Do you feel professions in WotLK are easier to cap?Follow

I have enough L70+ characters to have every profession but LW (370ish), Skinning (440) and Tailoring (443) capped. LW and Skinning are not capped because I'm just leveling that toon and only got him past L55 a week or two ago.

JC and Alch on my main were capped a while back, the hardest part with JC was getting the dailies done to get recipes; BS on a DK capped long ago thanks to capped mining (and herb) on my hunter; Enchanting capped on another (L70) hunter (thanks to making cheap rings on my JC and DEing them for mats) along with Engineering (again, thanks to capped mining); Inscription capped (thanks to capped herbing) on my priest, the limiting step being the need to do the daily research.

Tailoring is the only profession that I would say is "hard" to cap because I'm at the point of needing to make items which require the special cloth and frozen orbs, but they will DE into abyss crystals so it isn't that big a deal. I would have it capped already but I haven't been good about doing the cloth every three days.

It seems to me Blizz made it easy to cap professions. But they also spread around a lot of the nice recipes among different quatermasters requiring rep grinds so I guess that evens it out (I know, they did this in BC too)? Or is it just that having more capped toons made it easy to get the mats so it just seems easier?

I'm curious to hear your opinions. (And the tradeskills forum has been quiet lately anyway.)

My professions still aren't capped, and I've had WotLK since it came out. It's mainly because my guild has no need for anther tailor whatsoever, and my Enchanting skill is high enough to DE anything. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

This.

Try doing BS all the way to 450. You'll start out with low level mats and find it cheap/easy. Then mithril and thorium come along and kick you all the way back to Sunday school. It will cost you a ton to level it, either with gold or time to gather the mats. Once you hit OLs, it gets easy and cheap again. Just at the point where you'd have to start farming a carpload of mats to make things, you get to start with Northrend recipes.

The hop from OLs to NR is much easier than Vanilla to OLs.

As for capping at 450, I didn't find it too hard since I took it slow(JC and Enchanting). There are a ton of ways to get recipes, and I so love JC the best right now. Getting recipes from rep vendors, instances, and having its own daily totally makes it a fun profession. I really think that capping shouldn't be difficult, but new recipes should come out with new content, meaning the professions can grow for a long time after the initial plug to 450.

I hate to admit, I haven't pushed most of my charaters to get their professions capped in WotLK. Having said that, I have found leveling them a lot easier, and getting recipes (for the most part) less painful. There are some recipes that are only available by reputation vendors, but there are still plenty of recipes for items that people want that are relatively easy to get / train / buy. So far, I've liked the profession process.

The worst part for any profession tends to be the 250-300 range with the old Azeroth recipes requiring piles of mats and obscure additional components that are frequently tedious to gather or expensive to buy. Outland was a lot more simplified and WotLK took that simplification another step further. I have all professions at the Grand Master level with my various different alts and Northrend is one of the easier stretches to push through until around 440. Usually at about 440 it becomes extremely costly to continue leveling which is why I tend not to worry about getting to 450 on any of them right now.

Professions are definitely easier to level in WoTLK. I would hesitate to call any of them easy, but most only require "basic" mats without all the extras. I remember spending hours to get 6 hearts of fire to move my tailoring up. I've still spent hours trying to get all the frostweave I need, but that's only because I'm cheap. I hate to part with my gold at the AH if I can go farm it myself.

Several of our alts have maxed professions and have yet to even start questing in Borean Tundra. All in all, it's still somewhat time consuming if you're going to farm your own mats, but definitely easier.