General Crafting Guide

If you're new to crafting in WoW, there are some basic rules that apply to all of the various crafts in the game. It's probably a good idea to review this information so you'll know what to expect if you are just starting out with crafting professions.

Finding a Trainer

When you start in the newbie zone, you may or may not find a trainer for the particular skill you're interested in learning. That's ok, once you get up to about level 5 the quests will start to take you to new areas. Now is probably a good time for you to find your nearest city, visit the bank and find the various trainers you need. Any city guard can point you to a trainer and mark their location on your mini-map. So go ahead and take care of all your profession training needs while you're in the city, then head back out for your next round of quests.

Primary & Secondary Professions

You may notice that a trainer will ask you if you're sure you want to choose 'XX' as your profession. This is because you can only choose two Primary crafting skills in WoW. Once you fill both slots, you'll be forced to 'unlearn' one if you try to learn a third. So be certain about your choices before you visit the trainers. The Primary professions are Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering, Herbalism, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking, Mining, Skinning and Tailoring.

With Secondary professions, you can learn as many as you like. These generally aren't considered money-making skills, so you're free to do all of them. There are three: Cooking, First Aid and Fishing. It's a good idea to go ahead and train all three since you may decide to pursue them later on. If you never use them you aren't really out much anyway, just a few copper.

Increasing Your Skill

Once you begin crafting, you'll notice the names of the recipes in your crafting window start to filter into various colors. These colors indicate the difficulty level of that particular item. Easier items stop granting you skill points eventually, so to advance your skill you'll want to focus on making more difficult items. Here's a chart of the colors and their meaning:

• Orange: Guaranteed Skill Point (after 300 it's not guaranteed but still a very high chance)
• Yellow: Likely to grant a skill point
• Green: Low chance of gaining a skill point
• Gray: No skill points given

Crafting in Bulk

You may find after a day of adventuring that your bags are loaded with goodies that need to be crafted. Whether it's a few stacks of ore or a load of fish, you have a lot of work to do. Within your crafting window, you have options for creating multiple items with one click. There is a "Create All" button that will manufacture as many items as you have the ingredients for within your bags. You can also use the "Create" button in combination with the number arrows to specify exactly how many of a particular item you want. This makes it easier to run through a large number of items and take a quick break for yourself at the same time.

Moving through the Ranks

Each profession has six stages of advancement. You'll begin as an Apprentice, then move on to Journeyman, after that will be Expert, Artisan, Master and finally Grand Master. Each stage has a character level requirement in order to access the next level of training. You must be level 5 to train as an Apprentice, level 10 as a Journeyman, level 20 as an Expert, 35 for Artisan, 50 for Master and 60/65 for Grand Master. Once you're ready to move to the next level, your current trainer will usually tell you where to find a new trainer for the next stage of your development. At Master level all trainers are located in Outland, because players without the Burning Crusade expansion are not permitted to train beyond Artisan level skill. Grand Master trainers are all located in Northrend because the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is required to train that level of crafting.

Finding New Recipes

Your trainer will teach you a certain number of recipes, but as you advance you'll receive fewer and fewer new recipes this way. The other ways to get recipes are as loot drops, from vendors and occasionally from quests. Loot drops can usually be purchased from the Auction House, or sometimes you'll actually loot one appropriate for you. There are also certain recipes that can only be seen by someone with the proper tradeskill. These are usually static drops that only come from a specific mob, thus the crafter would know which critter or boss they needed to kill to get that particular recipe.

For those willing to travel a bit, vendors are actually a good source of new recipes. Most zones have a Trade Goods vendor, and these guys tend to stock a few recipes in limited supply. So whenever you happen across a new Trade Vendor, check his inventory. Recipes can usually be found on the last page of items for sale. There are also some specialty vendors in certain locations (Booty Bay for example) that sell recipes related to their specialty. So a Cook might have cooking recipes, a Weapons Vendor can have weapon recipes, and so on. If you have a profession relating to one of these vendor types, be sure to add them to your list of NPCs to inspect.

Recipe Tip

In case you didn't notice, all loot and vendor recipes have a color associated with them. The name of the recipe can be white, green or blue. Green and blue recipes are usually loot drops, but white recipes are bought from vendors or given as a quest reward. Any time you see a white recipe at the Auction House, there's a good chance that another player has purchased that from a vendor and is selling it at a markup. Seriously consider finding this vendor yourself before you bid on those recipes. You'll usually save 50% or more by visiting the vendor or doing the quest yourself.

Faction Recipes

Another special type of recipe is the faction recipe. These recipes are sold by vendors known as Quartermasters. A quartermaster will sell you items based on your reputation with his group. If you don't have the proper reputation, you can't buy the item. The methods for increasing your reputation with a faction can vary, but usually there are quests you can complete to gain favor. With other factions you might run a particular dungeon and gain reputation points for each mob you kill there. Sites like WoWHead and WoWWiki will be able to give you more information on how to raise your faction with the various groups. Once you reach the proper reputation, you can purchase the recipe you want. Faction recipes tend to be more valuable than vendor and trainer recipes because of the time investment required to access them.

TradeTrak

We've developed an in-game mod that lists every recipe in the game. It functions much like the Crafter's Tome recipe lists, with some searching and filtering options. This mod can be very handy for looking up recipes to find the ingredients without having to switch characters or switch to a browser window to look it up. It also has the ability to link recipes in chat so you can share links with other players. You can download Tradetrak from Curse or WowInterface