As I have been busy living up to my name I only just recently got my first epic profession tool, and I was quite surprised at the power level increase.

The power increase

The epic profession tools increase a stat of your choice by as much as 42 going from a rare to an epic item. This corresponds to a 3.8% in your multicraft yield, which depending on your profession means an average of at least 5.7% extra items per craft. At typical rare profession gear multicraft levels this corresponds to a decrease in your effective crafting cost of 3%. For crafts that don’t utilize multicraft the impact is smaller, but even on enchanting my concentration value increases by 13 silver by upgrading my tool.

Epic accessories

The epic accessories offer a much smaller stat increase, generally about 10 per piece. This is still relevant, but the benefit is obviously quite a bit higher for pieces with multicraft. This is lower priority than the tools, but you should be working towards them.

Mandatory for mass crafting

The epic profession gear is absolutely mandatory for mass crafting anything. Mass crafting is usually very competitive and you generally need to have every available efficiency increase at every point in time. SInce you are competing with the entire region you need every bit of both resourcefulness and multicraft you can get. In many cases you even need multiple profession tools, like with ink crafting you want a max resourcefulness epic tool for milling and then a max multicraft epic tool for crafting the inks.

Farming Fused vitality

Fused vitality is the BoP material you need 20 of to craft one of the epic pieces. You can buy these from Dundun by farmind the Abundance event. One Vitality costs 800 unalloyed abundance and you can get 900 per event. You can get 8 shards of Dundun per week and there is no catch up. That means that starting from scratch you need to run the event 18 times per epic piece. You do also get one fused vitality for each weekly profession quest, which helps out.

The Abundance event takes 3 minutes per run. The best way to do it is to look in the group finder for a raid group, or make your own, that way you are guaranteed to get max rewards. I personally find the event absolutely mind-bendingly boring, but hopefully you enjoy it more. The good news for the lazy among us is that in 12.0.7 you can use all your shards on one run to 8x your rewards and be done in one run per week.

Farming shards

To get the shards to do the event the best approach is to fly around Zul’Aman and pick up zone treasures. It can be time consuming, but it is the only somewhat efficient way. You also get shards every once in a while from the patron order bags, so on any crafter you havent touched the event you should have a good stockpile of shards already.

Get it before 12.1

I would strongly suggest that you utilize 12.0.7 to get up full profession gear, particularly on the highest demand professions so you are ready for the relative gold rush of 12.1 when activity picks back up. The most time efficient way is to just wait for 12.0.7 to divide your needed abundance runs by 8, which is massive, but you should make sure you have 8 shards on any characters you plan to do the farm for. Make sure you also keep on top of all your weekly quests to reduce the amount of runds needed.