Hey folks, this is Librarian Husky. Professions changed a lot in Dragonflight, probably the most we’ve ever seen, and Professions became an entirely new kind of progression option at endgame. But if you didn’t play through Dragonflight, you probably came back to the game, saw how complicated Professions are now, and just noped out of there. Or maybe you did play through Dragonflight but just couldn’t get into Professions or understand what you were supposed to be doing. What’s this Profession Knowledge stuff? How does the Profession Gear fit into things? And how can I level up when I ran out of recipes?

Clearing Up the Confusion

We are going to clear all of that up. Professions offer you some crazy gold-making potential, and you can craft some of the best gear available in the game. Professions really are valuable, so here’s our ultimate Professions guide for the War Within: where to start, how to level them quickly, and how it all fits together.

Main Goal: Understanding Professions in War Within

The main goal here is to make sure you understand how Professions work in the War Within and the various progression paths and options that are available to you to improve your crafting experience and let you make some good stuff. Maybe you didn’t play through Dragonflight.

Understanding Stats, Materials, and Crafting in War Within

So, you don’t know what all of these stats, optional materials, different ranks, and tiers mean? People are saying you need to use a spark to get good gear—what does that even mean? We’ll go over it, don’t worry. Or maybe you kind of know some things about the big update we had in Dragonflight but just couldn’t wrap your head around what you’re supposed to do.

Embracing Professions in War Within

No matter what camp you’re currently in, this article should have all the answers you need to fully embrace Professions in the War Within. So first things first, where can you learn the new Cat Algar versions of the Professions so you can start working on getting everything leveled up?

Finding the New City Hub: Dagal

The War Within is a bit different because usually, we visit the big city hub towards the end of the leveling process. But Dagal, the new hub for this expansion, is introduced almost immediately. Very shortly after starting your adventure on the Isle of Dawn, you’ll visit the new city hub. It has quite a few different districts, and the one you’re looking for is the Forge Grounds.

The Forge Grounds: Your Crafting Destination

This is the Professions or crafting section, and you can find trainers for every profession somewhere in this area. So, you can pick up Cat Algar Professions almost immediately. It’s also very important to note that you do not need the Dragonflight Professions at all. You don’t have to have any progress in them; none of it will carry over. They are entirely separate, so even if you did nothing in Dragonflight with your Professions, you are not any further behind anyone else—everything is reset.

Starting Fresh in War Within

It’s a fresh, clean slate, and everyone is on an even playing field. But you may be wondering, when should you start focusing on leveling these up? Should you pile everything you have into crafting and leave leveling until later, or should you just wait until max level to really start tinkering around with things? This will largely depend on you, your goals, and which Professions you’re interested in.

Gathering Professions: Mining, Herbalism, and Skinning

For anyone with a gathering profession, such as mining, herbalism, or skinning, I recommend picking those up and starting to level them right away. Make sure you are tracking your relevant nodes and gather whatever you come across on your questing adventures. Not only will this help you level up your profession, but gathering still yields a bit of experience too, so it can also help you level up your character.

Maximizing Gold Early On

If you want to make some good gold early on, I suggest selling the materials you are gathering. Usually, the earlier you get your items onto the auction house, the more gold you’re going to get for them.

Crafting Professions: When to Start

For crafting Professions, it gets a bit tricky. Personally, I would recommend waiting until you hit max level and complete the campaign before jumping into crafting and Professions. But ultimately, it is up to you. Crafting requires a lot of materials to really get going, so you’re either going to be spending a lot of time gathering them out in the world, which is usually easier at max level, or you’ll need to spend a lot of gold to buy them off the auction house.

The Cost of Early Crafting

It’s going to be super expensive early on, so leveling up first might give the prices a bit of a chance to come down. It’s worth noting that first-time crafts still offer some experience for your character. In Dragonflight, the experience gained from crafting was limited to about two levels, if I remember correctly. You can get some good chunks of experience if you start your crafting early, but you’re going to need to complete the campaign anyway, so it might not matter in the grand scheme of things.

Leveling Up Professions

Now that we have these Professions, how do we go about leveling them up? Leveling up your gathering is super simple—just gather every node you come across. You should get one skill up per node you gather early on, and as you approach 100 skill, you’ll mostly be relying on empowered nodes for the last few Skill-Ups. Just gather everything you can, and you’ll reach skill 100 in no time.

Skinning: A Quick Path to Max Level

For skinners, it’s even easier—just skin everything you can as you level, and you’ll probably be maxed by the time you’re level 80. If not, find a good place with a lot of beasts, kill them, and skin them to enjoy your super easy leveling.

Crafting Professions: Skill-Up Strategies

Leveling up crafting Professions is a little more involved. You’ll need to keep an eye on what you’re crafting and whether it can actually provide you with a skill-up or level-up. Each recipe will have an icon next to it—an orange icon means it will always give you a skill-up, and an orange icon with a number means that recipe gives that many Skill-Ups.

Understanding Skill-Up Icons in Crafting

You can see that some recipes give two or three Skill-Ups just for crafting one item, so keep an eye on that. This can save you a lot of time and gold if you craft the most efficient recipes available to you. A yellow icon means it only has a chance to grant you a skill-up, while a green icon means there is a low chance to get a skill-up. If there’s no icon, you will not get a skill-up at all from that recipe. Focus on orange and yellow crafts, and make sure you aren’t crafting gray recipes if your goal is to skill up your profession.

The Importance of Profession Skill Level

Skill level is super important for a few reasons. Obviously, the higher your skill, the more recipes you can learn, so the more items you can craft and create. For gatherers, the higher the skill you have, the more raw materials you’re going to get, so you can make more gold if that’s what you’re trying to do. But it goes a bit further than that.

Crafting Gear and Difficulty Score

Every craft has a difficulty score tied to it. This difficulty score dictates how much skill you need to craft that item at higher ranks. Crafting gear is probably the easiest way to explain this. All crafting gear has five ranks at which you can craft it, and the higher the rank you achieve, the higher the item level that piece of gear will be.

The Goal: Crafting at Rank Five

This is why everyone wants their gear crafted at rank five—you want the best result, right? The highest item level for your materials.

Increasing Your Skill to Reach Rank Five Results

You’re going to need to increase your skill to achieve those rank five results. The first way to do that is simply by leveling up your profession. Yes, you’ll gain access to more recipes, but you’ll also be increasing your overall skill to reach higher ranks of crafting results.

Using Higher Quality Materials

Another way to increase your skill in a crafting recipe is to use higher quality, tier, or rank of raw materials. Most raw materials have three tiers, so every ore, herb, or piece of leather will have three versions. The higher the tier that you include in any given recipe, the higher your skill for that craft, making it easier to reach higher ranks. So, if you really want to push for better results, using the best versions of the raw materials will help as well.

Introducing Concentration: A New Feature

There is a brand new feature and stat that will help you reach those higher rank results in the War Within: concentration. You can use your concentration to force a recipe to go up by one rank. So, if you can only manage to craft a recipe at rank four but really want to get that rank five result, you can tick this box and spend your concentration to guarantee that higher rank result.

Managing Your Concentration Pool

It will always increase your result by one rank, so this lets you decide when you want to get something good and when you might be okay crafting something at a lower rank. Your concentration pool regenerates slowly over time, so you can’t use this on every craft you do. You can hold up to 1,000 concentration at any one point, and each crafting profession has its own pool.

Concentration and Ingenuity in Crafting

You don’t have to worry about double gathering sharing a concentration pool—every profession has its own. There’s an important new stat that goes along with concentration: the Ingenuity stat. This stat gives you a chance to refund the concentration you spend, so if you have a high value here, you’ll be able to use your concentration more often, though there will be some RNG involved.

Other Useful Profession Stats

There are other profession stats that can help you in various ways as well. Resourcefulness gives you a chance to refund some of the materials used in any given recipe or craft, making things a bit cheaper if you get some materials back. Crafting speed, unsurprisingly, just speeds up all of your crafting, which can be great when you’re making a whole bunch of potions or similar items. Multicraft gives you a chance to make additional items, though this stat doesn’t really apply to crafted gear—it’s only useful for intermediate materials like alloys or for consumables like flasks and potions. However, being able to make multiple items from just one set of materials can earn you a lot of gold in the right profession.

Gathering Professions and Their Stats

For gatherers, the higher your skill, the higher the chance you’ll be collecting higher-tier materials, which will always sell for a premium because crafters will want to use them as often as they can. Gathering Professions have different stats to help them on their adventures. Finesse, for instance, gives you a chance to gather more of whatever material you’re collecting, increasing your overall yield.

Gathering Stats: Depthness and Perception

Your gathering depthness increases your gathering speed, and perception increases your chance to receive rare materials while gathering. Gathering is generally easier, so if you don’t want to jump through the hoops required to keep up with crafting, gathering is still a great option.

Understanding Profession Specializations

That’s how the different kinds of Professions work and how you can level them up. Let’s move on and talk about Specializations next. Each profession has up to four specialization trees. Your first specialization becomes available when you hit skill 25 in your profession. This first specialization choice is very important because you can only pick one at a time. You cannot swap or change your choice, and the others will remain locked until you level up further.

Unlocking Bonuses and Recipes

Throughout these trees, you can unlock various bonuses to your profession, like general increases to skills or stats. You can learn new recipes or unlock special effects. To unlock or purchase anything in here, you will need to earn Profession Knowledge. Each profession has its own knowledge, so you can’t spend mining knowledge on herbalism trees, for example.

Acquiring Profession Knowledge

How you acquire this Profession Knowledge will depend on your profession. Gatherers have it easier; they gain Profession Knowledge randomly while gathering and from empowering elemental nodes for the first time. As you gather, you just have a chance to get an item that will provide you with some knowledge. Crafters will need to do a bit more legwork. The first major source of knowledge for crafters comes from the first-time crafting bonus, which is simply an extra reward for the first time you craft any recipe in your profession.

Maximizing First-Time Craft Bonuses

You can actually filter for first-time craft bonuses, just in case you forgot what you have or haven’t crafted. If you select the first-time craft bonus filter, it will only show you the recipes you haven’t already made. The first-time craft bonus includes Profession Knowledge, some Artisan’s Mettle, and, if you aren’t yet at max level, a good chunk of bonus experience.

Earning Profession Knowledge Efficiently

One of the easiest ways to earn knowledge is to simply craft every recipe you have. Whenever you unlock a new one, make sure you craft it at least once to earn this first-time crafting bonus. This also means that earning new recipes gives you more chances to gain these first craft bonuses, so you should also aim to learn every recipe available to your profession for the current expansion.

Navigating NPC Crafting Orders

The next big source of knowledge comes from NPC Crafting Orders. You can find these in the crafting order menu at the bottom left of your profession window. This can only be opened while you are near a profession table, which can always be found near your trainers in Dagal. The NPC ones are listed under the patron section. They can reward you with a variety of goodies but will serve as the main source of two important resources: the first one is Profession Knowledge, so you’ll see a lot of them reward items related to it.

Gaining Profession Knowledge in War Within

When used, these items will give you some knowledge for your profession. This is the main source of repeatable knowledge gains in War Within, so you’ll want to keep an eye on this board and complete the knowledge orders whenever possible. Profession Knowledge is capped per week this time around, so you can only gain so much each week. If you fall behind, you’ll start to see more of these NPC work orders that offer knowledge, providing a catch-up system that we didn’t have in Dragonflight.

Artisan’s Mettle and Other Resources

No one player should be able to get too far ahead of anyone else, so if you didn’t enjoy Professions in Dragonflight because of that, we should be on a much more even playing field in War Within. The other important resource you can get from these orders is Artisan’s Mettle, a crafting material that will fuel all sorts of important crafts, so you’ll want to complete those orders as well.

Additional Knowledge Sources and Tips

You can also get treaties or books that provide one knowledge point for your profession, which were usable once per week in Dragonflight, so I expect that to be the same in War Within. These come from inscriptions, so you’ll likely need to make a crafting order for them if you’re interested. Additionally, there are one-time treasures for every profession scattered around the new zones. If you come across anything purple, be sure to check it out—it might just be another few points of Profession Knowledge.

Managing Your Profession Knowledge

It’s important to note that you don’t have to spend your knowledge as you acquire it. This gives you the flexibility to plan your specialization path and spend your knowledge when you’re ready to maximize its benefits.

Planning Your Profession Specializations

You can let your knowledge sit until you decide what you want to do. You can choose your first specialization for the initial bonus and then save your knowledge to spend on a completely different tree. Don’t feel like you have to rush anything here. Take your time, read through the options, and plan ahead. As you level up, you’ll be able to unlock the other specialization trees for your profession. The second one becomes available at skill 50, the third at skill 60, and if you have a fourth, it will become available at skill 75. You won’t be able to unlock all four until you reach skill level 75, which can take quite a while depending on the Professions you’re trying to level. So your first choices of Specializations really do matter.

Maximizing Your Crafting Professions

That should give you enough information to get your Professions started, but what about maxing them out? You may notice while leveling your crafting Professions, especially, that you kind of hit a wall around 50 to 70 skill, depending on the profession. You don’t have any more recipes to learn from the trainer, and everything is turning gray or green. So how do you keep skilling up to reach skill level 100?

Unlocking New Recipes

You’re going to need to get some new recipes—ones that are not available from a trainer. For example, certain specialization tree choices will unlock recipes for you. These can be quite deep in the trees, so they may cost a lot of knowledge to acquire, but these are the highest tiers of crafted gear that everyone will be after. They are usually worth picking up, and all of these recipes should stay orange until skill 100, so they can carry you the rest of the way.

Choosing Your Specialization Wisely

I would actually encourage you to choose a specialization tree that includes some epic crafting recipes as your first or second specialization choice. If you don’t unlock these trees, it could be much harder to scale up further because these are some of the easier higher-tier recipes you can get. Personally, I will be unlocking the epic dagger and sword recipes as quickly as I can on my blacksmith so I can take advantage of the Crafting Orders for weapons early on.

Spending Artisan’s Mettle for Recipes

Another way to get some higher-tier recipes is by spending your Artisan’s Mettle at a new Artisan’s Consortium vendor in Dagal. This vendor is right next to the crafting order clerks and sells a variety of recipes that can help you level up a bit further. Most of them are for Profession Gear, which can also make you some good gold. Artisan’s Mettle is quite restricted, though, so you’ll want to ensure that any recipes you buy are worth the cost. They also sell some books that grant you a significant amount of Profession Knowledge, so you’ll probably want to buy those as well.

Recipes from Renown Factions

Several recipes are also rewarded through the various renown factions in War Within. As you earn reputation, you’ll progress through the renown tracks and earn more and more rewards. Earning rep is quite simple—just do story quests in each zone and complete activities for those factions. Then you can use some of these new recipes to get a few more skill points, which is a great way to narrow down what recipes are useful for continuing your leveling.

Finding and Learning New Recipes

One of the best ways to advance in your profession is to scroll down through your profession interface until you start seeing recipes you haven’t yet learned. Look for any with the orange icon, and then hover over the recipe’s unlearned information tooltip. This will tell you exactly where these recipes come from. This method not only helps you learn recipes to skill up further, but it’s also the best way to locate any missing recipes you want.

Understanding Profession Gear

Another very important part of your profession progression is gear—special Profession Gear. Every profession has two accessory pieces and one tool. Almost all of this gear is crafted within the Professions themselves, but you probably won’t be crafting all of your own pieces. Instead, they are spread out among different crafters, so you often have to rely on another profession to get your Profession Gear crafted.

How to Obtain Profession Gear

The easiest way to find out where your Profession Gear comes from is to visit a crafting order clerk. In this menu, go down to Profession Equipment and choose the profession you want equipment for. For example, if you have mining, pick mining and then search for your equipment. I also encourage you to go up into the filters and check the box that says “Current Expansion Only” to ensure you aren’t buying Dragonflight tools, which won’t be as good.

Crafting and Ordering Profession Gear

If you click on the recipe, you can see which profession will craft it at the top left. For instance, the mining hoarde accessory is made by engineers. You can either make an engineer and level it up to eventually craft your own gear, or you can just gather the materials, put in a crafting order, and have someone else do it for you.

The Benefits of Profession Gear

Profession Gear will increase the general skill of your profession and provide you with a good chunk of profession stats, making it a great way to enhance your overall crafting efficacy. Now is the perfect time to dive into Crafting Orders. Crafting Orders allow you to have something crafted that cannot be traded. For instance, the profession equipment we just looked at is bind-on-pickup, meaning anyone crafting it won’t be able to sell it on the auction house. The only way to obtain it from another player is by putting in a crafting order.

How to Place a Crafting Order

Crafting Orders are actually deceptively simple when you break it all down. First, visit a crafting order clerk—those in Dagal can be found at a specific building marked on the map. There’s one outside and quite a few inside. Talk to them, and they’ll give you a menu where you can search for any crafting item or recipe that you can place an order for. If you want a new weapon crafted but don’t have the profession necessary to craft it, search for the weapon you want.

Choosing and Preparing Your Crafting Order

Let’s say you want to order a two-handed axe. I recommend enabling the current expansion filter to ensure you aren’t looking at old recipes. You’ll see two options: a blue two-handed axe and an epic two-handed axe. If you click on the blue recipe, you’ll see it requires 10 Iron Claw Ore and one Core Alloy. You can get both of these off the auction house, or you can gather the ore and smelt the alloy yourself if you have the required profession.

Customizing Your Crafting Order

At the bottom of the crafting order menu, there are three different optional boxes you can fill. The first box allows you to add a missive to choose the stats on the resulting piece of gear. The second box lets you add an embellishment, which grants a bonus effect, but you can only have two embellishments across all your gear. Some special crafted gear also counts towards embellishments, so only add these if you know they’ll be worthwhile. Class guides on sites like Wowhead often include sections about crafted gear and which embellishments are best for you.

Enhancing the Item Level of Crafted Gear

The last box allows you to add special items that increase the item level of the gear you’re getting crafted. For example, if you add a Soul Sigil, the axe can go up to item level 574. If you use an Enchanted Weathered Harbinger Crest, it can go up to item level 590. This is how you upgrade the item level of crafted gear, making this arguably the most important part to understand.

Using Sparks for Epic Crafted Gear

Higher tiers of crafted recipes, particularly the epic ones, usually require something called a spark. For War Within Season 1, we will be collecting Sparks of Omens, which come from completing endgame activities. You’ll need one spark for any one-handed recipes or camp gear, and two sparks for any two-handed weapons. A crafting order for this gear works in exactly the same way—just add your sparks, collect all the necessary materials, and add any optional bits at the bottom.

The Value of Spark-Crafted Gear

Spark-crafted gear is special because it can reach much higher item levels, allowing you to get gear crafted that’s just three item levels below the very highest gear in the game. However, your Sparks will be limited—you’ll likely only receive one spark every two weeks if the pace matches what we saw in Dragonflight.

Options for Sending Crafting Orders

For all of your Crafting Orders, you can send them as a public order, which means anyone who sees it can complete it for you. If you want something crafted quickly, this isn’t a bad option. If you are in a guild, you can also send it to your guild members, which could be a good option if you have dedicated crafters in the guild.

Sending Personal Orders for Better Control

If you want more control over your recipe, like requiring a minimum rank to ensure that you get a good item level from your crafting result, you’ll need to send a personal order. The only requirement here is a player name. You can either find someone in trade chat who can complete the craft or pay attention to trade chat until someone with your profession starts advertising their expertise. Plug in the player’s name, send it off, and wait for them to craft it—it’s really that simple.

Recrafting: Enhancing Your Crafted Gear

Something else to highlight is the Recrafting option. As a crafter, you’ll have this option at the very top of your menu, and it allows you to recraft something you’ve already made. For example, if you make a piece of gear and get a rank two result because your profession isn’t progressed all that much, you can use this option to try for a higher rank result as you improve.

Recrafting: Upgrading Your Gear

You can come back later and recraft that same item into a higher rank after gaining more Skill-Ups, knowledge, or just upgrading your Profession Gear. Recrafting something will always cost fewer materials compared to making it for the first time, and the rarest or most expensive materials are usually excluded, making it cheaper to recraft than to start from scratch. This is great because it means you don’t have to wait to craft something—you can craft it at a lower rank, equip it, and benefit from the gear upgrade, then recraft it later when you can get a better result.

Recrafting Through Crafting Orders

The same process can be done with Crafting Orders. There is a recraft option at the crafting order clerks, so you can plug in your already crafted item, supply the Recrafting materials, and find someone to craft it at a higher item level. You don’t need to get something at rank five the very first time. At the start of the expansion, getting a rank five result will actually be quite a bit harder than many folks expect. Accepting a lower rank for some early crafts with the intention of Recrafting later could be very beneficial.

Checking Available Crafting Orders

On the crafting side of things, if you want to check out what Crafting Orders are currently available for you to complete, you can open your profession window when you are near a profession table. The best place for this will be your profession trainer in Dagal. You can view all of the public orders currently on the board, the current commissions available, and how many orders there are for these items. If you click on one, you’ll get more details about the order and can decide if it’s worth taking on.

Evaluating Crafting Orders

When reviewing Crafting Orders, you’ll see individual listings showing how much each client is willing to pay and how many reagents they are providing. Keep an eye on this detail—there’s no point in filling an order with a low commission if they also don’t provide all the necessary materials. This issue usually occurs with guild and personal orders, but it’s still something to watch for. When you find an order you want to craft, click on it, start the order, craft the item, and complete the order. It’s super simple, and you’ll receive all of your rewards in the mailbox.

Daily Limits on Public Orders

You can only complete a certain number of public orders per day, as indicated in the top right corner of the crafting order menu. Since these are limited, you’ll want to choose the orders that offer the best commission for your time and materials. If you want to craft more than your daily limit allows, you’ll need to rely on guild orders or advertise in trade chat for personal orders.

Maximizing Crafting Rewards

If you have any personal orders waiting for you, they’ll be found in the personal tab of the crafting order menu. Crafting Orders might not seem particularly useful unless you want to make a bunch of gold, but it’s worth noting that crafting an item via a crafting order is essentially the same as crafting it yourself—you’ll still benefit from the first craft bonus.

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