Profession guides

Looking for a class instead? The class guides are here — all nine, one page per specialisation.

Start here: the three things that matter most

1. Take Cooking at level 1. 103 of its 123 dishes give +5% experience from kills while you are well fed, and the first one is available at Cooking skill 1 on a level-1 character. It costs you no primary slot. Nothing else in the profession system comes close for a levelling player.
2. Only six professions earn Legacy Points — Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering, Leatherworking and Tailoring, at skill 150, 225 and 300. Gathering professions and secondary skills earn none. If you care about account-wide perks, that is your list.
3. Camping is new and it is not optional flavour. Every profession gets three camp objects, and the buffs last an hour.

Trainer ranks

Unchanged from Classic, and confirmed in the client.

There is no Master rank and no 275 tier. That is Burning Crusade, and a veteran who half-remembers it will go looking for a trainer who does not exist.

Artisan needs character level 35, which is the gate people forget: your profession cannot pass 225 until then no matter how much you craft.

In the beta, no profession can pass skill 225 at all, because the level cap is below 35. Everything published about 225 to 300 is read from client data rather than played.

Which two primaries?

The classic pairings still make sense — Mining with Blacksmithing or Engineering, Herbalism with Alchemy, Skinning with Leatherworking — because a crafting profession that has to buy its own materials is expensive. Nothing published suggests Forever changed that logic.

Two gathering professions is still the money answer if you want gold rather than gear, and it is the cheapest way to level.

The secondary skills are free. Take all three.

Rogues: Poisons and Lockpicking are now tradeskills, not class spells. They are described in the client as secondary skills "like First Aid" — but they sit in a separate class-based bucket and do not count against your three secondaries. The practical gain is that Lockpicking now levels like a tradeskill.

What Forever changed

• 919 new recipes across the trades, against Blizzard's published "over 600". Leatherworking gained the most (271 new of 512), then Blacksmithing (197 of 437) and Tailoring (180 of 414).
• Camping is new. A cook lights a campfire; every profession can then place three camp objects — one at skill 20, then two more from Blueprints at 140 and 300. Sit or craft for a minute and the buffs last an hour, and you can leave.
• Merchant's Favor is new — a second currency, and 317 recipes that no trainer teaches. Open from level 10 to any class and any profession, including none.
• A new material class, "Scarce materials", exists in Mining, Herbalism and Skinning. What counts as scarce is not published.
• The Legacy system adds 11 profession-relevant perks across three trees, including Working Overtime (up to +20% chance of a skill-up), Bountiful Harvest (up to +100% scarce materials while gathering) and Master Chef (up to a 50% chance of an extra cooking result).
• No profession was added or removed. Nine primary, three secondary, exactly as Classic. There is no Jewelcrafting and no Inscription.

Three things vanilla never had

Crafted tier sets at skill 300. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking and Tailoring all make level-60 sets with real set bonuses. Every one of them needs Malleable Essence of Nature, which comes only from disenchanting drops in the two new raids — so the whole crafted-gear economy runs through an enchanter. Engineering has no tier set, which tells you where Forever thinks raid power sits.

Certifications and titles. At skill 300, 1,000 Merchant's Favor buys an account-wide title — the Alchemist, the Blacksmith, the Enchanter, the Engineer, the Leatherworker, the Tailor. Six crafting professions only; no gathering title, no Cooking title. Only a character with 300 skill can display it.

Self-only profession perks, every one of them from a later expansion:

None of these exists in vanilla 1.12, and no skill level, cost or value has been published for any of them. They are named and nothing more.

A warning about stats

Forever uses rating stats and a unified Spell Power where vanilla used flat percentages and split spell damage from healing. A crafted piece reads like +25 Stamina, +9 Defense Rating, +14 Spell Power. If you are reading a vanilla stat budget onto these items you will misjudge them.

Blizzard is also hiding item stats until they drop. Only about a fifth of the new items are revealed, and 240 recipes across the four gear professions make something the client will not describe. That is deliberate, and it is why "unknown" appears more often here than it otherwise would.

Specialisations

Only three professions have them, exactly as in vanilla: Blacksmithing (Armorsmith, Weaponsmith, and the three Master smiths), Leatherworking (Dragonscale, Elemental, Tribal) and Engineering (Gnomish, Goblin). Tailoring, Enchanting and Alchemy have none — if you remember Elixir or Potion Mastery, that is Burning Crusade.

All ten are present in the beta client with their descriptions intact. Beyond that, almost nothing is known — not the skill levels, not whether they are still mutually exclusive, not what switching costs. Only Engineering's has a published sentence confirming it is a live system, quest-based as in vanilla.

The reason nobody knows is structural: the beta caps professions at 225 and characters at 20 to 30, and every specialisation sits above that. No tester can reach one.

What is not known

• Gathering material tables beyond Classic's. Two ores (Pitchblende, Heavy Thorium Ore) and six herbs (Demonsage, Death Lotus, Marefoil, Stranglevine, Rosecap, Frilled Lichen) exist in the client as crafting reagents with no published gathering node. They are probably the "Scarce materials" Bountiful Harvest boosts, but nobody has confirmed that.
• Gathering node density, respawn rules and skill-up rates. Unpublished for all three gathering professions.
• Legacy perk point costs, and whether perks can be refunded. In the beta a class trainer resets them for 10 gold.
• Whether the +5% experience stacks with the Cozy Sleeping Bag's +3% or with rested experience. Nobody has tested it.