If your profession alt is the wrong race, you might never make a profit!
We theorized before Dragonflight that the profession racials might be mandatory. For many markets they do not matter, but for some recipes and professions, they wil literally make or break your profits.
Hidden skill value is the culprit
Getting the right amount of recipe skill has a significant impact on goldmaking, being able to reach the inspiration break point to hit max rank for instance is an important one, or being able to guarantee maximum quality for a given recipe. Then there’s the Hidden skill value break points. If you can get within 5% of the recipe difficulty, you will proc max quality some percentage of the time regardless of inspiration procs. This makes more skill extremely valuable if you can reach the threshold where this kicks in.
No guaranteed max rank
A lot of recipes in Dragonflight are impossible to guarantee max quality on. This includes mythic ilvl crafted gear, enchants and a bunch of consumables. Reaching hidden skill value thresholds for these will increase your profit dramatically as players universally prefer the max quality items. For crafted gear the effect is much smaller, as players typically cheap out on materials, and they can’t verify your inspiration chance anyway. But when you are competing on the region wide AH on thin margin consumables, every percent matters.
Fauna runes
I realized this when I was crafting fauna runes. My scribe is Nightborne, which gives me 5 extra inscription skill. I’ve sometimes been crafting the weapon runes, and for me the highest profit method has typically been to use rank 2 chilled runes. This puts me at 295/300 recipe skill, which means I proc some quality 2 runes, but mostly quality 3. With quality 3 materials I would guarantee a quality 3 outcome, but they are typically more expensive, so the cheaper materials win out. If my scribe had not been nightborne I would be at 290/300, which still puts me in HSV range, but my proc rate for quality 3 would be a lot lower. In fact I plugged the numbers into my HSV calculator and for any other race you would get 50% quality 3, versus 75% quality 3s at my current stats. That’s a huge difference, which works out to 10g average profit per craft, which in most cases will completely make or break the profit for these items.
Other items
This lead to me checking my enchanting page, and realizing that I can reach skill 402 on 425 difficulty recipes, which is just below the HSV threshold. The +5 skill i could get from being a Blood Elf would increase my quality 3 rate from 38% to 47%, a very significant increase, which would either make unprofitable recipes profitable or increase profits from insignificant amounts to real amounts.
The prime markets
This mostly matters for recipes that you sell on the AH, where the price difference between q3 and q2 is significant, and where the extra skill will either take you into HSV territory or take you further into HSV-territory. The main ones I’ve tested are enchanting and inscription, but I expect alchemy might also see a very signficant effect from this. At this point I think having a non blood-elf enchanter is pointless outside of doing crests for resourcefulness procs. The races you want to use are
Inscription: Nightborne
Enchanting: Blood Elf
Alchemy: Goblin