These are the notes I cribbed from reading the http://wod.wowhead.com/guide=2506
Both gathering and crafting are integrated into the new Garrison system. Its worth taking the time to read up on the Garrison system, as mistakes can take a bit of gold and time to reverse. A few things I noted:
- old choke points in skill levelling can be bypassed in WoD, so overpriced low level enchanting mats and the like will soon be a fading memory
- levelling is much easier, most crafting professions have a handful of blue patterns, not the mess of greens built for instant sharding
- don’t worry about training in a city before launching into the expansion, mobs and quests will give you what you need
- Garrisons have their own resource currency, professions often require mats from multiple gathering professions, this added with the Work Order system, means there are more steps in producing most craft items and room for confusion and mistakes
- the crafting professions look evenly matched, the traditional dominance of the modification professions (Enchanting, Jewelcrafting) looks to be over.
Blacksmith
TLDR, the easy stuff is easy to get, the hard stuff is a long grind.
(1) It will take about two months to learn all the patterns (the upgrade weapon/armour patterns take 15 days each to learn).
(2) There are no 2-handed weapons that can be crafted (so far, might be something like the ToT weapons down the track).
(3) There is a limit of “Unique Equipped: Warlords Crafted (3)”, so while there are eight epic armours, no one will want more than three of them.
(4) Learn Chest, Helm, Greaves, these three items provide the biggest stat boost for the same mats.
(5) Can learn how to make a pet “Soul of the Forge”.
(6) You learn the skill and get a few patterns just from the initial questing, plus the Forge building for your garrison.
(7) Its possible to level BS from 1 to 600 in four hours of frenzied slaughter of NPCs (and trading in scrap items looted from their bodies). Rinse and repeat for other professions as needed.
(8) No sign of crafted PVP gear. PVE gear will automatically scale up towards PVP stat levels, just not quite as good as dedicated PVP gear, so no real need for PVP specific crafting items.
Mining
(1) True Iron Ore, Blackrock Ore, and Draenic Stone (which can be traded for ore)
(2) Fragments skill levelling extended to all ore types (and similar mechanics for other gathering professions)
(3) Ore nodes can spawn a hostile Goren when mined
(4) Level 2 Garrison plus a quest gets you a mine for your Garrison
(5) “Ore Eater” Battle pet
(6) Peon’s Mining Pick (not sure if this a limited spawn like the Ancient Mining Pick, or if everyone can grab it). Worth farming, it will save hours of your life if you like flying in circles looking for gold dots on the mini-map.
Alchemy
(1) There are WoD versions of classic, hard to get spells, including Invisibility, Free Action, Water Walking, Water breathing, and Swiftness.
(2) Better level fishing, a lot of the potions require fishing mats for Crescent Oil
(3) Alchemy followers in an Alchemy lab will give you a stack of potions/day
(4) Transmorphic Tincture: changes gender for a short time
(5) For standard flasks and potions, your garrison can provide everything you need
(6) Only Alchemists can make “Greater Flasks”, possible +250 stat rather than +200 stat gain (and its primary stats not secondary stats)
(7) A greater flask requires 5 of the ordinary flasks, plus some stuff, to make, so I think you can imagine what the Greater Flask cost is going to be like…
(8) iLvl 620 Alchemist Trinket for xmuting.
The Chameleon Lotus
TLDR: Pick ALL the herbs!
The way this new lotus is implemented is a little bit different from the Pandaria ones: In MoP, Golden Lotus nodes are a rare spawn replacing a regular herb node. Apparently in WoD the Chameleon Lotus mimics a local herb, meaning you don’t know it is a lotus until you gather it. Essentially, instead of being a rare node spawn, it becomes a rare herb drop from a regular node.
Can be picked from Garrison herb garden.
Archaeology
Mostly like Mists, some BOA 620 gear, and some jumping puzzles for people who like platform games.
Cooking
A bit simpler, +50 and +75 stat food … except for the +100 stat feast which requires a Level 2+ Barn in your Garrison to get the materials. But in general you just want lots of meat/fish.
Jewelcrafting
JC used to be the Queen of Professions, the one anyone could make a million gold with. Its had some pretty massive changes:
(1) No more meta gems, primary stat gems, socket bonuses, or gem colours. No more prospecting!
(2) The number of sockets on gear is being reduced significantly, I estimate to around 10% of the current number of sockets (so demand for gems will be greatly reduced)
(3) There is emphasis on crafting neck and ring items, with levelling patterns good for L92, 95 and 98. You can build epics too, but remember the 3 crafted item limit – its probable that other armour slots offer more item points than mere bling.
(4) Probably looking at a couple of months to pick up all the patterns, like BS there are some 15 day upgrade patterns to boost neck/ring iLevel.
(5) Gems now come in two exciting flavours, vanilla and “greater”. Regular gems are +35, greater are +50.
(6) You need to be a JC to get greater gems and the best upgrades.
(7) The supply chokepoint, regular gems are going to be CHEAP, like the green gems today. A greater gem requires 50 times as many work order/daily CD resources as a regular gem. If you did nothing but play WoW all day, forgoing sleep, you can probably make two greater gems per Gem Boutique per day. If you just do some work orders at the start of the evening, and again when you log off four hours later, you can probably make one every second day. Getting one of those epic blings or upgrading it is going to consume more like a week’s JC resources (x100-200 the resources of a regular gem).
(8) Note the daily CD for making crystals is shared with the daily CD for learning patterns.
In case you hadn’t figured it out already, you can’t make Draenic gold by sitting in Orgrimmar at Level 90. You will have to do the starting quests up to around Level 92 and you will need to get the garrison up and running.
Engineering
The red-headed step child of professions, filled with useless toys you can’t offload onto unsuspecting customers, traditionally a way to spend gold rather than a serious gold earner.
(1) A lot of the odd little Engineer items are now available to anyone through the Engineering Works. The loot-a-rang may be useful in raids, when you have run past a mountain of corpses, and now wonder which one has you 30 silvers on it. The one use glider, stealth, shield, and attack toys may be a source of income. I’m hoping these things don’t become essential for raids, otherwise we will all be writing macros to include their use.
(2) You need to be an engineer to make armour upgrades, or use the Blingtron 5000, or the Wormhole generator.
(3) The Ultimate Gnomish Army Knife, the version for engineers only, has a 10 minute CD resurrection. Wording suggests it is always successful. We’ll need to test this in the field because science!
(4) You can make Fireworks, including Everlasting Horde Firework (which had a 0.5% drop rate in the week it was available).
(5) One epic weapon – an agility gun. And you can make scopes for ranged weapons as usual.
(6) Four epic goggles/helmets – in cloth, leather, mail and plate varieties. Statwise they seem equal to those produced by the other crafting systems in the game … but they’re Mechshades, and they’re bind-on-equip. Did you know transmog rhymes with ka-ching!? Your engineer alt could be busy making a pair of these while your other crafter toon is busy working on chest or legs, so some potential for faster gearing by paying attention to your Engineer.
(7) Yes, there are pets. Three crafted, one from the Blingtron.
Fishing
Fishing has been made more complicated.
(1) Fish comes in different sizes (bigger = more meat)
(2) Savage Savory Delight = orc pirate/ninja costumes.
(3) Each zone has different fish, and a unique bait to increase the chance of catching that fish.
(4) Crescent sabrefish is essential to many alchemical products.
(5) Rubber Duck pet
(6) Social fish – new ways to annoy your raiding comrades by throwing fish at them
(7) Pretty Draenor Pearl
(8) Your garrison gets a fishing shack at L94. Nat Pagle will turn up, and will annoy you endlessly.
(9) A pet land shark and water strider mount await those willing to grind and grind and grind…
Inscription
Inscription is the boom/bust profession of WoW. One day your stuff sells for a fortune, three days later you have to pay people to take it off your hands.
(1) The fact that a key byproduct of your scribe followers is a “merchant order” that is cashed in for gold tells you something about the lack of goods that scribes have to offer other players. Still 75-225g is not too shabby.
(2) Ability consolidation means there are few new glyphs, existing glyphs have been repurposed. Large numbers of glyphs are now learned automatically.
(3) BOE levelling trinkets at L91, 95 and 98.
(4) Can craft some weapons and off-hands for casters – wowhead has contradictory information about there ability to be upgraded, I’d lean towards them being capable of being fully upgraded.
(5) Darkmoon faire cards, Trinkets are generally +primary stat (or armour) with a crit or spirit proc. There are new Joker cards which can be used to fill in a missing card in a near complete deck. Trinket decks can be upgraded. NB: first DMC post launch starts 7 December. Edit 10 Warpaints to make, and not locked behind a CD, these are going to be pretty easy to make! Unlike the weapons, these don’t seem to be upgradeable.
(6) Card of Omens, for gambling with, or arranging movement of vast hoards of gold between servers. 1-6,000g.
(7) You still have to mill herbs. When the JC has knocked off for the day and is enjoying a beer, you will still be grinding…
Tailoring
(1) Hexweave Cloth, requires fur and herbs to make. Remember how you used to farm humanoids for cloth? Well, get used to killing furry animals. Or just doing lots of work orders.
(2) You get the standard WoD set of armours, stat rerolls and upgrades.
(3) No more leg embroidery.
(4) Tailor only “creeping carpet” mount and plushie toy (for Masochist Pet Battle owners only).
(5) The Hexweave bag has 30 slots and requires 100 Hexcloth (500 Sumptous fur plus herbs through work orders), so maybe you can make one every 2-3 days or so. If it is this fast, then there is not much point making the older big bags from Mists/Cataclysm as they take much longer to make and the mats are pretty expensive. You need to be a tailor to make these.
(6) Epic BOE cloaks. Do not appear to be subject to the 3-crafted item limit. These will be in demand.
Tailoring looks to be in a good place for making gold. Unlike the other gear crafters, you have a lot of options for your mats when the demand for crafted gear falls off. You will always sell bags. But, the price of the bags is probably going to crash a few months into the expansion because everyone else will be shifting their production into bags as well.
I don’t have a leatherworker toon, but as there do not seem to be specialistions for pots, flasks and elixirs for WoD alchemy, I may as well convert one of my alchemists into a leatherworker/skinner.
(1) Can make armour, drums, profession bags (e.g. for mining). The bags are 36 slots, which is a slight improvement over the 30 slot tailoring bags, and no bigger than the 36 slot bags you can already build.
(2) Leatherworking only mount (Dustmane Direwolf).
(3) BOA Garrison tents, 10 second rest for +10 stat boost for an hour. Consumable.
(4) BOE epic cloaks, like the tailoring cloaks do not appear to be subject to 3-crafted item limit.
So, its okay, but nothing super exciting.
Double-gathering
Q. If almost everyone can make everything, should I just drop my professions and gather raw materials?
A. While most things can be made without great difficulty through your garrison, the very best items and upgrades are going to be locked behind long acquisition times for the patterns and long farming times for the consumables.
Mechanics Are Easy 