Engineering

Is Engineering worth taking?

Take it for utility and fun, not for gear. It earns Legacy Points like the other crafting professions, but it got no tier set and only 29 trade-camp recipes — the fewest of any profession — and it is the most expensive to buy out.

Three good reasons to take it anyway:

1. You are a Gnome. The racial was rewritten for Forever — see below
2. PvP. The published Hunter advice is "Engineering for valuable PvP items"
3. As a second profession at 60, once Blacksmithing has given you the gear: "After Blacksmithing has provided the gear you need, you can replace it with Engineering."

The hard evidence at the beta cap is one item. Minor Recombobulator at Engineering 140 appears in 32 of the level-20 best-in-slot lists — effectively every class and spec in the game.

The warning that comes with it, from the Mage guide: "without a Herbalism or Mining alt, these will be difficult or expensive to level."

What it pairs with

Mining. Unchanged.

What Forever changed

• The Gnome racial was rewritten. Vanilla gave "Engineering skill increased by 15." Forever gives "Your gnomish ingenuity reduces the rate of engineering devices failing or backfiring when you use them by 20%."
• Engineering-only gating is fully intact, and is being applied to brand-new items. 98 items carry a "Requires Engineering" line, 20 of them new. The vanilla ones are untouched: Gnomish Rocket Boots, Parachute Cloak, Arcanite Dragonling, Force Reactive Disk, Goblin Jumper Cables XL, Master Engineer's Goggles, Bloodvine Goggles.
• Goggles now exist for every armour type. New at skill 200: Floppy (cloth), Bent (leather), Stuckbutton (mail), Dented (plate). In vanilla, engineer headgear was effectively cloth-only — plate and mail wearers now have an engineer head slot. New engineer-only belts at 175 too.
• Two new consumable brands, "SAF-T" and "EZ-Thro", spanning the whole skill range. The top ones are real: EZ-Thro Dark Bomb at 300 (225–675 fire damage and a 4-second stun) and EZ-Thro Mana Bomb (burns 675–1125 mana, 5-second silence, and 50% of the drained mana as damage).
• SAF-T Ultra Precision Scope at 300 — a permanent +2% critical strike on a bow, gun or crossbow.
• New thrown weapons: Satchel of Copper, Bronze, Iron and Dark Iron Bombs, which "explode on impact" and carry Stamina.
• Compact Critter Carrier at 225 "allows Hunters in your group to access their stabled pets."
• Bombs got cheaper and fireworks got much more efficient. 23 recipes changed reagents. Rough Dynamite now takes 1 Rough Blasting Powder instead of 2. Every rocket now makes 5 instead of 3 for the same cost, and there are three new colours.
• Profession perk, new: "Engineering-only gadgets and tinkers crafted with Tinkerbox." What a Tinkerbox is, and what it costs, is not published.
• Certification at 300 for 1,000 Favor → the title "the Engineer".
• There is still no engineering mount. The pets list holds four entries and all four are vanilla. If you remember an engineering mount, that is Burning Crusade.

Specialisations

Gnomish and Goblin are confirmed to be a live system in Forever — the only specialisation with a published sentence: "After completing a unique quest, you can specialize in either Goblin or Gnomish schools of engineering. Each school specializes in crafting unique items, some of which aren't available to the opposing style of craftsmanship."

The skill level is not published (vanilla's was 200), nor is the switch cost. Exclusivity is implied by that wording but never stated outright.

Levelling it

1. 1 → 30 — Rough Blasting Powder, ~33
2. 30 → 59 — Handful of Copper Bolts, ~50. Keep them
3. 59 → 95 — Copper Tube, then Coarse Blasting Powder ~40
4. 95 → 160 — Copper Modulator → Silver Contact → Practice Lock → Large Copper Bomb → Heavy Blasting Powder → Whirring Bronze Gizmo → Bronze Framework → Aquadynamic Fish Attractor
5. 160 → 175 — Ice Deflector. The schematic is gold-bought from Rizz Loosebolt in Alterac Mountains, and it is a real bottleneck
6. 175 → 195 — Solid Blasting Powder, ~72 crafts
7. 195 → 225 — Iron Grenade → Inlaid Mithril Cylinder → Mechanical Repair Kit → Hi-Impact Mithril Slugs

Shopping list to 225: 144 Solid Stone, 120 Copper Bar, 80 Bronze Bar, 46 Coarse Stone, 33 Rough Stone, 28 Linen, 26 Mithril Bar, 26 Weak Flux, 21 Wool, 15 Frost Oil, 12 Iron Bar, 12 Silk.

225 → 300: 162 Thorium Bar, 176 Solid Stone, 88 Mithril Bar, 30 Dense Stone, 28 Runecloth.

The shape is unusual: Engineering is cheap in bars and expensive in schematics. Several key steps are gold-bought rather than trainer-taught, which is the real cost.

What is not known

The Gnomish and Goblin skill level and switch cost. What Tinkerbox is. Whether Engineering's raid value changed at all — no source states it either way. What 33 of its recipes make, and where about twenty of the new high-skill schematics come from.