Crafting/Professions

[jrkilroy]

Simple question, lots of possible answers.

When MB a group, how do you skill up your crafting/professions? Do you change your system if you are in the RAF zone?

I have my first 5 man team, my tank is doing herb/mining so that I can grab as I go w/o changing toons. I have one toon that does skinning and I use a click to move/repeater to take care of that. The challenge I've found is that I have collected enough resources to start leveling one profession. I don't know that I want to spend the time doing that, especially x10.

So, do you just let your professions slide until you are higher level?

Do you take your toons out solo for gathering/grinding mats?

Is there an advantage to keeping your crafts current while leveling with RAF?

[Maxion]

With RaF you generally want to just get the most out of it while you can.
But for normal leveling it is generally good to at least do the gathering professions and enchanting so you'll be ready for when you want the rest up, if you do.
Tailoring can be easy to do as you go too with all the cloth that drops.

Generally it depends how fast you want to level, if you plan to level more teams during your RaF, and if you mind going back for them later.

[Ualaa]

It takes roughly the same time to level to 60th, and then skill up a gathering profession to 300.... as it does to reduce your leveling speed and skill the gathering profession as you go. That is assuming no RAF.

With RAF, the only way to skill up a gathering profession while leveling the toons, is to greatly sacrifice your leveling speed. But since RAF is a limited duration, I'd say during RAF ignore the trade skills entirely, unless you're on a new server or starting wow and cannot afford to train your toons. Even if that is the case, once you have leveled the first set, gain a bit of gold in Hellfire and then ignore tradeskills until after RAF on the other teams.

I like to end up with 1x Skinning, 1x Mining, 1x Herbalism and 1x Enchanting across the team. That way, should I be in the mood, I can gather any resource, and if the team does instances I have the option to disenchant, should the essences/shards/dust be more valuable then vendoring a drop.



I would recommend one Jewelcrafting toon across all of your teams (or possibly several, to gain recipes faster), and for as many alchemists as you can stand leveling.

I'm sitting at 19 alchemists currently (have been taking a lot of time off of wow lately), but plan on having 29.

I'm currently making 3k gold per day, transmuting gems (takes 16 minutes) via alchemy, and then using Quick Auctions, I use the auto cancel and then post features... 5-6 times between heroics or battlegrounds, over the next couple of hours. I'd say under half an hour of "working" time, for 3k a day.

[Sam DeathWalker]

1 JC
3 Tailors (each a different cloth)
1 of everything else

Then rest Eng (pvp) / Alch

is optimal in my opinion.

[Shodokan]

I have 32 alchemists... with my gem output + the honor change the market is pretty flooded... which is a bit odd. I produce an average of 40 gems per day or so with procs. About 4.5k worth of profit per day. Which for doing nothing but making gems isn't bad.

I also use alchemy to make titansteel and every 1000 gold spent nets me 1800, and i have a dedicated buyer @ 90 per bar.

[mikekim]

I have always found that its far easier to level some of the skills as you go along (unless you are running RAF, then you just outlevel the zones too quickly)

If have just recently started a fresh team (3x Warlocks) on a new server (see sig..) - no RAF :(
my main has Mining and Skinning.
slave 1 has Herbalism and Inscription.
slave 2 has Tailoring and Enchanting.

I'm now at lvl 19 and hav been levelling up all the skills as I go along. As I'm basically hoovering the area of all resources, on route to quests. so mats for levelling are not an issue.

Current status:
Mining (105)
Skinning (145)
Herbalism (117)
Inscription (98)
Tailoring (130)
Enchanting (128).

I have no current use for the bars that are smelted, or the leather skinned so they are all sold on the AH.
in three days I have made 280g just from selling these alone.

when I RAF'd up my multiple sets of toons I had just mining, skinning and herbalism.
Skinning kept up to speed, due to the number of mobs killed. but i found that i had to spend some time later levelling up Mining and Herbing (only took a couple of hours to level both after I had hit 60 and equipped an epic mount to speed up trawling the zones)

[jinkobi]

Leveling first- professions last is my mottto.

At 80 it only takes a few hours to go from 0-450 in most professions if you got the gold.

Outside of skinning which at least one toon should have while leveling. It is useful in more ways than one for multiboxers and can be done as you kill.

[OzPhoenix]

I always do my teams like this:

1. Tailor / Enchanter: I want the enchanter on 1, since he's the toon that (unless he's dead) is doing the looting and it saves me having to move over bound-after-x-mins items from a non-enchanting master to an enchanting slave. With Enchanting as one profession, Tailoring is the natural compliment (and also makes looting the extra cloth in Wrath easier).

2. Miner / Blacksmither: I'm now running an All-Paladin team so this is the obvious next choice for professions.

3. Skinner / Leatherworker: Skinning being a ridiculously easy to level profession (so easy I think you could even level with it with RAF), and useful as a money maker (and drums maker from leatherworking) makes this the next combo.

4. Herbalist / Alchemist: The last gathering profession, plus a moderately useful crafting profession.

5. Jewelcrafter (or Inscription) / Engineer: Engineering for repair bots (and Dal AH access). I prefer Jewelcrafting to Inscription but I must admit, Blacksmithing + Engineering + Jewelcrafting in the team does make for a shortage of gathered ore.

As others have stated if I were RAF'ing (as I've done before), I'd skip all profs bar enchanting and skinning until I'd hit 60 (though I'd take mining + herbing but wouldn't go out of my way to level them). I guess it depends on whether you're going to use your RAF time to level multiple teams (in which case the race is on) or just one or two.

[Seldum]

Ignore skills during RAF.

Then just lvl them either by bying mats or collecting the nessesary stuff.

I did this with mining. In the beginning I skilled up mining as I leveled along. But stopped as this skill takes a bit of dedication to keep "up to level".

I went back to the areas where I could mine the necessary ores and since I out leveled the places so much I diden't have to spend time on killing mobs much. I think I saved alot of time by doing this.

I diden't keep enchanting up to date aswell... which I came to regret a bit, since I had so many items in my bank which I coulden't disenchant that it becase annoying...

[OzPhoenix]

I diden't keep enchanting up to date aswell... which I came to regret a bit, since I had so many items in my bank which I coulden't disenchant that it becase annoying...

Yeah, I think you (can) store up problems if you skip enchanting - at least the one time I tried it I found I had the same problem as you did, a great mass of BoE's in the gbank waiting to be DE's (and many BoPs vendored or in personal bank). I agree with Mining, it'll slow you up - I always took it, but then only mined until my RAF-level speed got in front of my mining skill - at least that way you got some skillups done without slowing down the leveling too much.

Skinning I reckon is so easy it can be done even in RAF (and without RAF, I've found myself hitting skinning caps long before my team had leveled high enough to allow me to expand the cap).