Dragonflight Professions RANKED...Here's How It Went

Hello folks! this is Soul and i'm gonna i'm back i'm here to talk about professions in dragonflight,  the goal today well the goal today was to inform you of which professions are going to be the best in terms of profit but it's a bit harder than that this video is based off of beta information and is not meant to be a guide or rule book it's just me sitting here with maybe some b-roll sharing my perspective and knowledge so that you can make your own decision, now if you don't mind leave a like for the attempt subscribe for more content and dragonflight information and well well let me explain why ranking professions turned out to be a pretty massive and almost impossible undertaking but if you want to skip this part because it's long, a lot of it is use the navigation to get to where you want to go.

So what makes professions hard to rank you might be wondering like shouldn't it be something simple like you know something along the lines of okay gathering is right up there gathering is s tier right it's a mess in the middle it's a whole amalgam and then engineering is at the bottom right all right so like in the most gross oversimplification it's actually pretty close to that but thanks to profession specializations no two players with the same professions are going to be the same it's not as limited as uh choosing potion versus elixir master there may be a less optimal way of picking herbs making mythic level armor and weapons, sounds great.

But what if it's too early or what if it's too late to get into that market when considering professions, obviously profitability comes to mind when deciding on specializations though the mindset sort of changes from simple profitability to measuring risks for example being a blacksmith sounds good they can make weapons and armor up to mythic quality who wouldn't want a chance to sell well via crafting orders who wouldn't want a chance to sell two-handed weapons with the most ideal stats blacksmithing sounds like a winner right? maybe but the road towards getting the skills to make those awesome weapons means that you're not mastering other skills to efficiently make alloy which might be very profitable and easier to master which could make more money in the long run.

In dragonflight professions are more than just the hardest to make items but indirectly the cheapest to make items relative to any of your competitors, racing to make that one item that no one else can make might come at a cost the other big wrench, the regional auction house is obviously a big factor here some folks out there are still feeling the whiplash after the wow economy that is you know vanilla up until shadow lands made its commodities available uh region-wide for sale and for selling the wow economy up until now is 18 years old mind you 18 years and well over like a hundred million players worth of old materials and garbage and accumulated gold, it's no wonder that when you take the regional supply of an old economy like that and then make it public and then at the same time put it against the regional demand of well what is now old stuff because we're at the end of shadowlands it's no wonder that the prices of most of these goods are lower than what it was on your particular realm.

Over a million death blossom is up on the market right now for players who already leveled their alchemy and their inscription who had made like tons of missives and tomes of the whatever it’s called but a regional auction house for a new expansion economy like dragonflights that's going to feel different they're going to be you know there are going to be dedicated gatherers but most players will be leveling their characters and starting up their professions the region's suppliers against the region's consumers all starting at the same time it's going to be a wild card and I’m going to talk more on this later.

Before we can properly rank the professions we have to describe them or redescribe them and identify the risks, the strengths and the weaknesses items that seem to be worth making maybe and and what might be fun and what might be ignored so we'll start with the gathering professions.

Gathering is asked here and s in this case stands for safe and this shouldn't be a surprise, professions run off of resources and gathers are the source of these resources pushing back against this just a tiny bit are the different world activities and treasures and fishing nets and rares and more that can drop some profession materials but by and large the economy starts with gathering.

For miners they can spec into either gathering terabytes or draconium, now terabyte is far more commonly found than draconium and blacksmiths use terabytes primarily in lower end recipes so at first glance the value of terabyte long term sounds like it's not going to be so great, however blacksmiths and other professions who spec to make low-level gear they’re going to suck this aura up because with it you can make cheap epics jewel crafters of all shapes and sizes are going to devour terravites for the gems when specking for one ore or another.

You get increased chances of obtaining rare elemental materials and titanesium it's a rare ore that so far it doesn't seem to spawn on its own draconian is very hard to find at the moment so by that merit alone the value of that or is going to be nothing to scoff at either, you can also spec into being able to farm up elemental node types at greater efficiency but i'm a little bit wary of that particular tree, these special nodes that you can find well they're pretty hard to find actually they’re pretty rare and while the gathering bonus from it stacks on top of your other mining skills there just aren’t enough of these nodes to make it seem like a worthwhile early investment, you're probably better off doubling down on one of the two or specializations.

I talked about herbalism on the other hand it works well really similarly to mining only that there are four kinds of herb notes found on the dragon isle, chin bloom as i think i'm pronouncing it is the most plentiful of the four herbs while the others grow in more specific places although they're still kind of all over the place, maybe you want to spec for the other three herbs because those will be more in demand for file creation it's the new kinds of flasks that are made by alchemists it's hard to say which of those three herbs are going to be the most popular in case values on the files are like retuned and redone but i've got to go back to ho chi bloom again because it’s the most plentiful it's just like tyrolite specking into ho chun bloom increases your chances of obtaining elemental materials which will also sell for all sorts professions like mining.

Herbalism is easy to level to where you can access the second tree or spec tree easily and it's hard to deny the power of skinning plants under the botany tree and this is something i couldn't test due to needing spec points and it's a little bit hard to do that on the beta but i'd probably recommend getting access to that perk sooner than later so you can expand on where you can farm.

Skinning is also a big winner because leather working covers two armor types and all armor slots are up for demand in dragonflight i have a feeling that mastering basic skinning is going to be the best short and long term investment, lots of recipes use special hide and scales so going down this routes surefire gold for people trying to craft higher end gear expecting for bait crafting means that you can unlock these special mobs that you can kill and skin.

Now i'm not sure if any skinner can get in on the action there though but if they can't then this skill might be worth it on a smaller round but if you're on a fairly high population realm you can probably count following uh you can probably count on following another skinner to where these mobs are and leech some materials or you can just make a group finder sort of party that could work too.

Fishing is just fishing is just fishing at least as far as i've tested there's nothing new going on there which is a bummer uh you know after all that’ve experienced in the beta with these other professions so far fishing was kind of a letdown and on that note a quick blurb on cooking as well without specializations with cooking there's nothing really cool happening with cooking either there's no strategy to it other than to say that cooking will be in demand as much as it always has and fishing will be as critical as it always was it's just not quite as fun against the other primary professions.

Now let's move on to the armor professions.

Leatherworking covers two armor types but blacksmithing covers the most options out of the armored professions thanks to weapons they can make a whole bunch of them, smiths who are interested in armor or weapons are going to have to make some commitments though but fortunately one isn't forced to pump spec points into anything whether it's blacksmithing or anything else you can just keep acquiring them you can keep acquiring the expect points until you're ready to make a decision.

Now when it comes to armor or weapons you can either be a specialist at making a specific piece of gear as best as you can or trying to make as many different pieces of gear as you can, a lot of this is going to depend on your realms size and its demand i mean yeah you can gonad be like the renowned smith who put all their points into being able to make the highest quality apps with an embellishment and customized stats or you can instead take those points and be able to craft a chest and a helmet and legplate at a decent level, you'll be deciding whether you're catering to the very very high-end gamer who wants Thebes test gear or the different high-end gamer who's looking to quickly gear their multiple alts.

Specializing hard is a really risky venture though because some players might share the same idea as you making all of you competitors and the biggest competitor of all are other sources of gear namely the pve and pve contents the demand for high-end gear will fluctuate as the season rolls along people are going to start getting mythic plus gear that as far as we know may still be upgraded with valor just like in shadowlands but there are always people making new alts right.

In season one epic gear is a risky venture as said especially if you're on a big realm but i'd argue that it's a little bit safer to be an all-rounder who can make all the things it could be a different story in season two one non-sold-bound materials are going to be more available and armor and weapon crafters will have mastery over multiple weapon and armor types it could be safer to spec for crafting reagents like alloys, heavy leather and bolts for leather working and tailoring respectively crafters who are going for the best quality items at that time they're going to need those high-end reagents.

A specialized armor crafter who can make these will be in very high demand i guess in the mid game can see an opportunity where this type of crafter can craft high level alloy with low level materials bought from the regional auction house which makes for profit that's so easy to where it almost might feel like vendor flipping if all else fails, though blacksmiths i guess can make weapon stones leather workers can make leg armor kits and tailors have bags and other leg armor kits.

Jewelcrafting is still a bit up in the air because we still don't know for sure how many total gem slots are available on a single person, jc like inscription has an additional production step with the prospecting of ore which means even at the very beginning there can be folks who specialize exclusively on extracting gems, i was only able to test this in the alpha at the time but i didn't find a noticeable difference in prospecting high ranked versus low rank ore meaning specialized prospectors might be able to pull off some really impressive flips with low level ore.

It doesn't end there though because gems also have quality, Jcs will need to decide which if any gem cut they want to invest into for the highest efficiency and profit but don't forget that’s Jcs can make gear too including a trinket, simmers will probably decide whether the trinket is worth using if it’s discovered that it's best in slots compared to raid or dungeon trinkets demand is going to skyrocket however I have a feeling that the wild team wants trinkets like those to be competitive and not dominant at endgame making trinkets a pretty risky investment to spec into.

Safety tells me to invest in prospecting and to play the buy low sell high sort of game on the commodity market gem cuts will be profitable but really really competitive and the same goes for jewelry unless you're going for making those perfect mythic quality rings or necklaces racing to be able to make that is going to be super cut throats but the first ones to the finish line there are going to make insane money.

I think inscription is uniquely positioned to have a lot going for it from gear to consumables but there's a significant drawback outside of weapons scribes don't offer a whole lot of useful stuff until the rest of the economy has matured a little bit like in shadowlands, they can make stat missives in shadowlands they sold pretty fast because you needed to have two legendaries needed in dragonflight you need zero crafted armor but you can wear up to a full set so there's that give and take even then the armor and weapon crafting economy needs to be up and running for the demand for missives to even begin, contracts for reputation are back but you need high level reputation before even unlocking them document, box trinkets seem powerful and pretty cool but just like jewelcrafting if word gets out that the trinkets aren't very competitive there goes that market and the profession itself is extremely hungry for herbalism materials.

There are five pigments that can be extracted and you need each of the four dragonflight herbs from these you make three different inks and from those you make two higher level inks, developing this profession is going to feel very slow and it's gonna be very resource intensive so it might be in some folks interest to instead like other professions to specialize in the stages of production namely to mill pigments and to develop higher level ink, in the long run though inscription might be laughing its way to the bank they can make a treatise that grants any profession spec points although oddly enough there's no such item for skinning i couldn't find it since these items are bind on pickup these are only going to be sold via the crafting order system where basically people with professionals who are trying to power level are going to offer gold to have to have a scribe up their skill level and this might be a method to let scribes up their skill levels pretty quickly and hopefully make a whole bunch of gold for very little effort.

Like many professions alchemy is going to be at the mercy of the regional auction house it's going to be tempting to go straight for making these elemental potions of power and its stronger version there are no longer separate cooldown potions for each of the primary stats which will be a double-edged sword because you only have well you only have one potion to make now but you only have one potion to make lots of ray tunes are going to go down this route of making this potion so that way they can unlock cauldrons yes instead of flask cauldrons they're going to have potion cauldrons so as a side effect there are going to be a lot of people who respect for making these potions it's going to be a pretty risky venture to try and mass produce these in order to sell so i think and again here’s a reminder to not really listen to me too much but i think there might be a dark horse in transmutes.

Every profession uses these elemental reagents to some degree and there are only so many that gathering professions are going to be able to produce specking hard into transmutes and the resourcefulness stats will let an alchemist take the cheapest materials from the auction house for example and turn them into something hopefully more profitable with a chance to do it without using those materials.

Commodity focused professions in jewel crafting and inscription and alchemy they may have to take a different approach when it comes to profitability they're going to be a ton of sellers on the market, eventually the goal then isn't exactly to make the most valuable item but to make any desired item as cheaply as possible that's going to mean like a big focus on multi-crafting and resourcefulness two of the stats that are available.

The new alchemy trinkets are in the same boats as the inscription and jewelcrafting trinkets but at least it doesn't seem to have a profession requirement, that means depending on the encounter and the class having a position possibly be on a 4-minute cooldown instead of 5 that might be highly advantageous.

Engineering as usual is in a weird sort of spot, there's a robust specialization around explosives or bomb making and you can focus on making bonds for engineers or non-engineers but it's still a pretty niche market specting for devices lets you make some powerful and really fun gadgets for the purpose of a combat rez, even a mass res something interesting to point out too.

Leather workers can make bows while engineers make guns so if you consider weapons as nothing more than a stat stick that you want to transmog into your wolf slayer sniper rifle anyway well maybe you should look at the market to see which is easier and more profitable to make, engineers can also spec into ammunition now they could already make scopes for hunters as usual but now they can make a temporary ammo not unlike weapon oils or sharpening stones only these are designed specifically for hunters, engineer goggles are great but they do have a profession requirement, however i think engineers have the market locked when it comes to bracers yeah i know they're just bracers but here’s what's cool about them they don't have a professional requirement they're upgradable to mythic quality just like other crafted gear but unlike other profession gear they don't use missives from scribes.

Now missives give an even spread of two of your desired secondary stats like oh i want haste and crit so they take that budget they cut it in half and then here's your here are your stats gears for engineers they're kind of like misses but they only provide one stat and it's not cut in half so you get haste or crit and and yeah you get the full value of that stack so it's not a bad choice to make it all for those specs or roles who rely heavily on having just one state and finally they get to install a tinker onto these bracers and most of them don't have a professional requirement so if you want a flamethrower sure knock yourself out with any luck that'll be ago-to piece of gear that specialized engineers can provide.

And last but not least enchanting, okay maybe the not least but i think that they're in for a kind of a rough ride so from my testing enchanters are going to be forced to pick one specialization right from the start so they just auto get it and then later when they get to skill level 50 then they can make a choice to either start progressing into higher end weapon and armor enchants or to focus on being able to farm up extra materials per disenchant.

I’m going to talk more about timing in the next section but when it comes to timing expansion launches are obviously a pretty dry spell for enchanters for obvious reasons, a few weeks into the expansion though we’re going to see two kinds of enchanters one who has a very high skills but they’re relying on help for getting enchanting resources and ones who have lots of resources but they're playing catch up with their specializations.

From a strictly gold making standpoint you're probably better off specking for getting more of those enchanting materials per disenchant but only if you constantly run content like dungeons so you can quickly amass resources and then turn them around immediately like the auction house no joke it's going to be like avacuum that just eats it right up and spits back a chunk of gold but for the mid to long term this works out a little similarly to armor crafting professions, you can either go all in with a single type of enchant or you can spread your specialization points wide to earn so i'm sorry to learn a little bit of everything the problem there though is one the regional auction house and also the quality is going to suck and you can't recraft in chance so oddly enough profession in chance might be the way to go down it's an enchants that make people’s profession gear better.

The best crafters are going to be seeking these out because it'll help them make more gold knowing that you're the only one who can make these enchants you might be able to get away with some really good prices.

Now in this section i want to talk about re-crafting and professional gear not crafted gear like you knows tabby stabby gear but i'm talking about the gear that makes your crafting better, just about all the crafting professions can make profession gear which i haven't really talked about which can raise your stats and even your skill level it’s something that i barely mentioned for enchanting but it's a critical piece of equipment sometimes.

I'm oversimplifying here but there are two kinds of crafted goods in dragonflight, if you haven't noticed there’s gear and there's commodities, now gear can be upgraded and tweaked through a thing called recrafting and profession gear plays a part thanks to the additional skills that they provide to possibly make some of this recrafted gear, better recrafting allows players to take their time with crafted gear like in theory i can craft for myself a piece of epic gear and then have someone else recraft it to add mythic item level they happen to have the mats they recraft it for me i pay them oodles of money and then later again i can recraft it again to customize the stats and raise its quality.

The only time quality and profession gear matters is at the last step profession skill all it does is determine quality so that means in the short term profession gear for armor and weapon crafting professions it's not really needed it also means and this is a big one so listen up it also means that in the current state of professions you know here's another example top level players who happen to have crafting professions can and probably should expect themselves to craft epics at like the bare minimum but try to make as many as they can because then they can use the resources that they’re getting from mythic grades that no one else can get you know the stuff they get from mythic grades or high level keys or rated pvp to pretty much kind of sort of sell mythic gear through crafting orders and their profession.

Now we don't know the rate at which these mythical reagents will be accessible or how many crafting orders can be fulfilled in a day, but you bet it's going to be easy gold on them as soon as they find us outgoing back to quality again commodity goods like reagents and consumables they can't be recrafted the rank one potion will always be a rank one potion.

Now early on this isn't going to matter because every gatherer every professional person is going to suck, you know they're all going to be gathering rank one materials every crafter will be making low-level reagents and consumables but there's going to be a line to cross there's gonane a tipping point where rank two goods will start to appear thanks to higher skill and inspiration the kind of crit that makes stuff better it's going to be at that point when profession gear is going to matter a lot for these professions because every point will get the crafter closer to the rank 2 or the rank 3.

So in short profession gear is more valuable to commodity crafters than it is to gear crafters at least in the short term remember blacksmiths do make ingots, tailors do make bolts but remember again quality reagents of that sort they're not going to be in high demand early in the expansion which brings me to timing.

Being successful in any in-game economy means knowing the timing of well everything the regional auction house is pretty new territory and it's worth paying very close attention to but i could say with confidence that demand will far outstrip supply in the first few weeks of dragonflight.

Lots of people are leveling the gathering machine is just starting to rev itself up we've seen historically in world of warcraft that there's a period where gathering materials go for insane prices but at some point that window closes and prices will start entering this period of fluctuation that typically follows patterns around like raid resets patches that introduce new crafted goods and new seasons.

We've seen with the regional markets in shadowlands that prices quickly self-regulate based on the regional demand and from how prices look right now demand is there but it's way outstripped by supply, dragonflight though is a new market and dragonflight professions are especially hungry for resources eventually the market will shift towards people being hungry for high quality resources and then it'll fluctuate again because these crafters now have higher skill and multiple specializations and then they’ll be able to produce products without the need for high quality materials but then again gear crafters trying to make perfect mythic will definitely need high quality materials, god how am i gonna rank professions in dragon what the hell kind of video did i just make.

So ranking professions, yeah this is going to be easy right? like when we consider the many specializations and how long it takes to get those up and the timing of which products will be on demand and the specializations themselves it's it's not easy to just rank but here it goes!

Tied for first place mining and herbalism, both professions are going to be devoured by blacksmithing and engineering and jewelcrafting and inscription and the other one alchemy but it depends on your specialization too, terabyte spec miners cater mostly to jewelcrafting i guess draconian spectators to blacksmithing and engineering one might be more profitable than the other.

Your herbalism specialization will also lead you towards supporting a certain alchemy specialization, so you want to look out for which potions or files are in most demand inscription is like an urban incinerator though they're going to be going after everything in close.

Second place skinning, skins support a lot of professions but they don't seem to be as high of a demanding item as ore and herbs but i can easily easily be wrong, leatherworking is two armor specializations after all i think though that skinning mats will start to regulate on the regional market faster than or an herb but it should still be pretty easy money.

In third place and I’m kind of just i'm kind of just throwing it in there but i'm going to throw in cooking and fishing together, they’re staples of mid to high-end content they're safe but they're boring but they're safe and let’s move on the next few spots.

Here is high risk with high reward but it totally depends on your play style, jewelcrafting comes in fourth place because everyone's going to need gems but more importantly mythic level rings and necks are probably going to be the most in-demand mythic level crafted thing, even spectrum for prospecting should yield good results in the short term.

Blacksmithing comes next at fifth because they can make the most weapons tailored with the secondary stats that users want leather working and tailoring sort of tied for sixth i guess a lot of the working covers two armor professions like i mentioned a couple of times and that's very cool but also it means that they’re going to be using a lot of specialization points to master both tailors are self-sufficient and i forgot to mention this, they can expect to farm cloth more efficiently and they can make bags and spell thread for constant income.

Now all of the crafting professions including jewelcrafting can potentially shoot up to first place now mention this again top players who can acquire the reagents to turn pics into mythic item level stuff they can just spec to craft any high-end gear at low quality then fulfill crafting orders for mythic gear, now this sounds chaotic at first but in the worst case scenario we'd have a lot of people shelling out money for you know it'd be mythic item level gear but it would have random stats on them which would sound kind of horrifying and they would need to be recrafted by someone else anyway.

On the flip side armor crafting professions might need a massive rethinking once we find out how tier set bonuses are going to work and whether crafted gear can get in on that at all alchemy comes seventh i think i i think i lost count demand for potions are high and the trinkets they're pretty good but they're very much at the mercy of the regional auction house i think that it’s going to start out feeling easy but prices will start going haywire very very quickly it's going to be hard to gauge the player behavior when you know consumers are going to be faced with getting rank one two or three positions depending on the kind of content that they're doing, like how is the race to world first people how are they going to treat the consumption of high level or low level potions.

Inscription is a good solid and sad eighth lots of professions are going to depend on their missives the document fair trinkets are pretty interesting but i'm hesitant to make it worth speccing into at least at the start of dragonflight between missives contracts and those skilled treatises, inscription might not be super high profit but probably steady money as long as they've got a very healthy supply of herbs on the cheap.

In ninth place we have enchanting, materials will go for ridiculous prices but once the economy gets into gear the price of these materials is bound to drop significantly and the value of an enchanter will be based on which specialization that they chose in the long run even that isn't going to matter much though and their best bet will be to spec for a high resourcefulness to reduce their crafting costs.

And in the very back engineering, not because they don't make compelling stuff i mean they might have the bracer slot locked down for the entire expansion don't get me wrong, but they don't make enough compelling stuff outside of what could be useful for hunters and some one-time fun things like toys.

Now i want to remind you folks that this ranking is 100 opinion don't assume for a second that I’m right but i urge you to at least consider these thoughts as you make your decision, i'm totally cool with your clapbacks and your pushbacks and your comments so fire away, like the video if you enjoyed this very long talk, thanks again for coming and staying for the whole thing and subscribe for more content, stay safe, stay healthy and stay breezy!