II’ve been looking into what you can do during the earlya ccess of the War Within, and the more I think about it, the more sure I am it will be a significant advantage.
Time is money
TIme is not an infinite resource. If you are like me and have multiple obligations outside the game having more evenings early on means you will get farther. In particular you will have time to collect profession treasures on more alts, level more professions for shuffling artisan’s acuity, and take advantage of daily cooldowns of professions (This last part MAY be disabled if they want to keep the playing field more equal).
Will weekly stuff be live?
It’s uncertain if things like patron work orders and weekly knowledge gains will be live in early access, but professions presumably will.
Best things to do
With how valuable Acuity is for getting profession tools early doing the full first craft shuffle on multiple professions is EXTREMELY valuable. Leveling multiple professions to stack up Artisan’s acuity will obviously be expensive, but it will also be very valuable as it will allow you to reach guaranteed max quality thresholds on some crafts before the season begins assuming we get full weekly profession knowledge gains starting from the 28th of August.
Gathering if you like it
If you enjoy gathering I honestly think you can expect to make back the upgrade cost in gold from materials if you spend most of your playtime gathering. It will depend on many factors though, and the season release is quite a long time after launch so things could be a little slow on the material price side, but we might see a repeat of things like the titan orb prices or Awakened Order from Dragonflight.