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| WotLK: Profession Changes |
by Theik @ 20 Aug 2008, 04:41 AM
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 Wrath of the Lichkin: Profession Changes Welcome to the very first edition of Wrath of the Lichkin, where an infamous Moonkin shall guide you through the various, sometimes confusing, changes that Blizzard will be making to World of Warcraft in the upcoming expansion. In the first article in the Wrath of the Lichkin line, we shall take a closer look at the various Professions in Wrath of the Lich King, and how they're changing. And, of course, the new kid on the block, Inscription, will also receive some proper attention.
Introduction
While World of Warcraft does not have very complex gathering or crafting mechanics, there is no denying that professions have a strong impact on the game. From the Gnomish Mind Control Cap that turned Saurfang into the menace of Orgrimmar, to the thousands of potions a raider consumes in a lifetime, professions have been an important part of World of Warcraft for ages.
Read on and discover how your favorite professions are going to change for the better (or worse) in the upcoming expansion.
Gathering Professions
Gathering Professions have long been the domain of Chinese farmers and alts, and often you'll find people frowning on your choice of professions if you try to join a hardcore guild as a Mage who delights in picking flowers and skinning innocent critters after raid time.
To counteract this, Blizzard is giving the three gathering professions something extra, something that should make them something other than a complete waste of your two slots.
Herbalism
Herbalism in Wrath of the Lich King will be giving you a self-cast HoT known as Wild Growth, an ability which should make solo grinding a bit easier. The healing isn't all that shabby, but the cooldown is a bit on the high side.
Luckily enough, there will also be two new consumables you can find from Firethorn, a new herb in Wrath of the Lich King, the Fire Seed and Fire Leaf items. At a one minute cooldown, shared only with Leatherworking drums and Engineering bombs, these will find their way into the bags of many herbing raiders in large numbers.
Mining
To make mining more attractive for gathering mains, Blizzard has introduced Toughness to the profession, granting an extra 35 stamina. It has yet to be seen if 35 stamina is going to convince tanks to pick up mining, but an extra 350 HP is never a bad extra if you were already a miner.
Skinning
New in Wrath of the Lich King is Master of Anatomy, an ability that all skinners will be granted. This newly found anatomy knowledge will increase your crit by 1.13% at Level 70 or 0.54% at Level 80. While RNG will always be rearing its ugly head to poke fun at crit, this should still make the profession a lot more attractive for people who enjoy a good critical hit every now and then.
Crafting Professions
From carefully crafted Shadoweave Robes to powerful Lionheart swords, crafting professions have given equipment to wear for early raiders and casuals alike. And a raid without potions and elixirs is hard to imagine, so crafting professions have been helping in raids for quite some time.
Sadly enough, some professions offered benefits only to the player, with little to no items they could sell, where as others were largely based around selling things, offering no reward to the crafter. This pushed several professions out of the raiding scene, much like how gathering professions went largely ignored.
Luckily enough, the next expansion will offer some positive changes for these professions.
Alchemy
Alchemy has been a 'profit' profession for ages. Mass producing potions, elixirs and flasks is a very nice source of income, yet until the addition of the improved Alchemist Stones, there was little reason for anybody to roll Alchemy other than easy access to raiding consumables.
Not far into the Burning Crusade, Blizzard gave Alchemy a massive blow by changing how elixirs worked, bringing the elixir count from one flask and as many elixirs as you could fit on your buffbar, down to one flask, or one battle and one defensive elixir.
In Wrath of the Lich King, Alchemy consumables will be further reduced in their usefulness by the introduction of Potion Sickness, a debuff which will make it impossible to use more than one potion a fight.
This would have certainly been a deathblow to the Alchemy profession for any character other than a crafter alt, rendering the Alchemy Stones useless, but the introduction of a new passive ability, Mixology will help ease the pain slightly, increasing the strength of elixirs and flasks you are able to craft. Tests report a 20 to 25 % increase in elixir buffs, and a massive 50 % increase from flasks.
Blacksmithing
Aside from the rare Bind on Equip crafts picked up in raiding instances, which Blacksmiths might be able to sell, this profession has been one of the least economical choices. All the goodies people actually want are Bind on Pickup or require a certain level in Blacksmithing to use, leaving no actual income for the Blacksmith.
This will be changing in Wrath of the Lich King because of the introduction of a new concept; socketing. Now I'm certain you have all placed a gem in your equipment before, so you're most likely wondering if I've lost my mind; but take a look at this baby, the Titanium Belt Buckle.
New in the expansion is the ability to apply an extra, colorless (No matter what you put in them, your set bonus will not be affected) gemslot to your belt, bracers and gloves. Details on if this would replace an enchantment on the affected item are vague, but that Belt Buckle will certainly be of interest and fetch a nice price on the auction house.
Enchanting
With Enchanter-only ring enchants, this profession already offered a nice benefit to people who rolled it; and anybody who had to fork over the gold for a Mongoose enchant will agree that it also fetches quite some money. This profession wasn't exactly in need of a major overhaul, it was already working rather well, yet one complaint has stood the test of time; 'What? No I don't want to fly to Darnassus, I'll find a different Enchanter then'.
Being face to face for a sale is great if you're trying to sell a car, but simply selling an enchant on the Auction House would have been far more convenient. A new kind of consumable created by Inscription is the answer, scrolls one can enchant such as the Treated Vellum scroll. The scroll can then be placed on the Auction House, and later used by somebody who buys it to enchant their own weapon, saving the hassle of finding an enchanter.
Engineering
The goggles that this profession can craft aside, Engineering has never been a profession for serious raiders. Most of the creations are mediocre at best, and the ever-present threat of having it backfire and burn your facial hair away keeps the mentally sane from using it. The Flying Machine gave the profession some new light, but it still lacks the benefits of the other professions.
Much will stay the same in the expansion as it stands now, though the addition of a few new tricks might help. While this isn't exactly as useful as one might have hoped for, the Hyperspeed Accelerators look a good bit better. Additions are also available to turn boots into rocket boots and cloaks into parachutes, yet the real question remains; are any of these additions better than the enchants you could have put on that gear?
Well, if they don't, you can at least make certain you ride around in style on a badass motorcycle.
Jewelcrafting
Like Enchanting, Jewelcrafting did not exactly lack anything. Not only are gems in great demand, the Jewelcrafter only gems were popular enough to keep people from rerolling once the prices of gems dropped. As such, little is subject to change so far, but a few new mechanics are in place.
First of all is the Gem Perfection passive ability, which gives a chance to create a slightly higher quality green quality gem. (Compare this to its 'perfect form'.)
As you can tell from the further improved versions of the gem (blue and epic) the gems in Northrend will be making slightly bigger leaps. This isn't the only change to gems though, for the Jewelcrafting-only gems got better as well.
Comparing a regular epic stamina gem to its Jewelcrafter-only version, the extra increase in stamina is far from bad, but the fact that a Dragon's Eye (the gem all Jewelcrafter-only versions use) can fit all colors, making those pesky set bonuses that much easier to achieve.
Leatherworking
If you're in a hardcore, endgame guild, there's a four out of five chance that you're all too familiar with this tradeskill, because you currently have it. With the haste buff provided by drums being far too amazing on DPS intensive fights such as Brutallus, many guilds are sporting raids with four leatherworkers in each group.
It was really only a matter of time before Blizzard realised this, and in Wrath of the Lich King, the drum part of Leatherworking got reduced immensely. First and foremost is Tinnitus, a debuff that prevents you from receiving the benefits of a drum for two minutes. This alone would lower the required amount of Leatherworkers to one per party, but even though the tooltip does not display it yet, reports are stating that drums now affect all raid members in range, bringing the number required down to two per raid. (Assuming a ranged camp and a melee camp.)
Tailoring
Tailoring is yet another profession that wasn't in a dire need of an overhaul. While there was a gap of raiding content between the Spellfire and Sunfire robes, they were still some of the best pieces of equipment around at that level, and what caster did not at one point or another sport a Belt of Blasting?
Selling your services was far from difficult either, for Runic and Golden Spellthreads were great enchants to put on your pants. In Wrath of the Lich King, cloaks are the next spot where tailoring will be able to fill in the gap Enchanting leaves behind, with Swordguard, Darkglow and Lightweave Embroideries. (And to stop the argument before it starts: 'You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound.' does not mean that these can only be used by tailors, as long as the embroidery is not bind on pickup. Only time will tell.)
And if that wasn't enough? Well, you'll be able to fly around Aladdin style on your new flying carpet.
New Profession - Inscription
Being that Inscription is the new profession in Wrath of the Lich King, I opted to go slightly more in-depth on this one. Many will be fairly unfamiliar with the concept of 'Glyphs', so I shall be doing a lot more explaining here than on the previous professions.
Glyphs
What are Glyphs and how do they work? Before I even start about the profession itself, I should most likely explain what exactly the whole Glyph system is and how it works.
 What you see on the right of here is the Glyph interface, the place in your spellbook where all the Glyphs produced by Inscribers will be placed. There are three types of Glyphs, in varying degrees of power.
Greater Glyphs (the three golden slots) are Glyphs that have a major effect on your spells. You will be able to place three of these Glyphs in your interface, and they should easily make a difference for your performance.
Examples are increasing a spell's damage, increasing the duration of a DoT spell or giving a stun effect to a spell.
Lesser Glyphs can be placed in the three silver slots, and are Glyphs that provide effects similar to Greater Glyphs, but weaker.
Minor Glyphs are also placed in the silver slots and are minor alterations to your spells, such as new graphics for your spell (Polar Bear Druids, Polymorph Penguin for Mages), or reducing the mana cost ever so slightly.
At the moment, Glyphs are in an experimental stage, and most information regarding them has been datamined, leaving it very open to changes. As such, I won't actually be linking a whole lot of example Glyphs; you'll have to do with these two examples:
Greater Glyph - Wrath - The tooltip is wrong, it should actually read '25%', but this is an example of what a Greater Glyph is like. It has a massive impact on spells, making, in this case, Wrath almost completely immune to cast interruption from damage with the right spec and glyph. (Talent: Celestial Focus)
Minor Glyph - Baby Penguin - This is an example of a Minor Glyph, Glyphs that provide more of a niche to your spells than an actual benefit. Polymorphing things into other stuff than sheep is always fun, but I feel sorry for the tank who has to start sundering the baby penguin. Such cute animal abuse.
Inscription - How does it work?
If you've ever played a Jewelcrafter, you're most likely familiar with the concept of Prospecting. Much like how Jewelcrafters prospect 5 ore for some gems (and rubble), Inscribers will mill 5 herbs into an ink. This ink will then be used for writing the various scrolls and Glyphs they can make. As I already explained what Glyphs are, I shall only shortly list the other things they can make:
- Scroll of Recall, a handy pocket Hearthstone useable only by people with Inscription.
- Various damaging effects such as this Runic Blast.
- Temporary enchants like those Blacksmiths can make, such as the Runeword of Minor Magic.
- Stat increasing scrolls that were previously only available from drops and vendors, such as a Scroll of Intellect.
- Scrolls such as the previously mentioned Treated Vellum for enchanters to use.
Inscription - Personal Benefit
An ongoing theme in the changes to professions in this article is the balance between economical viability against actual self benefit, something that has become far more balanced in Wrath of the Lich King. To this end, Inscription has an ability called Glyph Mastery which unlocks the transparent Glyph in the middle. (See screenshot above.)
It is currently unknown if this will be a Greater or a Lesser/Minor slot, but it should hopefully give the profession that extra boost it needs to be popular amongst raiders.
Conclusion
In conclusion, a lot of professions that hold little to no personal benefit are getting some love given to them; and professions with the exact opposite problem are granted some new ways to fill their gold supplies. While the expansion is obviously still in beta, and many things are subject to change, the various tradeskills are already starting to shape up to provide new and refreshing changes.
This was Theik with the, incredibly long I notice at this point, first edition of Wrath of the Lichkin, and I hope to see you next time when Wrath of the Lichkin will be trying to make sense of the 'Achievement system'.
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I am Really looking forward to the warlock glyphs, have to decide between engineering or inscription to replace the drums.
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