Professions

Professions are additional skills for your character, most of which you can learn starting at level 5. Learning professions is completely optional, but they add additional layers of interaction (and fun!) to your time in World of Warcraft.

There are two categories of professions: primary and secondary. Each character can choose only two primary professions. You can learn as many secondary professions as you like. There are no class or race restrictions when it comes to choosing a profession, but some races enjoy advantages for certain professions.

Some primary professions involve your character going into the world and looking for specific types of loot. These are called gathering professions. You might be hunting for metal, animal skins, or herbs. Other professions use these materials to create items, and they are known as crafting professions.

Crafting professions allow characters to produce items for others to use. You might be making permanent items, such as armor or weapons . You might be invested in short-term goodies, like potions. Crafting professions require a higher investment in money and time than gathering professions.

Secondary professions are specific in what they can do. Though more limited in scope than primary professions, these are easier to pick up, master, and play around with.

Primary Professions

There are 11 primary professions in the game. If you’re interested in a certain profession after reading the brief introductions that follow, there is more detail about each profession later in this guide.

Improving Professions

Practicing the Gathering Professions

To increase your skill in Herbalism, Mining, or Skinning, you must simply perform those gathering tasks again and again. Performing the actual task is just like looting: right-click on the object. Herbs are found on the ground all over the world. Mining veins are usually along ridges or tucked into valleys. They’re also plentiful inside caves. Skins are taken from many normal animals or natural monsters after they’ve been defeated and emptied of loot.

Most times you gather an item, your skill increases as shown in your General log. Eventually, a given type of object “grays out.” This means that you can’t get points from them anymore (you can still gather them, though). You can tell this because the tag below the object appears in gray instead of green, yellow, or orange.

Practicing the Crafting Professions

To practice crafting professions, click on that profession’s icon from the Professions menu or your Action Bar. This opens a window that lists all the recipes you currently know in that profession. Clicking on the individual recipe shows all the ingredients required.

If you have all the required ingredients, the number of times you can use that recipe is indicated beside the name. To make an item, click on the recipe to highlight it, input the number desired, and click Create. Your character automatically cycles through all of the creations in the queue, and you get any points gained in the process.

Crafting Professions

Alchemy

Alchemists use herbs and oils to create potions, elixirs, and flasks with such effects as healing, mana regeneration, invisibility, speed, and increased stats. The earliest focus in this profession is on potions that restore health and mana.

Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing uses metal bars to create weaponry and both mail and plate armor. Blacksmiths need a Blacksmithing Hammer (or any object that functions as one) and access to an anvil to create items. Many merchants have crafting items, and any of these will sell your character a Blacksmithing Hammer for a trivial amount of money. Anvils are found in most towns and in all cities.

Enchanting

Enchanting uses magic recipes to permanently enhance armor and weapons with improvements such as increased stats or resistance to magic. Enchantments require magical ingredients that result from Disenchanting other items. This is a rare case where a crafting profession is also its own gathering profession.

Enchanting is a difficult profession for a new player to skill up easily. Guilds often offer the support a person needs to become a higher level Enchanter without crippling themselves financially. Tailoring is a good profession to take in addition to Enchanting, as it doesn’t require a gathering profession to make its goods, and the items made can then be Disenchanted.

Engineering

Engineering uses metal and stones to create a variety of useful and fun items, such as goggles, explosives, ranged weapon scopes, bombs, and mechanical animals. Creating different items with Engineering requires a handful of tools, most of which are created by the Engineer.

Engineering is helpful for dedicated solo and PvP characters. Most professions won’t make or break you in a fight, but being able to use decent explosives is another way to stun enemies and damage them. Anything like this is a big boost when fighting on your own.

Inscription

Scribes create glyphs, scrolls, cards, and other paper and book items. Glyphs are class-specific recipes that enhance characters’ abilities. At beginning levels, scribes need a Virtuoso Inking Set, herbs, and parchments. To create inks, scribes automatically learn Milling, which turns herbs into inks.

Jewelcrafting

Jewelcrafting is the art of creating beautiful and powerful jewelry from metals and gems. There are a number of nifty recipes that are only meant to be used when a Jewelcrafter makes the items for themselves.

At higher levels of Jewelcrafting, you create gems that are slotted into higher-tier equipment. Anything that has red, yellow, blue, or meta slots is an indication that there are empty spaces for gems. Jewelcrafters take gems found with metal veins or gained through Prospecting and cut them into finished items that convey various bonuses.

Leatherworking

Leatherworking uses hides and skins to create leather armor, armor kits, and a few other items. Many early Leatherworking items require you to purchase materials from Trade vendors, but you won’t need to worry about any required tools for making items.

Tailoring

Tailoring is the weaving and sewing of cloth into armor, shirts, bags, and other items. Cloth is available only as loot drops from humanoid enemies. Some items require silks, which are loot drops from spiders.

Gathering Professions

Herbalism

Herbalism is the harvesting of herbs from plants. Herbs also occasionally drop from enemies, and some enemies can be harvested once they are killed (usually ones that are affiliated with nature).

Mining

Mining is the collection of minerals and ore from natural deposits. Mining is simple and inexpensive, as the only tool required is a Mining Pick (there are a few weapons that also serve as a mining pick, so read their descriptions carefully). Metal is most often found in hilly or mountainous regions.

Skinning

Skinning is the act of removing leather and hides from animal corpses. Skinning is simple, inexpensive, and requires only a Skinning Knife. Mousing over an enemy corpse indicates whether it is “skinnable.” You can skin your own kills after looting them. In addition, you can skin other people’s kills if they loot their targets and leave. It’s good to wait a second before doing this in case the other person is also a Skinner and is planning on coming back. You don’t want to steal anyone else’s work!

Secondary Professions

There are four secondary professions in the game, and you can acquire as many of them as desired. There is no reason not to take all four and to raise them whenever you have the time to spare.

Archeology

Archeology allows players to recover fragments of artifacts from various parts of the world. You turn on artifact tracking, which can be used in concert with tracking for other gathering professions. Look for special areas within each region and use Surveying to uncover the fragments that are assembled into finished pieces.

Cooking

Cooking uses many of the ingredients received as loot to create food for you and your comrades. Certain recipes create food that includes temporary buffs, known as Well Fed, which increases your character’s stats.

First Aid

First Aid enables you to create bandages for restoring health and antidotes to remove poison. First Aid is most valuable for classes without a healing ability, but everyone benefits from First Aid. Healers can use bandages for times when they’re out of mana or are silenced. Bandages are created from cloth drops in the game.

Fishing

With Fishing, you catch fish and possibly other marine life, junk, or treasure. To Fish, you need a Fishing Pole. Fish are found in any sufficiently deep pool of water (even inside the major cities!) and many types of fish are often found in schools.