Profession skill is VERY important in The War Within. For some professions it’s possible to get a +skill bonus from your racial, and today we’ll take a look at the value of these racials.
WHen does it matter
The main scenario where +5 skill will have significant effect is in recipes where you are crafting max quality with max quality reagents. If you have every other possible source of + skill then you might be able to swap out a small number of materials for lower quality materials, while still reaching the recipe difficulty.
Not all recipes though
You need a recipe with a lot of materials required. If it’s a small number of materials then swapping even one item out will reduce your skill by too much. As an example for the Flask of alchemical chaos you can swap two pieces of tier 3 herbs for tier 2 ones. This will reduce your crafting cost by 142 gold for each craft, and will have a significant impact on profits.
The racials
Below is the list of profession racial bonuses available. They matter by far the most in volume crafting for alchemy and enchanting as these have the largest number of recipes with a large enough crafting cost in terms of items that you can actually cut costs. Kul Tirans technically get +2 skill to every profession, but they are only shown for the two professions that do not have access to any other skill racials. I also ignored gathering professions, as they don’t have crafts.
Needed for alchemy
As of right now you absolutely need to have the alchemy racial to be profitable in Alchemy. Having the racial will allow you to swap 2 herbs to the lower quality ones. This will cut your costs by about 120-140 gold per craft, and will be absolutely crucial on a marketplace as competitive as the region wide AH is.
Enchanting is broken
On enchanting having the racial will allow you to swap out up to 10 max quality storm dust for quality 2 ones. As of right now on EU that means you can decrease your crafting costs by 400 gold per enchant, which is VERY significant. Outside of resets you will generally not be able to compete with players who are rocking this bonus.
Setup now
The rush for this patch in The War Within is already behind us, but there is one more patch at least for the expansion. If you want to take advantage of the initial demand rush you will want to prepare crafters with maxed knowledge and tools and the right racial. At this point of the expansion there is no alternative to min maxing your characters.