Which Crafted Items Can Be Sold
Demand decides what a crafted item is worth. Binding decides whether it can reach a buyer at all. That second question comes first, and it is the one most profession plans skip when they compare trades on income alone.
Binding comes before demand
The usual way to pick a crafting trade is to look at what the realm wants and work backwards to the recipe that makes it. That order misses a step. Before a crafted item has a price it has a binding rule, and the rule says whether the item can be posted, mailed and traded, or whether it attaches to the character that made it the moment it leaves the bench. A recipe with the second rule can still be excellent for the crafter and worth nothing as a business.
Our other profession writing compares trades on buyer lists and on material cost. What Forever changed about professions and which trade pays best at 60 both argue from demand. Neither of them sorts a recipe list by what is tradable, and on a realm where every coin comes from a player that sort order matters more than usual, because a crafter with a soulbound output has no shelf to sell into and no second buyer to raise the price.
The practical form of the question is short. For each recipe you intend to level toward, ask whether the product can be handed to somebody else after it is made. If it can, the recipe is stock and belongs in the income column. If it cannot, the recipe is equipment for one character, and the profession that holds it is being levelled for personal use with a side income attached.
Where the line usually falls
In the Classic-era recipe lists the bulk of crafted gear is bind-on-equip. A smith, a tailor or a leatherworker produces items that can go to the auction house, into the mail or across a trade window, and the crafter's skill is only needed at the moment of making. That is the ordinary case and it is why those trades have an auction presence at all. Who supplies the auction house is largely a list of people working recipes of this kind.
The exceptions cluster in two places: at the top of a trade's list, where the strongest crafted pieces tend to bind when they are created, and around specialisations, where the output is tied to the character that took the specialisation. Our longer treatment of that group is soulbound gear made at the bench, which deals with what a piece is worth when the only way to own it is to level the trade yourself.
Binding can also reach a reagent rather than the finished item. A material that binds when crafted pins the whole chain to one character, which changes how a roster is arranged: the intermediate step cannot be mailed to the alt that holds the recipe. That is the quiet reason some plans built around professions spread across a roster stall halfway, and it is worth checking before the second account slot is filled.
The trades that never post an item
Some crafting output is not an item at all. An enchanter does not produce a thing that sits in a bag and waits for a buyer; the work is applied to somebody else's gear, which means there is nothing to list. Enchanting outside the auction house covers what that does to the sale, and paying an enchanter to turn up covers the half of the fee that is attendance rather than materials. If vellums are absent, the whole trade is arranged in person, and enchants without a vellum item is where that arrangement is set out.
Camp stations sit in the same bracket from a selling point of view. They process and they buff, but what comes out of them is work done on the spot rather than stock to carry home. A crafter working at a fire on a route is producing for the people standing there, which makes the sale a service call with travel attached rather than a listing.
None of this means those trades earn less. It means their income is scheduled rather than posted: the crafter has to be online, in the right place, at the same time as the buyer. That is a different kind of evening from stacking bars and letting the shelf do the work, and it should be chosen deliberately.
What is not published yet
We do not have a per-recipe binding list for the recipes Forever added. Blizzard's own material describes new recipes and new crafting locations without walking through which outputs bind, and we are not going to assemble a list from guesswork and present it as confirmed. Beta reports we have read discuss materials and skill-ups far more than they discuss binding, so the honest statement is that the pattern above is the Classic-era pattern, and the new entries have to be checked individually once they are visible in a trainer list.
The other open question is how commissions are arranged when the product binds. If a buyer wants a soulbound piece, the item cannot be delivered, so the only transaction left is the buyer supplying materials and paying a fee while the crafter makes it in front of them. Whether Forever supports anything formal for that is the subject of commissioned crafting in Forever, and we treat it as unsettled rather than described.
Until those details are public, the safe plan is the dull one. Level the trade for the recipes you can verify are tradable, treat the soulbound part of the list as gear for your own character, and price the service trades by your evening rather than by a shelf. What a crafted item costs in materials is the other half of that sum, and it is the half you can measure today.
Questions
What is the difference between bind-on-equip and bind-on-pickup for a crafter?
A bind-on-equip item stays tradable after it is made: it can be posted, mailed or handed over, and it only binds when somebody puts it on. A bind-on-pickup item binds the moment it is created, so it belongs to the crafter from the first second. For income the distinction is total, because only the first kind can reach a buyer.
Can soulbound crafted items be turned into gold at all?
Not through another player. They can be used by the character that made them, or sold to a vendor for whatever the vendor pays, which is usually a poor return on the materials. The gold value of such a recipe is indirect: it is the money you do not spend buying an equivalent item, not money that arrives in your bags.
Does binding affect materials as well as finished gear?
It can. A reagent that binds when crafted cannot be mailed to another character, so the whole chain has to sit on one profession slot. That is worth checking before splitting crafting and gathering across several alts, because a bound intermediate step makes the split unworkable for that particular recipe line.
Do we know which of Forever's new recipes bind?
No. There is no published list that marks binding recipe by recipe for the new entries, and we are not going to infer one. The Classic-era pattern is that most crafted gear is tradable and the strongest pieces and specialisation outputs are not, but each new recipe has to be confirmed in the trainer list rather than assumed.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, used for announcement material on professions and crafting — World of Warcraft official site.
- Blizzard's community forums, where beta reports on crafting and materials are posted and argued over — WoW community forums.