Leveling Professions, how do you do it?Follow

So another curiosity that's entered my head (yay!). How do you go about leveling your professions? Do you level your character first, then go back and power-level your crafts? Do you try to keep your professions up with your character's level, or even level them ahead of where you are?



I've been an option #2 person myself. I have this OCD thing where I can't go through the dark portal until my skills are at 300; much to my DK's dismay. Though on my latest alt I'm actually playing 'catch up' more with the character, and routinely bumping up against the level cap for my skills. So I guess that I flirt with #3.

What about you? One of the above, or something else perhaps?

Depends on the profession for me.

Gathering ones get leveled as I go. With crafting ones it depends. I try to keep them up as I go but more frequently I find myself doing bursts of leveling, then playing catch-up on professions, then leveling, etc. Unless of course, I've decided late to change a profession at which point of course I need to powerlevel it.

So basically, I've done all of the provided choices at some point and am absolutely no help. You're welcome.

I like leveling them as I level my character. I also like to do it with minimal AH mat buying but over the years that's been getting harder and harder and leveling gets faster and faster.

Edited, Aug 2nd 2011 8:42pm by Karlina

Depends on both the profession and how far I'm leveling it.

I'm doing Inscription on an alt on a new server. Been insanely easy to power level buy buying herbs. I'n thinking that eventually the cost will be too much but until then professions faster than toon. Around the 500 point of Inscription it gets pricey so will slow then until I have the gold of a level 85 to push it to the cap. But for now selling stuff is easily making me enough gold to power it up.

I could see Alc/LW/BS/Tail working the same way depending on the economy. Engineering is always expensive to level as nothing you make sells, at least with the other ones the results can be DE'd or used.

Gathering profs are weird now that people level via various queues from the comforts of town. They used to be the easiest to level.

I answered the option numero dos.

I always pick up professions when I start a new character and I TRY to level them up as I go, but the thing is that usually I just want to level really really fast, so the professions just kind of get left behind.
And so, when I get to 85, my professions sit at like 185 skill points or so.

I don't know what's up with that, because I really enjoy taking it slow and focusing on maxing out the professions as I go, but somehow they just get left behind almost every single time.

Number 3 is the way I most often level crafting professions. The gathering ones generally just level themselves as I level and tend to max out before am high enough level for the next zone. One exception to that is when I have a gathering profession on a character that I run a lot of instances on because most instances don't offer many opportunities for herbing and mining and only a few are good for skinning.

For crafting professions on my alts, I have a tendency to binge level them. I will send a bunch of mats to them and level the profession up to cap and then I work on leveling the character up to the next level that lets me raise the cap on the profession. This only works well for professions that I have a higher level character doing the gathering for on that server/faction. On my main server, I have so many mats stored away that I can pretty much power level a character's crafting up to whatever the last expansion's cap (or the cap dictated by the character level) without hardly touching the AH. Getting to 525 on professions sometimes takes me a bit longer depending on the mats needed, the availability of the recipes and how badly I need an alt with that profession capped. I had no trouble getting two alchemists from 450 to 525 but my JC/Engineer isn't capped yet in either one because I just haven't had a reason to.

Cooking and fishing I tend to cap out pretty quickly on my main and cooking gets leveled as my supply of cooking materials stocks up. When I get too much to store easily, I look to see if any of my alts need to do some more leveling and send it to them. I haven't been as diligent with the fishing though. I don't have a big reason anymore to keep my fishing capped out on my alts since you can fish in any pool with 100% efficiency at any fishing level. I used to keep their fishing high enough to fish in the zones they were questing in but there's no need for that anymore.

I don't spend a lot of effort leveling first aid at the higher levels. My lowbie alts usually have their first aid pushed to the point where they can make bandages that would actually be useful at their level but after that, the supply of cloth tends to dictate whether or not I use it for leveling first aid. Right now, my main's first aid is capped but most of the cloth I get while questing goes straight to my tailor to use for making dreamcloth and to make bags.

JCing is a major pain in the *** to max out I think. It's those last 10 or 15 points that still have me... My priest has been 85 since April and she still doesn't have JCing maxed out, because at this point the only things that ive her skill ups are meta gem cuts (which I haven't bothered to learn any because I don't need to replace them that often and all of my toons are casters except one and I refuse to pay 1k for the burning meta gem recipe) or the fire prism. Fire prism just doesn't seem to be worth it with the cost of green gems and what ore is worth on my server.

Just recently took my baby druid's alchemy to 525 the moment I hit 75. The past couple of weeks she's just been standing around in Dalaran making Truegold.

So it really depends on the benefits of leveling a profession early.

Gathering professions I level as my character levels up. It seems the most efficient, and I absolutely hate going back through newbie zones picking peaceblooms as a level 85. It seems to take forever.

Crafting professions are usually costly to level, and I never seem to have enough from the gathering to level them, even when I keep every single thing I gather. For me, I can make gold at max level much faster than a non-max level toon, so I wait until I'm level capped before starting crafting professions. First aid being the exception.

Yeah, that is one of the downsides to being on a Full server. There is more supply for a lot of the lower level herbs than I would like, which makes it difficult to do the buy low sell high thing. There are particular herbs, like Dreamfoil, Khadgar's Whiskers, etc. which I bought a ton of at the start of Cata when they were priced really low, that I still have not managed to sell off because there's always a steady supply of them, so I have a hard time selling at inflated prices. =x