New Professions FAQ : World of Warcraft General Discussions

Straight from the Professions designer

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Is the change intended as a money sink?

Nope, in fact all prices are set at the same levels they were before the change. To learn how to ride a mount it costs 20 Gold for the skill and 80 gold for the mount.

For tradeskills, the additional levels do not cost anything more to learn, you just need to find the trainer to train you and have enough skill (50 skill to learn Journeyman Blacksmithing, etc…).


Why are you restricting us to so few options?

It was never intended that a player would be able to be all the gathering skills and all the tradeskills as it works currently. One of the interesting aspects of the game is making choices, and in the same way you cannot be all the classes with the same character, you cannot choose all the tradeskills with the same character.


Why would I ever take a non gathering skill, when I could just gather on my main character and send all the components to an alternate character?

The trade skills have level requirements on them now, Apprentice requiring level 5, Journeyman level 10, Expert level 20 and Artisan level 35 (subject to change as we balance things). It should be less restrictive then it was with skill points limiting when a player could get a new tradeskill.


How will it actually change the interaction with tradeskill trainers.

Not much, you will just be limited to choosing two apprentice skills, but after that point it will work just as it worked before with players advancing through apprentice/journeyman/etc. The only difference here is that the trainers can only teach you up to a certain level before you need to go out and find the next advanced trainer. In Goldshire there will be a Journeyman Blacksmith who can teach you all of the blacksmithing skills up to skill 75, but if you want to progress past this you need to travel to Stormwind to find an Expert Blacksmith.


Why are you making the gathering skills professions instead of allowing a player to do all of the skills.

There are a couple of reasons for this.

-Relieve pressure on the resources. We need to control the influx of materials in the world, and if everyone has all gathering skills it makes those resources harder to gather for everyone.

-We want diversity in the world, with different people in a party or guild collecting different things. If a beast is killed and one person can skin it, then it makes that person special. If a beast is killed and everyone can skin it, there wasn’t much point of it even being a gathering skill, we might as well have just dropped the leather on the corpse.

-We don’t want it to just be a money game to increase your skill or make a specific tradeskill item, where you head down to the auction house and buy everything you need to increase your skill or make any specific item. Instead primarily you should gather the things you need. Certainly there will be a number of people who are just gatherer’s and sell the materials to make cash at the auction house, but we don’t want everyone operating in that mode. If it is too hard for people to advance a tradeskill and make items on their own without resorting to the auction house, then we will improve the tradeskill in question.

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