Professions

In the World of Warcraft, there are two types of professions, primary and secondary. Every player may have as many Secondary Professions as he or she desires but will only be able to choose two Primary Professions. All professions also fall into three categories: gathering, production, and service. To learn more, check out the Professions F.A.Q. down the bottom.

Alchemy || Blacksmithing || Cooking || Enchanting || Engineering || First Aid || Fishing || Herbalism || Leatherworking

Mining || Skinning || Tailoring

Gathering Profession

Gathering professions support production professions by providing the materials necessary to create goods. Players may choose to become pure gatherers and sell gathered materials to other players.

Herbalism

Herbalism is an almost necessary requirement for alchemy. You're going to find herbs all around the world, so why not get this skill and take advantage of it? Alchemy is a great skill that allows you to generate all sorts of instant and temporary potions to improve a character's effectiveness.

Fishing

Fishing is a mini-game that allows you to catch fish, which can be used with the cooking trade skill. You can also catch fish that cannot be eaten but are instead useful for other trade skills. You can even catch equipment, funny items, and valuable gems such as pearls. Fishing isn't for everyone. You'll discover that it requires a lot of patience and time to build your skill level up to the maximum level. While you're fishing you won't be gaining experience, so this development can put your leveling behind, unlike some other trade skills.

Mining

Mining is an exciting trade skill used to gather materials for blacksmithing or engineering. However, you don’t need those trade skills to be a miner. You could simply collect resources and sell them to blacksmiths and engineers. You're going to find these spots anyway as you travel throughout the world, so why not cash in on them? However, most people combine mining and blacksmithing or mining and engineering.

Skinning

Skinning allows players to gather leather and hides by skinning animals. Leather and hides are used for leatherworking. Leather is also used for some blacksmithing, engineering, and tailoring recipes.

Production Professions

Production professions allow players to create trade goods to be sold or used by the creator. However, some goods cannot be sold and are designed only to be used by the one who made the item.

Alchemy

The Alchemist mixes herbs in order to generate potions with a variety of effects. A player can create healing, invisibility, elemental resistance, mana potions, oils to coat weapons; and much more.

Blacksmithing

If you plan on being a blacksmith, you should probably already be a miner. Miners collect ore and smelt ore into bars to create the majority of blacksmithing items. Blacksmith recipes often include jewels, which are found in a variety of places. Typically, most blacksmiths buy or are given rare jewels from other players. Some blacksmithing recipes require leather, which you will need to buy from a skinner.

Cooking

From Beer-Basted Boar Ribs to Giant Clam Scorcho, there is no recipe too obscure or odd to avoid notice from the Chefs of Azeroth. Food is used in the game to heal players out of combat, so they can get back to fighting as quickly as possible.

Cooking isn't a serious trade skill, but it is a fun one. As you're traveling around the world, you'll notice that you often receive pieces of meat, which, instead of being sold to merchants, could be used to create food. If you're a player that relies on food, such as a non-healing player or a player that solos, food should become very important to you.

Engineering

Engineering is used to assemble metal and stones into parts needed to make explosives, guns, scopes, bullets, mechanical dragons, aquatic helmets, and more. More than any other trade skill, engineering products require several steps to be completed. Bombs and Dynamite are the bread and butter of the engineer's creations. Many engineering recipes require a lot of different parts before the item can be created. This will require more space in your bags than other trade skills. Engineering is a very fun and creative trade skill. You can create all kinds of wacky things that are fun to use and also entertain and amaze other players.

Leatherworking

This skill allows players to work various leathers and pelts into leather armors as well as patches integral to the creation of higher-level, metallic armors and enhanced weapons. Leatherworkers are responsible for creating leather items for leather wearing classes: Druid, Hunter, Shaman, and Rogue. While the Paladin and Warrior can wear leather, they won't typically wear it unless they like the particular stats on an item and have nothing better at the time.

Tailoring

Tailoring allows players to cut and weave various pieces of cloth into armor, bags, shirts, and other cloth items. Tailors play an especially important role in guilds because they can create bags for the entire guild provided the guild members gather the proper ingredients. Tailors are responsible for creating cloth items for cloth wearing classes: Mages, Warlocks, and Priests. They may also occasionally make items for other classes interested in wearing cloth, if the item are especially appealing.

Service Professions

Although no goods are produced with service professions, they are still valuable skills to learn that will aid players in their adventures.

Enchanting

Enchanters use their magical formulae to grant permanent augmentation to weapons, armor, and other equipment.

First Aid

Want to save people's lives? Want to cure poison and heal grave wounds? Become a Physician! This minor skill allows you to create various bandages that can be used to help yourself and other players. Physicians create bandages then apply them to other players that are wounded. You must have the first aid skill to apply a bandage to another player.

The benefit of this skill is the ability to heal yourself (and others) using items created from ingredients you are finding anyway while you are killing monsters. You might be throwing these first aid ingredients away, but you should instead turn them into something useful.  Very helpful to Warlocks!

Profession F.A.Q.

How do I get a Profession?
You have to find an NPC that can teach you their Profession. Use the tables above to assist you with finding the correct NPC. If you use major cities to train up, ask a guard for specific directions to find your trainer, a flag will also appear on your map.

I went to train the next level but the Trainer wouldn't help me, why?

This is where Profession training can get fun... you actually need to see the level above the one you wish to train.

Journeyman trainer teaches Apprentice (Up to level 75 skill)

Expert trainer teaches Journeyman (Up to level 150 skill)

Artisan teaches Expert (Up to level 225 skill)

Master teaches Artisan (Up to level 300 skill)

Using Professions
After you have trained or purchased a Profession, hit "P" to bring up your abilities book. Then, look for a new icon that has been placed in there for that skill. You can drag this icon over to your action bar to make it easier to find and use. If you can't fit it on the first row of your action bar, place it on a different row by left-clicking on the scroll arrows to the right of your action bar (it's ok if the icon is still selected on your cursor).

Profession Limit
You can learn all of the secondary skills, but can only choose two professions.

Character Level Limits
In order to prevent low level characters from mastering high level skills, a certain character level limit is required for each level of profession. You will need a minimum character level to learn a new level of professions. Apprentice requires level 5, Journeyman level 10, Expert level 20 and Artisan requires level 35.

Skill Increases

Gray - You cannot increase your skill by making these items or harvesting these items.
Green - These items give you a fairly poor chance to increase your skill. You can still do it, but its going to take a lot of gathering/creation to up your skill with these items.
Yellow - These items give you a reduced chance of increasing your skill. It's still pretty reasonable to try to increase your skills with these items.
Orange - These items give you your best chance of increasing your skill. For many of the Professions, making an orange item will always increase your skill.
Red - Your skill is not high enough.

Secondary Skill Training
Expert and above skill tiers for secondary skills require you to find the books to teach you them. Artisan level requires a quest to be completed.