ULTIMATE Professions Guide for Dragonflight - Where to Start, How to Level Quickly & Best Options

Hey folks, this is Kelani.

Professions are changing a lot going into dragonflight, and most folks probably won't recognize the system at all.

It's not your simple run-of-the-mill expansion where professions are only going to be relevant for the first week and then it's all outdated instantly.

There are a lot of different progression paths we've got skill levels, specialization and knowledge levels, even profession gear to collect and upgrade.

There are so many new interlinking systems and features, and it gives professions the most relevance they’ve arguably ever had.

It also comes with a lot of changes, and some of this stuff is kind of complicated but we're going to go through it all to make sure you can hit the ground running when it comes to professions in dragonflight, and so you don't get stuck.

This is our ultimate professions guide for dragonflight, and everything you're gonna need to know.

Before we jump in, be sure to hit up that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video.

So my main goal with this video is to make sure you understand what profession progression is going to look like in Dragonflight to give you a big picture of how it all works, where you're going to start, how you can progress, and what the end game for professions is going to look like.

So let's start with where you can first learn your dragonflight profession skills.

When we first drop onto the dragon Isles we'll be in the Waking Shores.

After the first round of quests you're going to find yourself at the Wing Rest Embassy.

This is the first major questing hub for the expansion that is also where you'll find a profession trainer for each profession.

So this is the perfect time to learn the dragonflight version of your profession so you can start to skill up and explore what options you might have.

Now the first question you have is probably "well when should I start to focus on my professions?

Do I hit the ground running and spend all of my time on professions before I even level, or should I wait until max level to really give it my full attention?" And the answer is pretty simple: it's going to depend on your profession.

But the gatherers out there, I would absolutely make sure you learn your profession skill at this Hub, pick every node you see as you level, and if you want to make heaps of gold just sell it all as quickly as you can.

Gathering nodes also give you experience, so they’re actually going to help you level somewhat, which makes it even more worthwhile to go out of your way to get that next herb node or Mining Node for skill ups.

Just skin whatever you can as your level.

I will probably wait until you max level to really focus on skinning because you're going to be able to kill things much easier.

Then for the Crafters it's going to be a bit of a hard decision.

There is some great potential for earning experience with crafting professions, but you probably won't have access to all that many raw materials as you level unless you really want to go out of your way and farm mats instead of leveling.

I don't think it’s going to be that efficient, but if that's what you want to do, you do you.

I think leveling a crafting profession as you level only really works if you have the Gathering profession to go along with it otherwise you're just going to be spending a boatload of gold to get your raw materials.

It is also worth noting that a lot of profession related progression is focused in Valdrakken, the city hub for the expansion.

The first time you'll see Valdrakken is as you get closer to max level and start on your end game activities, so things like daily quests or weekly quests or even just easier access to a profession table that will be required for many recipes.

That's all in Valdrakken, so leveling first and focusing on professions afterwards, especially crafting professions, would probably be a good idea.

Now before we get into the nitty-gritty here, there's also one more thing I want to point out.

For while you're leveling, when you get to the Ruby Life Pools, you want to pick up and work through a specific profession related Quest.

Now where this Quest starts has changed a few times so it might be at this NPC right next to the flight path, the ambassador of The Artisans Consortium, or it could be in the Life Pools Hub itself. You can find Thomas bright next to the Alchemy trainer.

This might be the other starting NPC, either way, you'll end up talking to Thomas bright who introduces you to the idea of item quality.

This questline isn’t too long but it does unlock some end game profession Quest tests and NPCs that you will need, so you will need to do this questline at some point, either while leveling or you'll need to come back for it.

I'm going to do it while leveling just to get it out of the way earlier. I just wanted you to be aware of this Quest because it's probably super important.

Alright, we've got our dragonflight profession learned.

What's next?

Well, for gatherers it's pretty simple.

Make sure you're tracking the appropriate gathering nodes and gather anything and everything that comes into view.

You should get one skill up per node you encounter, especially early on, but it will slow down the highest skill you get for the skinners while leveling.

I would skin anything that you can that you kill while you're leveling and then at max level I would hunt down the best skinning spots to really go ham on it.

I wouldn't really grind or farm mobs just to skin while leveling.

It's going to be easier and faster at max level, but that's going to be up to you.

Getting to max skinning is probably the easiest profession to cap, so just keep skinning stuff and you'll get there before you know it.

For Crafters, you'll need to source some materials obviously, so pair your crafting profession with a gathering profession that provides the right materials, like skinning with leather working or mining with blacksmithing.

Then just make whatever recipes you can with the materials you gather.

Now if you want to focus on double gathering for a character you can also just buy any materials you need but that's going to be quite expensive early on.

You can very easily see which crafts will provide you with Skillets as a crafting profession—the orange arrow is a guaranteed skill up.

If there's a number alongside it you'll get that many Skillets for creating that recipe.

A yellow arrow means you have a high chance for a skillet but it's not guaranteed.

And then a green arrow is a low chance for a skill up.

No arrow means no skill up, so again easy to understand.

As you increase your skill you can learn new recipes which gives you higher chances for skill ups and you just keep going.

Skilling up your profession isn't just valuable for learning new recipes; each craft or recipe has a difficulty attached to it and the higher your skill is versus that difficulty, the better quality you will create.

Higher quality results literally just mean better products; so for gear, higher quality just translates into higher item levels, so more stats and better gear.

For consumables, you get more powerful effects, and for things like gems, you just get a better gem with more stats to pop into your sockets.

So higher quality is always better, which means higher skill level in a profession will always yield better results.

This will become more and more important the more time and effort you put into professions, especially with the highest tier of crafted gear.

The same goes for gathering professions—the higher your skill, the higher the quality of the raw materials you can gather, and the more often you will see those higher quality materials.

Higher quality raw materials mean better quality crafting gear for all the crafters, so it's going to be quite expensive.

So skilling up is super valuable for absolutely everyone.

So your first few steps here are pretty typical; create things that give you skill ups.

Return to your trainer every 5 to 10 points to learn new recipes and keep chugging along with your fashion Adventures up until skill 25.

At skill 25 you get to unlock your first specialization this is where things really start to get fun.

Each profession has access to three or four different specializations that improve your efficacy in very specific areas of your profession so a blacksmith can focus their efforts into weapon smithing or armor smithing an alchemist can channel their energy into potion crafts or vile crafts.

There are a lot of options here in how you specialize is going to dictate which crafts you become better at which ones you can craft with that coveted high quality but also which recipes you unlock and what services you can provide.

You also cannot reset any spent specialization points so your choices really do matter.

Now all of this is going to come down to profession knowledge.

Profession knowledge is essentially a skill point or Talent point for the specialization system.

While knowledge equals one point to spend, and each profession has its own specific knowledge, so you can only earn and spend blacksmithing knowledge with blacksmithing.

You can't spend blacksmithing knowledge to unlock points in Alchemy for example.

Every point is going to matter because you're going to need hundreds of points of knowledge to unlock everything, which I guess is another important point.

While you cannot respect or refund knowledge spent, you can eventually unlock everything so this isn't an infinite grind.

And you will eventually have access to absolutely everything in your specialization trees.

Just to throw that out there.

Okay, so this profession knowledge stuff is important.

How are we gonna get it well?

It's going to depend on your profession.

For gatherers, you can earn knowledge while gathering sometimes unique Gathering nodes will provide you with knowledge the first time you gather them and then you also have a random chance to get knowledge when gathering any kind of node.

For Crafters, every time you craft a recipe for the first time you will learn some profession knowledge.

So, you will want to craft every recipe that you have at least once just to maximize your knowledge gains.

You can actually filter for this bonus by going into your filters at the top of your profession menu and selecting the first craft bonus filter.

This is a great way to ensure you craft everything you can at least once to get that special first craft bonus and the knowledge that goes along with it.

Now the first craft bonus also provides you with a large chunk of experience about the same if not a little bit more than an actual Quest turn in.

So this is the main reason why it's a bit weird to time your focus into crafting because if you work on Crafting while leveling it actually helps you level faster.

But if you wait until max level you can put all of your focus into crafting.

It just depends on what you want to do and how you want to level.

As for more sources of knowledge, you can earn extra knowledge in a variety of other ways, like completing daily quests at max level.

There are rare drops you can turn into NPCs from all kinds of content, and there are even Secrets hidden around the world like books you can read to gain knowledge or Treasures you can find for specific professions, so finding those is going to be an interesting side quest for all profession types.

And then there is also a book that inscription can craft directly the these knowledge books providing with one knowledge and can only be used once per week, so that is a very slow but very reliable method for getting an extra point of knowledge every week.

You'll be able to unlock one of your specializations per 25 skill points you get in your profession, so one more at 50, another at 75, and then if you have a fourth you'll need to get to 100 to unlock that last one.

You don't have to spend your knowledge right away or even spend any of it at all in your first specialization choices.

You can save it up maybe wait for max level or just until you've gotten more of a grasp on how your profession works and what you really want to focus on.

I would definitely recommend you read everything in the specialization trees before committing your points.

Learn what bonuses you can earn in each trees how far you would have to go to get each bonus and check when you will get some recipes from especially the ones you're most interested in.

Each specialization and sub-specialization can give you a bonus towards certain kinds of activities and crafts, so it is very involved.

I would carve out a chunk of time to just sit down and go through your options; it will probably save you a lot of time in the long run.

Now you’re going to keep learning new recipes from your profession trainer for a little while up until you reach skill level 50.

That's when you learn everything from a trainer and you need to seek out higher tier recipes by yourself.

At this point you’ll have a little bit of everything, but not really any of the good stuff.

You probably don't have any epic recipes and you’ll only have the first tier or two of most types of crafts, so don't be surprised when you run out of trainer stuff and you still haven't gotten to the meat of your profession.

There are going to be three main sources of the higher tier crafting recipes.

The first is quite simply from specialization choices and nodes.

These are often rewarded on the big sub specialization spikes, but they're kind of everywhere depending on your profession.

As you put more points into different specializations and branch out, you will learn more recipes.

I would check to see where each recipe comes from so you can get exactly what you need one while spending the least amount of knowledge points.

The second major source is going to be from reputation in dragonflight.

There are four major factions to earn reputation with and rap earning is going to kind of merge with a renowned style reward structure.

So as you earn rep, you go up Renown levels, and as you go up Renown levels, you gain access to more rewards.

Some of those rewards are going to be profession related recipes, and then the last source is going to be from random drops from browsing through various professions and their recipe sources.

Recipes are going to drop from the new raid, they're going to be randomly rewarded for PVP wins, and then there are some that drop from specific creatures in specific zones.

The good news with these random drop recipes is that they should all be tradable and sellable on the auction house, which means you can buy them from other players if you just can't get the recipe itself to drop.

The easiest way to find out where a recipe comes from is to go up into your filters and turn on unlearned recipes.

This will show you everything your profession can learn at any skill level.

Just click on the recipe you want to go after, and if it's an unlearned recipe you will see a note that says "recipe unlearned."

If you hover over there it will tell you exactly when that recipe comes from.

So if you can't find something in your specialization options or on a rep vendor or wherever else, this note will tell you exactly where to look for the recipe you're wanting to get your hands on.

Now the next part of your progression is going to be a bit odd—partly because, after skill level 50, you won’t have any more trainer recipes; you have to find them yourself. And partly because this is the higher tier stuff—you actually only need to be skill level 50 to learn any and all recipes for your profession, so you don’t necessarily have to skill up any further. But it's still going to be a good idea—more skill means higher quality items. And you'll also need to get up to 75 and 100 skill to unlock your other specializations. The main problem that you’re probably going to run into here is that most of your recipes at this point that provide skillets will be very expensive—it's the end game crafted stuff.

There are all sorts of rare, crafted material requirements lots of base material requirements and you'll need to invest time and effort to even get the recipes in the first place so your progression will probably slow down quite considerably. This also makes it more important for your first and second specialization choices to be good ones because you might not learn the other ones for a good chunk of time but there is a system that could help with this quite considerably.

This system allows anyone to place an order for any recipe that is craftable in the crafting order menu. We're talking about bind on pickup crafting gear, profession gear, and specific tools that you're going to want to get your hands on. It's very easy to create or fill crafting orders. To create an order, you just pop on over to the crafting order clerks. Search through the recipes for the one that you want to be crafted for you and then you decide how you want this order to be filled. To put it out to the public, you have to provide all materials required for that recipe if you're doing a guild or private order.

You don't have to provide everything, but that means you're expecting the chap on the other side of this transaction to have what you need, and you'll need to pay them appropriately with a commission fee. Low commission fees will probably be largely ignored, so if you want something crafted, expect to pay a decent amount of gold in commission on the crafter's side. Your crafting window has a tab at the bottom for crafting orders. You need to be next to a profession table to be able to see it, but you also need to be at a table for many high level crafts anyway, so that's not really a big problem. You can view all available public orders as well as any private orders you may have. Public orders again will have all of the materials provided, so all you really need is the recipe or any secondary craft requirements the order may need.

You can accept an order, fill it, and be on your way very quickly. All of the materials are there; you literally just have to pick it up and create it. If that recipe or craft is something that would give you a skill up, creating it through the crafting order system will also give you that skill. So you're getting skills for crafting with other people’s materials in an incredibly streamlined and efficient way. So the more of these recipes you learn, the more crafts you'll be able to cover in the crafting order system. And arguably, the easier, cheaper, and faster you can skill up in your profession, leading to more specialization unlocks, higher quality goods, and all that good stuff.

Recipes made through the crafting order system also benefit from the first craft bonus giving you the knowledge of Artisans metal and any experience that goes along with it so not having to use your own materials for those expensive crafts is going to be awesome, so the crafting order system has a lot of potential both for making gold but also helping you progress.

Another major progression system you want to pay attention to is your profession gear. Every profession has three pieces of gear they can equip: there's one tool and two accessories. You can only equip one type of each item, so you have three very specific pieces of gear you can equip, and they're going to come from different professions.

I will go through where everyone's gear comes from very quickly with a spreadsheet on screen so it's easy to follow along. Miners can get a pickaxe from blacksmithing, a helmet from engineering, and an all Satchel from engineering. Herbalists can get a sickle from blacksmithing, a hat from tailoring, as well as a basket from leather working. Skinners can get a skinning knife from blacksmithing, a hat from leatherworking, and a pack from leather working. Alchemists can get a stirring rod from inscription, a hat from leather working, and a robe from tailoring. Blacksmiths will make their own Hammer. They can also make their own tool kit but they will need an apron from leather workers. Enchanters can make their own enchanting Rod. They can get a focus from Jewel crafters and a hat from tailoring. Engineers will make their own summer flange, their own Brave wave amplifier, and they can get gloves from a leather worker. Inscription will make their own quills. They can get a magnifying glass from jewel crafters, as well as a pair of glasses from Jewel Crafters. Jewel Crafters can get clamps from engineering, a headpiece made from Dual crafting, and a cover made from leather working. Leather workers can get a leather working knife from blacksmithing, a tool kit from blacksmithing, and they can make their own Smock. Then tailors can get scissors from engineering, a toolkit from blacksmithing, and they can make their own coats.

From this quick list you can see there's a high chance that someone else will be making your profession gears you'll either need to keep up with multiple professions or just buy what you need on the auction house. All of the higher ended crafting gear is also bind on pickup which means you have to make it for yourself, or you have to get it through a crafting order.

All of those high-end recipes are also locked behind extensive wrapped grinds I think they’re like renowned 18 or something for the earliest ones so don't expect to go from Green gear to Blue gear all too quickly and then for the few professions that have epic Gear Well that's going to take quite a while too so when you put everything together you can see there is a lot going on with professions this time around your typical gameplay Loop is going to consist of getting up to that 50 skill Mark pretty quickly with trainer recipes then working on getting new recipes from the end game sources, you'll want to get the best profession gear that you can either by crafting it yourself crafting it with a different profession maybe from a different alt or getting it from other players on the auction house or from the crafting order system, you'll want to craft every recipe at least once for that first craft bonus you should do any daily quests and weekly quests available from your profession area in val draken you'll want to get one inscription book per week so make friends with a scribe or get that profession leveled up on an alt and then plan out your specialization spending and earn enough knowledge to reach your goals.

That's pretty much it. It's probably going to be slow progression getting up to skill 100, especially for the Crafters. It's probably going to be pretty quick for the gatherers, all told, but for Crafters it’s going to be pretty slow, and even slower progression for everyone unlocking your specialization options. But there is a lot going on so you're sure to be kept busy with professions, especially if you try to progress with more than one. So that's the big picture of how professions progress and what you can expect in dragonflight. But there are some specific points I want to go over just to make sure you don't get stuck later on in the profession cycle.

There are quite a lot of optional reagents to play around with this time. The first kind of optional reagent I want to talk about are these empowering items or training matrixes. You can get them from a variety of sources including World quests. So they're available to everyone. And they only have one real purpose: to increase the item level of a craft. So our first round of crafted gear is around the 330 to 340 item level mark. You can then use a training matrix to increase that up to item level 356. So it's a big bump in item level for the same kind of crafted gear.

Now whenever you use a matrix it's going to increase the difficulty of that craft, so you'll need more skill to be able to get the higher quality stuff with a matrix in place. There's another Matrix that can take you up to item level 369 and then there’s an epic version that can take you up to item level 382 that's already a raid finder item level and above just from the first three item level boost items with a standard easy peasy crafting recipes that everyone will have access to. The higher tier epic gear crafted recipe start at item level 382 and can be crafted up to 392 just by increasing quality, so that smooth progression all the way from item level 330 you go to about 390 just from profession crafted gear alone.

BBut there’s another item level empowering reagent you can get: Primal infusions. These ones come from the raid and pretty much just the raid and they can increase the item level up to 405 or up to 418, that's Mythic raid item level which is really exciting. This means that crafted gear is relevant for the entire scope of the gearing up process from Outdoor World solo content casuals all the way up to Mythic Raiders everyone is going to care about crafted gear because everyone can benefit from it. This might be the most relevant professions have ever been in an expansion.

Then there's also another type of item called a finishing reagent. These are very special in that they don't necessarily add any special effect. They just massively increase your overall skill or effect for that craft, giving you a much higher chance of obtaining a higher quality result. To use a finishing reagent, you’ll have to unlock specific nodes in your specialization trees. And then finishing reagents are typically created by Professions themselves. I know Alchemy has quite a few in their recipe book. But if you want the absolute highest craft quality, you'll need to learn how to use finishing reagents sooner or later.

Then we also have items that let you choose specific stats on a craft. They're going to take the form of missives again. And these can be crafted by anyone with inscription. You can get missives for normal Gear with any stat variation. But you can also get missives for profession tool crafting as well, to specify profession stats. So that's cool. You will have to unlock the ability to use missives in one of your specialization trees. And it may be in a different tree for different types of crafts, so keep that in mind.

Adding a missile also increases the difficulty of a craft, so the quality could end up being lower as a result. I guess we should also cover profession stats because they're going to be a little different when compared to normal stance.

Crafting professions will have crafting speed, inspiration, multicraft and resourcefulness. Crafting speed just speeds up your crafting. Inspiration is like crit, you have a chance to get a big skill bonus whenever you craft an item, so you could create a quality upgrade with inspiration. Multicraft lets you craft multiple items for the same materials but it only works for things like potions and consumer walls. Then resourcefulness gives you a chance to use less materials when crafting.

And then Gathering professions will have deafness, finesse, and perception. Deafness increases your Gathering speed, finesse increases your raw material yield, and perception gives you a higher chance to find rare materials. You can get more stats from profession gear, upgrading your profession gear further, and then you can also get a lot of stat bonuses throughout your specialization trees. So it's all going to add up to provide some pretty big bonuses.

Now all this leans quite nicely into talking about re-crafting. I think re-crafting is going to be very important in dragonflight, especially for anyone who wants to progress through with profession gear as their main gearing up method. Recrafting allows you to take a crafted item and essentially just craft it again by using the item as a base instead of its typical material cost. Recrafting will still cost some materials but it’s always significantly less than the normal recipe and it typically does not include any of the rare materials. As you can see here, this molten gray tax recipe costs two Sparks of Ingenuity which are very rare and hard to come by, as well as Primal chaos which is also quite rare and you're going to want to use them sparingly. There's also 20 ingots in there which are also hard to make. This is a very expensive crafting recipe but when we throw that ax into the re-crafting menu it's only going to cost us some Artisans metal and eight ingots. That's way cheaper than crafting the ax over again.

But re-crafting gives you all of the options you would have when crafting the item normally. So, we can increase the item level using those empowered items, we can change the secondary stats, we can add embellishments or use a finishing reagent to increase the quality. So, what this means is you don't have to wait to craft something. Maybe you were thinking, "Oh well gosh darn it if I just get a few extra skill points maybe I can craft this Shield at a higher quality to get that higher item level, or maybe I can wait to use a finishing reagent to really give me a good boost and then I don't waste my rare crafting materials." But you don't have to wait, you can craft it now, use it as it is hopefully it's a big upgrade for you, and then re-craft it when you open up those extra options later on, and it won't cost you any of those rare materials. That's the key.

So you can arguably make yourself a full set of gear at the start of an expansion and then just keep re-crafting and upgrading that same set as you unlock more and more power in the profession system. That's super interesting to me in a huge quality of life feature in general.

I guess we should also talk about Artisan's metal and how you can get that. Artisan's metal is a bit weird because there doesn't seem to be very many ways to actually get it. Whenever you earn Professional Knowledge, you automatically also get some Artisan's metal. That's the first way you can get it. Just earn more knowledge. Every knowledge Point matters and that's where you'll get a lot of Artisan's metal early on. That also means that any repeatable source of knowledge, like the daily quests and the weekly quests and that Weekly inscription book will also be repeatable sources of Artisan's metal. So it's not like you run out of sources. It's just going to be quite heavily time gated.

Apart from that, there's also what looks to be a daily or weekly quest in Val Draken. I think it's weekly right now. This is the same chap as we talked to earlier in the Ruby Life Pools. That entire questline introduces you to the master Artisan, so make sure you do that questline otherwise this Quest might not show up. You also then need to do a quest for him in Val Draken if I remember correctly, but it's super short. Just find Thomas Bright in Val Dragon and he'll give you 60 Artisans metal whenever the quest is available.

You can turn in Dragon shards of knowledge to this Centaur and get knowledge as well as Artisans metal. We don't know too much about these shards of knowledge just yet; they're probably quite rare so keep your eyes peeled. All in all, you don't have too many sources for Artisans metal so it's going to be an important crafting reagent.

And then the last Point here is going to be about crafting gear limit and embellishments. This has changed quite a few times so it's understandable that folks might be confused. There are zero limitations to how many pieces of crafted gear you can equip. You can go for a full set—you know, every piece of armor, your jewelry, your weapons, even your trinkets—you can fully gear up with crafted gear, even though higher item level stuff. There is a limit on how many embellishments you can equip. This is kind of just like an extra enchant for your gear. Some end game recipes come with an embellishment baked into that recipe or craft. Then some of them are very powerful. Other embellishments can be crafted and added onto a piece of crafted gear during the crafting process.

So there are a few ways to get embellishments and you're going to want them because they add power to your gear but you can only equip two pieces of gear with embellishments at a time so two embellishments that's your limit. So it's kind of like only two pieces of empowered crafted gear essentially but that’s the only limit as of right now and I think that should about cover it.

You should be ready to take on any and all profession challenges and adventures in the Dragonflight expansion, but if you find yourself in a bit of a pickle either during your dragon flight leveling or maybe even at max level, you can always pop a comment down below and I'll try my best to answer your questions. You can also swing by our Discord server at discord.gg Kalanisuper easy to remember just type in Kalani to Discord and you'll pretty much get us. If you want more direct feedback interaction with our community, it's super chill over there so you're guaranteed to get a decent answer whatever your question may be.

But that's it for our ultimate professions guide for the dragonflight expansion, so that's it for this video. Do you have any questions that weren't answered in this video or is there anything you're still not sure about? Would you like to see some more profession specific guides that go through good specialization options or best ways to level after the game goes live? Leave all your thoughts in the comments section below.

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