easier to specialize compared to more segmented professions like blacksmithing.
• Gold-Making Highlights:
  • Early access to rank 5 crafted items could net significant profits.
  • The Ring of Binding with unique effects might mirror the success of Dragonflight’s Elemental Lariat.
  • Epic gems could be a solid moneymaker initially, although you'll likely need an Alchemist to supply materials.

Specializations:

1. Gem Cutting: Unlock and master various gem-cutting recipes.
2. Jewelry Crafting: Focus on rings and necklaces.
3. Prospecting: Increase yields from prospecting and create intermediate materials.

Inscription

Inscription is an odd one this time, offering tools and utilities but relying heavily on Darkmoon cards and decks for gold-making.

• Gold-Making Potential: If Darkmoon cards and their embellishments are powerful, this could be a lucrative profession. However, if they’re poorly tuned, you might struggle to recoup costs.
• New Deck Mechanics: Instead of upgrading to scaling trinkets, you now convert decks into embellishments, offering gear bonuses.
• Other Crafting Options:
  • Vantus Runes, contracts for bonus renown, and profession knowledge skill books.
  • Crafted staves and off-hands add a bit of gear potential.

Specializations:

1. General skill and profession stats: Boosts your overall crafting efficiency.
2. Milling and Ink Creation: Focus on material generation.
3. Crafting weapons and profession gear: Allows you to create equipment for other professions.
4. Darkmoon Cards: Increases drop rates and customization options for the decks.

Engineering

Engineering retains its quirky charm with many tools and gadgets aimed at personal use rather than profit. However, it introduces some interesting group-play options.

• Crafted Ranged Weapon: The only crafted gun for Hunters makes this profession unique.
• New Potion Bombs:These provide group buffs, including:
  • Potion of Power: Adds primary stats to allies.
  • Potion of Recovery: Increases healing received.
  • Potion of Speed: Boosts movement speed.

The bombs don’t require Engineering to use, so tanks or healers might leverage these in group content. They could potentially compete with Alchemy in the group buff market.

Specializations:

1. Craft specialized items like guns and profession equipment.
2. Devices and Tinkers: Enhance crafting efficiency for gadgets and explosives.
3. General skill boosts for specific components like cogwheels.

Alchemy

Alchemy remains a steady gold-maker with its potions, flasks, and new transmutation opportunities.

• Potion and Flask Sales: High-end players will prioritize rank 3 crafts for optimal performance, ensuring strong demand.
• New Gleaming Glory Transmute: This is the only way to craft Blasphemi Raw Gem, a key ingredient in epic Jewelcrafting recipes.

Specializations:

1. General Alchemy bonuses and skill points.
2. Flasks and Potions: Small specialization trees make it easy to max out quickly.
3. Transmutations: Focus on transforming materials, including the lucrative Gleaming Glory Transmute.

With its straightforward mechanics and established market, Alchemy continues to be a solid option.

Max Out Your Professions Now

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