The WotLK profession thread
 

Summarizing: Last updated: 30. August 2008

Most of the work has been done by Prinsesa so please give her credit too when you copy&paste this thread to any other place. If you find any wrong information in this post please let me know.


General:

• One of the system we’re considering as well is – so you have profession dailies for all of your professions, and what those end up being I’m not sure, but then when you do that daily you get a token. Then on this vendor there’s maybe 20 recipes, and they cost [maybe] 25 tokens each. So you’ll start making decisions on how you want to spend those tokens and that will help differentiate you from everyone else just by your decisions rather than what you happened to have found or bought off the Auction House.

Source: BlizzCast Episode 4

Mining:
Miners get a stamina boost as a profession-specific perk Toughness - Spell - World of Warcraft


Skinning:
Skinners get a critical strike boost as a profession-specific perk Master of Anatomy - Spell - World of Warcraft


Herbalism:
Herbalists get a Heal-over-time ability Wild Growth - Spell - World of Warcraft as well as consumables like such as Deadnettle - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft as profession-specific perks.


Alchemy:
Alchemy received the potion sickness debuff, which affects anyone using a potion, to limit potions to once per combat, but got Mixology as a profession-specific perk. Mixology increases the stats gained from Elixirs and Flasks by 20%

• Alchemy discovery - So for fairly deterministic upgrades they’re ok, or for the fun stuff, and there might even be some other uses that we haven’t really thought of that are going to fit well with that unpredictability

Source: BlizzCast Episode 4


Blacksmithing:
Blacksmithing gets to put sockets on weapons and belts as "constantly in-demand" products, as well as sockets on gloves and bracers as profession-specific perks. BS will have the ability to socket one-handed weapons. From the recipe, it looks like a casted ability, similar to Enchants that have to be done through the "Will not be traded" window. That being said, it will be available to all players. We do not know if two-handed weapons will be socketable, either as a freely-available ability or a BS-specific perk.

Blizzard has stated that one of their ideas was to give Armorsmiths the ability to add a second Meta socket as an additional sub-profession perk. However, those are simply words at this point. Nothing like this currently exists in the beta, nor has there been any announcements regarding perks for the Weaponsmith subprofession, or the Sword/Axe/Macesmith sub-sub-professions.

• "Permanently add a socket to your bracers. Requires a level 60 or higher item."
• "Permanently add a socket to your gloves. Requires a level 60 or higher item."
• "Permanently attach a titanium belt buckle onto a belt, adding a socket to the belt. Requires a level 60 or higher item."

Engineering:
Engineering gets to apply special Engineering-esque abilities to their items such as rocket-power to boots, parachute abilities to cloaks, haste abilities to gloves and rocket launchers on an as-yet-undetermined slot. Only Engineers can use these activated abilities, and they replace the traditional enchants. Scopes for ranged weapons continue as the "constantly in-demand" products, while a Motorcycle land mount is a new profession-specific perk. Other engineering gadgets include a deployable Auction House NPC and a deployable mailbox.

• "Permanently attaches a hand-mounted pyro rocket launcher, allowing a skilled engineer to deal 2070 to 2530 Fire damage to an enemy at range. The rocket can only be fired every 2 minutes."
  
• "Permanently attaches hyperspeed accelerators to a pair of gloves, allowing a skilled engineer to increase their haste rating by 340 for 8 seconds. The gloves can only be activated every few minutes."
  
• "Permanently attaches a flexweave underlay to a cloak, allowing a skilled engineer to turn the cloak into a parachute to fall slowly for 10 seconds. The cloak can only be used every 5 minutes."
  
• "Permanently attaches overpowered nitro boosts to a pair of boots, allowing a skilled engineer to greatly increase run speed for . The nitro boosts can only be activated every 5 minutes."
  
• "Attaches a permanent micro stabilizer to a bow or gun that increases your ranged hit rating by 40"
  
• "Attaches a permanent scope to a bow or gun that increases its ranged critical strike rating by 40"

Leatherworking:
Leatherworking received the Tinnitus debuff to limit Drum buffs to once every 5 minutes, but received BOP Leg Armors as a profession-specific perk. Also Leatherworker can use Fur Lining to enchant their own bracers.

• Fur Lining - Stamina - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase stamina by 90. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
• Fur Lining - Spell Damage - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase spell power by 70. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
• Fur Lining - Fire Resist - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase your fire resistance by 60. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."
• Fur Lining - Attack Power - "Permanently enchant bracers to increase attack power by 120. Can only be used on the leatherworker's bracers, and doing so will cause them to become soulbound."

Tailoring:
Tailoring gets to create "Embroideries" which are applied to cloaks in a manner similar to spellthreads and leg armors.
Embroideries provide special abilities such as a chance to deal additional Holy damage on spell hit, a chance to restore mana on spell cast, or a chance to proc extra armor penetration. These embroideries replace the traditional enchants and are a profession-specific perk. Spellthreads continue to be a "constantly in-demand" product, with an additional PvE/healing-oriented variant of SPI/spell power as opposed to STA/spell power. Like Leatherworking, Tailoring will also have spellthreads with higher-than-average stats as a profession-specific perk.

• "Embroiders a subtle pattern of light into your cloak, giving you a chance to cause an additional 800 to 1000 Holy damage when you damage an enemy with a spell. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound."
  
• "Embroiders a magical pattern into your cloak, giving you a chance to restore 300 mana when you cast a spell. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound."
  
• "Embroiders a magical pattern into your cloak, causing your damaging melee attacks to sometimes ignore 1000 of your target's armor. You can only embroider your own cloak and embroidering your cloak will cause it to become soulbound."

Jewelcrafting:
Jewelcrafting has the ability to create "Perfect" gems when cutting Uncommon gems - these supposedly provide more stats than the Uncommon gem, but it is unknown if thet provide more than Rare or Epic gems. It is also unknown if these Perfect gems are BOE or BOP. Special "Dragon's Eye" gems with higher-than-average stats continue to be JC's profession-specific perk, with the added bonus of matching any of the three socket colors, regardless of the stats provided.

New Meta gems:

• "Reduces spell damage taken by 2%"
  
• "Reduces the duration of any Fear effects used against the wearer by -15%. This effect does not stack with other similar effects."
  
• "Reduces the duration of all Stun effects used against you by -15%"
  
• "Reduces the duration of any Silence effects on you by -20%"
  
• "Decreases the duration of movement impairing effects by 15%"
  
• "Melee/Ranged Haste Rating increased by 480" (proc?)
  
• "2% chance on successful spellcast to restore 300 mana."

Enchanting:
Enchanting has had its new enchants released. There are also recipes for upgradable BOP epic Wands, similar to the Thunder/Deep Thunder/Stormherald line of upgradable epic maces for Blacksmithing, although their stats have not been finalized as of yet.


Inscription:
Inscription will allow players to augment the cooldown, damage, or mechanics (stun, knockback, DoT, HoT, etc.) of a spell. It will have two aspects: augmentation of abilities and spells with the creation of a new type of item ("scrolls", for example, from ink, paper, and other reagents — or some other item which has not yet been revealed). Every player will get a new spell book page to which they can add six glyphs — currently, two major, two lesser, and two minor.

Source: Inscription - WoWWiki

• Players will be able to swap their glyph with an one hour cooldown on each glyph. The glyph is destroyed when it is replaced. The cost of glyphs appear to be rather low.
• Inscription will draw most of its materials from Herbalism's herbs, milling them the same way a Jewelcrafter prospects a Miner's ores.
• Inscription will interact with Enchanting by allowing enchants to be placed on Scrolls, which can then be sold separately and applied without an enchanter. Newer scrolls have since been revealed with a level 35 minimum requirement, allowing TBC enchants to be placed on them. It can be expected that a third scroll for WOTLK level minimum requirements will be implemented as well.

Cooking:
Aside from those granting Track Humanoids or Track Beasts, or pet stats, the food buffs are pretty uniformly 40 stamina and 40 (otherstat). Ones pictured include: Strength, agility, expertise (I assume they mean rating), hit rating, 16mp/5, spirit, and 280 ArP.

List of known recipes:
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...oking_8885.jpg

I'm looking forward to the potion sickness change, if it goes far enough. It'd be nice not to be hitting a mana potion on every cooldown. There are plenty of fights where the RL says "take a healthstone or healthpot when/before <something happens>" and the healthpot is almost never an option.

There's also Blacksmithing getting easy way to level past the 360ish bump with the common ore found in the two starting zones in Northred. Which is all kinds of awesome and should be extended to other crafting professions, or at least the ones that use current "high end" mats just to advance to the cap.

For common knowledge about professions, see Professions - WotlkWiki - Wrath of the Lich King Information

E: Which states that Engineers are going to be able to create a Motorcycle.

I saw the drum debuff listed as well. My concern is that what happens to BC fights? they can tailor the new instances to take into account the potion sickness and drum debuff but as these can be staples of some BC fights I wonder if they plan to revisit those encounters.

Whomever was in charge of tailoring in BC did a bang up job. You could easily equip any cloth based class for the end game for the most part with just everyday work. The other professions were not so well served.

As for Inscriptions being permanent or exchangeable.

I vote for exchangeable glyphs. I would have assumed they would be like sockets, the player can select when and if to replace them individually. It could be as bad as having to pay a NPC to clear them like talent resets are handled.

If they are implemented as exchangeable there are ways for Blizzard to put limits on it so that we don't see people flipping inscriptions during a raid. It could be as simple as requiring a fixed item similar to the blacksmiths anvil, tailors mana loom, or such.

I'm wondering on their reasoning though.
Tanks won't be able to chain chug armor potions, health potions, resist potions.
Healers will have a very hard time keeping mana up if not able to chain chug on long fights. And the alchemy trinket just lost a large part of it's value as well.

Are they planning to put more emphasis on mana regen and spirit (as with the paladin evocation),
or whether they intend to make fights shorter. (unlikely)
Perhaps they intend to allow a bigger variety of potion usage, or longer duration on potions. Healing over time (like diablo 2) instead of instant regen.

Mana gems and health stones will find an increased value as well.

Unless they change the fights then killing Illidan after WotLK talents/skills are patched will be nigh-impossible. We'll see later but I don't think they changed any fights for BC (they even said they weren't going to reverse the loot switch). But that discussion is for an another thread.

Hopefully this means that these pots (health, armour & all) are finally ending up as the crutch needed to make the kill (say a tank pops the armour pot near the end or a known damage increase if healers are in a pinch), instead of the staple "drink up every time your cooldown is up" type they are currently.

Though Health pots and maybe Resistance (absorb) pots should be off this sickness thing as they are already reactionary and not something you just keep drinking the whole fight.

We'll be getting lots of manaregen options, so mana shouldn't be a hinderance in longer fights, with raidwide totems, bigger JoW returns, buffed BoW and of course improved gear.

Currently they have to balance around people spamming pots, now they don't. It's no different from the flask/elixir change when TBC came out as far as I'm concerned. It's a good thing as it cuts out more of the outside of raids grind.

Right now it seems that a majority of class spells will have Glyphs available, and all of the Glyphs scale with level.

This raises the question of when the Glyphs will be craftable. Unavoidably, some will be crafted at lower profession skill levels. If good glyphs are available at low skill, this will overpower Inscription in comparison to other professions at low levels and create a disproportionate demand for low-level herbs and other materials required.

Only Druids have gotten a decent amount of Inscriptions right now. One can see most of them through this filter: Uncategorized - Spells - World of Warcraft

Or perhabs an inscriptor to "unlock" them. Blizzard stated that they want to keep the interaction a part of the whole trade and profession system. Inscribers to unlock inscriptions, blacksmiths being able to repair weapons and so on. A lot of the NPCs could be replaced or assisted with that. Which Engineer didn't want to open up the rep bot and take out out all the gold spent..

For inscription: Such a change could be an item that costs a small amount of reagents and add a cooldown. If someone actually wants to unlock them a second time within the cooldown (lets say 3 hours) they would have to spent more reagents and need an inscriber to "unlock" them at a certain place within a major city.

Interaction is a good thing as long as it doesn't get too annoying. I hope the developers have better ideas than they did have during the last expansion, where the classic creative profession Engineering was treated really with very few love except for the flying machine and the goggles.

Requiring interaction makes it hard for alts to be used as crafters though.

And we're still the only profession able to make scopes.
The sad part is that only hunters really "need" them.

Some alternative items, such as belt buckles might be interesting for engineers to make. With a variety of uses.

Blacksmithing already makes Belt Buckles. [Iron Buckle]

True, they're not used a lot, but perhaps engineering could make some belt "enhancements", say something like an utility belt to add to your normal belt.

One thing I've always wondered is that how people come so dependant on those extra buffs and consumables. Suuure, drums and such are a nice bonus, but with even M'uru dps requirements nerfed, I don't think they are required for any TBC fight. We cleared BT months and months with almost zero consumable usage, why would anything change now? True, DPS checks became harder if there is a debuff on drums, so I'm just going to ask "Why did you become dependant on an optional profession?"

I was able to do (not nerfed version of) M'uru by using only 1 manapot during whole almost 10-minute fight. I'm very confident I can do same thing for Kil'jaeden. I can't talk for other classes really, but I don't think mana will be a problem if you actually put some thought in managing it.

My point is, while current professions do take down the difficulty in raiding, they are hardly required in order to succeed.

Well Jewelcrafting got the trinkets and we can turn enemies into chicken not even this inside the arena. Engineering got some nice things with the gas clouds for example.

But somehow the love for the details was missing all over TBC.

- the first epic goggle version for rogues was worse than the blue version, which was worse than the D3 dungeon drop
- the second version only required Engineering 350 and had easy to get reagents. So the strongest part of Engineering didn't require it to be maxed out
- the trinkets remained gimicks while Jewelcrafting got continuosly better ones and addiontionally some best in slot items (neck)
- the boots where for a long time really strong but now got nerfed for the whole PVP aspect
- the new goggles are much worse than other professions pieces in Sunwell like Leatherworking, Tailoring or Blacksmithing
- Leatherworking has the strongest raid support and better crafted pieces

I really hope that profession get evened out a bit more.

For Illidan he's talking about Shear, not consumables.

Yup. Blocking Shear with a 30s CD block is going to need some luck (or a 100% avoidance set, but those aren't exactly common).