WoW Classic Professions Guide

To level a profession, you will have to partake in whatever activity is associated with your chosen profession; to level your Skinning, you need to skin corpses, to level your Leatherworking, you need to craft gear.

As your skill level increases, the rate at which you can level up changes depending on the activity chosen. For any professions that use recipes of any kind, the recipes will be displayed in the profession window with a colour that corresponds with your skill level. As you increase your skill level, lower level recipes will change colour from Orange to Yellow to Green and, eventually, to Grey.

• Orange recipes will always grant you a skill level when crafted, unless you are at the level cap for your current skill level bracket. The only profession that is an exception to this is Skinning, which does not guarantee a skill level from Orange mobs.
• Yellow recipes will usually give you a skill level when crafted, but they have a chance not to.
• Green recipes will rarely give you a skill level when crafted, so you will not be crafting these often unless necessary.
• Grey recipes will never give you a skill level when crafted.

The colour of recipes will change as you craft items, so be wary of crafting large amounts of the same recipe to level up your profession.

For gathering professions, you will see these colours displayed on the tooltip of the nodes that you wish to gather. If it is Red, then your skill level is too low to gather from this node.

When you first learn a profession, you will be an Apprentice of that profession, able to level it up to skill level 75. In order to level it further, you will need to learn higher profession skill ranks from your profession's respective trainer.

The ranks available, as well as their requirements, are as follows.

Profession Rank	Skill Level Required	Skill Level Cap	Character Level Required
Apprentice	N/A	75	5
Journeyman	50	150	10
Expert	125	225	20
Artisan	200	300	35

There are multiple ways to categorise professions in Classic, depending on how you are assessing the criteria for categorisation.

The main categories used by players are as follows.

• Crafting professions — using the materials obtained through gathering professions, these will allow players to learn recipes and schematics that can create powerful equippable gear, consumables, and other usable gear.
• Gathering professions — these professions are mainly used to gather items from the world, which will then be used to create items with the other professions.
• "Other" professions — these professions do not fit into any other category and are either class specific or cannot be leveled up as others can.
• Primary professions — these professions take up a "primary" slot for players, of which only 2 can be learned at any single time on a character. In order to learn a new one, you will have to unlearn one of your current two.
• Secondary professions — for "secondary" professions, there is no restriction on which ones you can learn. You can learn all of them, as they each have their own unique slot.
• Service professions — these do not create a new item, but instead will modify an existing item for a player or enhance their character. Unlike with the other professions, these require you to directly interact with a character, whether it is your own or somebody else.

We have sorted the professions into their assigned categories, depending on their status as primary or secondary professions. It is important to note that, although we have placed First Aid as a service profession, it could very easily be considered a crafting profession as well.

Alchemy allows players to combine herbs and other reagents in special vials to create a variety of potions, flasks, and other consumables. As their skill increases, players will even be able to harness their experience to reconstruct materials via transumation, changing them into other materials.

If you choose to level Alchemy, it would be best to take Herbalism with it as your other primary profession, so that you can find your own herbs.

Blacksmithing is used to create weapons and armour for plate and mail wearers, with some excellent late-game options for Warriors and Paladins. Depending on your choice, you will be able to specialise in creating weapons or armour, with specific recipes only being available to their respective masters.

We recommend taking Mining as your second primary profession when leveling Blacksmithing, as it can be extremely expensive to level when buying your own ore.

Cooking is a secondary crafting profession, meaning that anyone can learn it; realistically, everyone should. It is a very useful profession to have and requires very little input from you as a player, given that most of the materials to level it can be gathered by simply playing the game and looting corpses.

It allows you to create food and drink that restores health and Mana, as well as giving you unique buffs and stat bonuses with higher-level recipes.

If you want to level Cooking efficiently, you can do so while leveling Fishing, as there are a huge number of recipes that use fish that you will find.

Engineering is an interesting profession in that, despite being a crafting profession, it does not necessarily craft items in the conventional way that Leatherworking or Blacksmithing do.

Many of the items created by this profession are not done so to be used as upgrades, but instead have special effects that are designed to make the Engineer's life easier. With teleportation devices, speed increases, and parachutes, the gear from Engineering is useful for almost any class.

Along with the quality of life creations that this profession brings, there are a number of usable items that can be crafted to help increase the DPS of the player or help them out with some additional CC, such as their variety of bombs.

Your possible creations will depend on your chosen specialisation, of which there are 2 choices for Engineering: Gnomish and Goblin. Gnomish Engineering focuses on utility, while Goblin Engineering is almost always about explosions.

Engineering is definitely an interesting choice, but it can be extremely expensive to level. We recommend taking Mining with Engineering to at least cover your ore costs for the schematics.

Leatherworking allows players to create Leather and Mail gear for them to equip. The recipes available to Leatherworkers at higher levels will depend on their chosen specialisation between the following:

• Dragonscale Leatherworking — focuses on creating Mail armour;
• Elemental Leatherworking — focuses on creating elemental resistance armour;
• Tribal Leatherworking — focuses on creating Leather armour.

If you choose to take Leatherworking as your primary profession, we recommend taking Skinning as your second to cover your leather costs.

Tailoring is used to create Cloth armour and cloaks, as well as bags for players to expand their inventory space.

There is no gathering profession that pairs with Tailoring, as cloth is found by simply killing certain enemies around the world. Instead, you should take Enchanting with Tailoring, as you can disenchant your creations for Enchanting materials.

Fishing allows players to catch fish from the waters of Azeroth, as well as find treasures in the variety of wreckages around the world.

If you are going to level Fishing, we recommend taking Cooking at the same time, as you can use the fish you find to level it as well.

Herbalism allows players to harvest herbs from around the world.

If you decide to take Herbalism as one of your primary professions, we recommend taking Alchemy as the second, since you can use your herbs to level it.

Mining allows you to mine ore and gems from veins that can be found around Azeroth. When you learn Mining, you will also learn Smelting, which allows you to create metal bars with the ore you have mined.

If you are going to take Mining as one of your primary professions, we recommend taking either Blacksmithing or Engineering as the other one, since they are both heavily reliant on the ore you will find.

Skinning allows players to skin the corpses of certain mobs around the world to obtain leather and scales.

If you choose to take this profession, we recommend taking Leatherworking as your second choice, as it requires a large amount of leather to level.

Enchanting uses dust, shards, and crystals to imbue and empower the weapons and armour that players use.

The materials for this profession cannot be "gathered" using a profession and instead are obtained by disenchanting pieces of uncommon or higher quality gear. If you take Enchanting as one of your professions, you should take Tailoring as your second choice because of this. Tailoring uses cloth, which can be found without needing a profession, which means you can craft gear and then disenchant it for Enchanting materials.

First Aid is an extremely useful profession that all players can learn, as it allows you to heal your character using bandages, as well as remove poison effects.

While it can technically also be classed as a Crafting profession, we feel that it belongs in the Service section, as the bandages you create have the sole purpose of healing either yourself or another player.

The professions in this section are different from the others, as they are either class-specific (Lockpicking for Rogues) or cannot be leveled as others can, as in the case of Riding.

Lockpicking allows Rogue players to unlock doors, chests, and lockboxes to loot the treasures within.

This profession is leveled by opening locks, but higher skill caps do not need to be learned. Instead, the skill cap is determined by your current character level.

Players will need to learn Riding in order to use a mount in Classic. Unlike with the other professions, you cannot level this up via training, but instead will learn Apprentice and Journeyman Riding for a set amount of gold.

Post hotfix just before Phase 2 launch, mount costs in Season of Discovery were increased back to original classic levels, instead of the 50% discounted values of Season of Mastery, thus the information below applies:

Players can learn Apprentice Riding at Level 40 for 100 gold. This will allow you to use a mount that increases your movement speed by 60%.

Players can learn Journeyman Riding at Level 60 for 1,000 gold. This will allow you to use a mount that increases your movement speed by 100%.

The cost of learning Riding can be reduced by achieving Honored reputation level with the faction you are buying it from.