With profession knowledge and catch up let’s look at some builds that are good for players starting from scratch in 11.1.
Concentration still works
Concentration builds are still great, and work well for most professions. The better your gear and knowledge, the better you will be. Below is a selection of builds for concentration where you will focus on using q2 materials and concentration to craft max quality items. You do not need to min-max any one aspect to get to a profitable state here, but every bit of multicraft, resourcefulness, ingenuity or skill you can get will help increase your profits. The advantage of concentration builds is that they can get away with being a lot less min-maxed and even full uncommon tools and 60-90 knowledge will be enough to be profitable on many recipes. Every bit of stats will help you though, so getting more knowledge is well worth it.
The real money is in volume crafting
You can earn a lot more gold per day if you aren’t limited by concentration, which after all regenerates quite slowly. So now we will look at how you can get up to speed on a non-concentration build as fast as possible.
You need BiS equipment
As of right now you will need to have best in slot profession gear for anything that is sold into the Auction House. The competition is really high, and every tiny percentage in crafting cost difference matters. This means you need to have rank 5 rare profession gear, and in some cases you also need the epic profession bag from tailoring. This will cost you anywhere from 1000-1300 Artisan’s aquity per profession. In most cases this will be all the acuity you have or can easily get, even with profession catch up.
Farming acuity quickly
The main profession catch up is from patron work orders and doing flickers of profession knowledge that you get as a reward. This is on the limited side and means it will take you quite a while to get enough acuity for a full setup. There is however a shortcut: enchanting. Enchanting’s catch up system is from disenchanting. You need to do all the normal weekly sources, including treasures. After that you can earn all available catch up from disenchanting. You can get 300+ knowledge from this, which will get you enough acuity for at least one full set of profession gear. It will cost you, but it is the only way to get up to speed quickly.
Low knowledge needed
Since we need to spend most of our acuity on getting max quality profession gear we can’t afford to buy the +10 knowledge tomes for acuity. This means we need a build where we can get to max skill or a concentration threshold quickly. Some good candidates include
Inscription: in particular crafting materials where you just put 90 points into Pursuit of perfection for mass crafting rank 1/2 materials used in treatises and other inscription crafts.
Enchanting: Disenchanting requires max skill and 60 knowledge points for one material type, or 120 for all three rarities.
Tailoring: Unraveling requires 90 knowledge in Quality Fabric and Weaving and unraveling and less is more to get you over the hump.