Professions Decide What Gold Buys

Facts from the BlizzCon Deep Dive and the September 18 breakdownOur reading is labelled as ours

The stated design line for Forever is not no changes but do not change everything. The team has said in its own presentations that professions in the original were one of the parts they considered uneven

Everything a bench produces is sold in coin, and the real money side of Forever never touches the supply side at all.

: a few trades carried most of the demand, several others produced goods almost nobody bought, and long stretches of a recipe list existed mainly as skill points on the way to something else. That is the admission the profession rework is built on, and it is worth separating from the usual expectation that a Classic realm leaves old systems where it found them.

One of those evened-out corners sits on the gear side rather than the recipe list. In the original, spell power was effectively a cloth stat

The buyer list behind any bench stops at the regional border, and a separate market per region decides who can actually buy the stack.

, which made tailoring the default supplier for every caster who was not wearing mail or plate. Forever breaks that link: part of the leatherworking list now covers the same stat niche, so a caster in leather is a buyer a leatherworker can serve directly instead of sending to a tailor.

Armour type cuts the other way on the same gear side, and it is easy to miss when reading a recipe list for income. On the beta, the blacksmithing item Glimmering Mithril Insignia is flagged as mail, which means the group that can equip it is smaller than the group that can read the recipe and smaller than a crafter would assume from the stat line alone. A smith who levels toward it is not supplying every class that wants the effect, only the ones whose armour type matches.

The practical reading is to check the armour type on a crafted piece before treating it as a product rather than a skill point.

How many crafters hold a trade at all can be estimated from outside the client, and a realm-wide profession count is only as good as the sample behind it.

Old recipes keep their buyers longer on this realm than on most, and a realm without catch-up gear keeps sending new characters through the same brackets.

The same check belongs on the buying side of the bench, and gear ordered before raiding is where most of that demand arrives.

Two recipes can sit at the same rank, cost comparable materials and still have buyer lists of very different size, because one is restricted and the other is not.

A rank is also sold as labour rather than as stock, and payment for somebody else's skill rises with how few crafters hold the recipe.

Some patterns never reach a trainer or a listing in the first place, and raid recipes held by guilds are handed to a nominated crafter instead.

We have not seen a published list of which crafted items carry which restriction on Forever, so this is worth checking item by item on the shelf instead of assumed across a whole trade.

There is one more hint that the profession list itself is not final. On the beta, an apprentice jewelcrafting trainer stands in Dalaran and does nothing

Every trade is raised while its customers are levelling too, and the pre-raid market window decides which recipes have buyers at all.

Bench work is not the only thing sold by the hour, and paid raid services for gold are priced in time rather than in stock.

: the model is placed, the title reads as a trainer, and the interaction is switched off. Nothing has been announced about it, and a disabled NPC on a test realm is not a feature. It is worth noting only because it is the single visible sign that the list of trades could grow rather than just get rebalanced.

If that trainer is ever turned on, the money consequences are easy to sketch and impossible to price. A new crafting trade competes for the same 2 profession slots every character has

Every trade is raised under unusual conditions at first, and crowded nodes in the opening days decide how fast the early materials arrive.

Income does not always come off a bench, and buffs and openings for gold are charged by classes with nothing to craft.

, so somebody drops tailoring or alchemy to take it. It also puts a second buyer behind ore, which currently feeds blacksmiths and engineers, and creates demand for a material category that has no established supply route on this realm. None of that is worth planning around before it is confirmed. Treat it as a thing to watch at the trainer, not as a trade to leave a slot open for.

The city around that trainer is worth a line of its own. On the beta, Dalaran holds trainers for 7 professions inside one set of streets

Those rounds are walked again by anyone starting over, and re-levelling a trade after a reroll is usually the largest repeat cost of the move.

, which is not how a Classic-era capital usually works: raising a trade past the early ranks normally means a trip to whichever city happens to hold the right teacher, and that trip is paid for in travel time and fares charged on flight routes rather than in materials. With 7 of them in walking distance, training becomes a single stop. The saving is small per visit and it is real across a roster of alts

That saving is one case of a wider pattern, and travel time between stops is charged against every gathering session as well.

Two things decide what a gathering trade returns per hour, and neither of them is the listed price of the stack. The first is yield per node: a node hands over a small stack rather than a single item, so the difference between a good route and a bad one is measured in nodes reached, not in what each one holds. The second is where those nodes sit. Players testing the beta report that the starting zones were thinned out, and that a gatherer working only the first areas runs into a skill ceiling there and has to move outward before the early ranks are finished. We have not seen those caps confirmed in anything published by the team, so they are worth treating as field reports rather than as figures to plan a route around.

Finding the nodes is less work than it used to be. On the beta the profession tab carries its own button for node tracking, so a gatherer turns it on where the trade is already listed instead of setting it from the minimap, and a trade picked up from level 3 is usable on the map from the first session. That saves seconds rather than gold, and it counts for most where competition for nodes at launch is heaviest and the gap between one node and the next is the whole margin.

, since every character that picks up a crafting trade makes the same rounds.

Class trainers are a separate round of visits again, and class trainer spend from 1 to 60 is counted apart from anything a profession teacher charges.

That round is priced the same for a mage as for a warrior, and the class training total is fixed before the first rank is bought.

Camp stations are a field tool, and the cities are the exception to them. Lighting a fire inside a capital is not allowed, so a cook standing in town has to work off a hearthfire

Those stations carry an income argument of their own, and field camps and travel time is where that argument is set out in full.

What a crafter can carry out of town is limited by storage as much as by materials, and the reagent slot and quivers decide how much room is left for stock.

How much of that material reaches a shelf depends on where it was gathered, and raw material supply by ruleset is not the same on every realm.

or a brazier that is already placed there rather than dropping their own. That is a small rule with a market attached: the convenient place to cook is not the convenient place to sell, and the player who wants a stack of food before a run is often standing in the auction house instead of at a fire.

Cooking also carries more weight while levelling than it used to, because the food it produces is part of how a character sustains a questing route rather than a raid-night nicety.

The raid-night half of that demand runs for as long as a gear project does, and the tier set bill keeps the same buyers ordering week after week.

That pushes demand down the level range instead of concentrating it at the top, and it keeps a buyer list alive for cooks who never see a raid. Supply for it comes off meat and fish, so the volume a cook can move depends on how quickly those gather, and realm type and farming speed decide how contested that route is. We have not seen a published list of which recipes sit at which skill ranks, so treat the direction as clear and the breakpoints as unknown.

What that trade sells and who keeps buying it is a longer account, and the cooking and food market sits apart from the rest of the supply side.

The apprentice jewelcrafter stands in that same city and still does not respond. We have not seen anything published about what the NPC is for

Whatever is taught there has to be stored somewhere afterwards, and space a crafting trade needs is bought in instalments rather than once.

, so the only safe reading is that Dalaran is already set up to be the place a new trade would be taught from, whether or not one ever is. If you are deciding where to park a crafting alt, the trainer density is the argument, not the empty slot on the trainer list.

Those stacks are ordered by the same table every reset, and a raider's weekly consumable spend is where most of that demand lands.

One trade on that list sells by meeting the buyer in person, and scrolls of enchantment at auction are the only route that would move it onto the shelf.

The money consequence is upstream of the bench. Demand that used to land on cloth drops now lands partly on skins and hides, which are gathered from mobs rather than looted from humanoids

How fast those raw materials arrive depends on more than the route, and realm type and farming speed set the cost behind every stack a bench consumes.

, and that is a different farming route with a different set of zones behind it. Cloth does not stop selling, since bandages and bags keep their own buyer list, but it no longer holds the caster market on its own.

One competitor to that bag demand is not crafted at all, and bag bundles sold for money appear in one regional storefront rather than on the shelf.

We have not seen a published list of which leather recipes carry the stat or at what item levels they sit, so treat this as a direction for skinning volume rather than a measured shift, and expect fees quoted for commissioned crafting to be asked of leatherworkers by clothwearers more often than they were.

Two of the changes follow directly from it. Gathering handed out free from level 3 widens the number of characters feeding raw materials into the economy from the first hours

Those characters are not spread evenly across the map either, and Tauren gathering and node competition explains where the herb supply piles up.

How many of those characters one account can keep is its own constraint, and spare character slots per realm cap the number of trades a roster can cover.

, rather than leaving it to whoever paid a trainer later. Roughly 600 new recipes are being added across the trades, which is a deliberate attempt to give the weaker professions output that somebody wants to buy instead of output that exists to be disenchanted or vendored. We have not seen a per-profession breakdown of where those recipes land, so the direction is clear and the distribution is not.

The same caution applies one layer up, where the Legacy tree's point budget decides which of those trades a character can actually support.

For anyone planning crafting income before the 4 November start, that is the honest reading: expect demand to be spread wider than it was, and do not assume a specific trade has been chosen as the winner.

4 changes that matter for money

Everyone gathers, from level 3

A quest around level 3 or 4 hands you a manual for Herbalism, Mining or Skinning — free, and it teaches the profession outright if you have a slot open.

Working that slot means covering ground first, and the cost of taxi routes comes out of whatever the gathering circuit brings back.

That log pays in more than manuals, and turn-ins measured against grind spots decides how much coin arrives before the first bench is used.

A different kind of purchase never reaches that bench at all, and paid character services in Forever are billed to the account rather than to the trade.

One crafting slot is cut off from the auction house entirely, and why enchanting skips the auction comes down to what the recipe produces.

What that slot earns instead is arranged in chat, and a trade that sells labour finds its price without a listing.

Not all of it stays out of the shelf, and an enchanter's 2 revenue lines are priced by availability on one side and by undercutting on the other.

Other benches reach the same point by a different route, and fees paid for bench work are quoted the same way, customer materials included.

How that quote is put together is its own question, and pricing a commissioned craft depends on travel and rarity as much as on the recipe.

What that free slot returns also depends on who else is in the zone, and gathering on an RP-PvP realm is priced with interruptions included.

The same quest log pays in coin as well as manuals, and what a 10-quest chain returns is weighted toward experience rather than gold.

What those early trades sell into is shrinking from the other direction, since fewer stops to eat and bandage thin out the buyer list for low-level stock.

One buyer list holds up better than the rest, and crafters supplying dungeon groups are ordered from again every time a party forms.

The steadiest version of that list sits one tier higher, and a raid seat's upkeep keeps the same benches busy between lockouts.

A recipe can also outlive its stat bracket entirely, and crafted models sold for appearance keep earning after the gear itself is replaced.

Not every sellable item comes off a bench, and world drops nobody crafted compete with crafted stock on the same shelf.

One buyer list does not thin out the same way, and reagent demand behind crafted bags keeps quivers, ammo pouches and shard bags on the order sheet.

Who works that slot fastest is partly decided before the first node, and gathering bonuses tied to a race buy a head start rather than a permanent edge.

Treat that part of the roster as unfinished rather than settled. Racials are still being adjusted ahead of the 4 November start, and the discussion we are reading includes a recent change to the orc racial along with repeated requests to take the combat racials out altogether. Neither of those is a gathering change by itself, but both sit in the same pass, and a pass that moves one racial can reach the ones with a money effect beside it.

We have not seen a final list published, so everything written here about a race paying for itself is measured against the set as it stands now, not against the set that ships. If a race is being picked mainly for the gathering bonus, the steadier reading is that the bonus is a convenience worth having rather than a plan that survives a rewrite.

Cultivation belongs in that reading as a supplement, not a substitute. It sits on a cooldown, so it can only be used at a set interval, and what it returns arrives as a single batch rather than as a steady feed. A herbalist on a route collects at every node they reach for as long as they stay out; the racial pays once and then goes quiet until it is ready again. The 2 do not sit in the same bracket for throughput, and a character relying on the racial alone is not supplying an alchemist at the same rate as a gathering slot does.

We have not seen a published figure for the cooldown or for the size of the batch, so this is a statement about direction rather than a measured ratio.

The same arithmetic changes shape once a roster spans more than one licence, and splitting professions across 2 accounts removes the slot ceiling a single account imposes.

The practical consequence is that the racial is worth having on top of Herbalism and is a poor argument for dropping it, which leaves the roster arithmetic where it was: herbs handed across a roster remain the cheaper feed for anyone crafting in volume.

Professions in Forever do not pay only in coin. Part of what a crafting or gathering slot returns arrives as a profession currency, earned by working the trade and spent back inside it, and the same applies to the perks a character carries forward. A large share of the discussion we are reading treats that as an unnecessary layer: a second ledger stacked on top of gold, with its own balance to watch and its own list of things it is allowed to buy, when a single currency already did the job. We are not taking a side on whether that complaint is fair, but it is the most common objection we see raised about the system, and it comes from people who expect to craft rather than from people arguing about design in the abstract.

For income the distinction is simple enough. Gold on the auction house is worth what a buyer will pay, it moves between players, and anything listed can be converted into it by somebody else. A profession currency does none of that: it is not traded, it is not bid up or down by supply, and no amount of coin in the bank produces any of it. It has to be worked for on the character that holds it, which means a crafter with a full purse and an empty profession balance is still locked out of whatever that balance unlocks. The same logic sits behind perks tied to a Legacy character, which attach to progress rather than to purchasing power. We have not seen a complete published list of what the profession currency buys, so treat the mechanism as described and the shopping list as unconfirmed.

One group of buyers goes the other way, and supplies burned in PvP fights are reordered far more often than a levelling character reorders anything.

What the bench needs has to arrive from somewhere first, and posting materials to a crafter is the step between the route and the recipe.

Where that slot is worked is a question of its own, and stations set up at a camp move the bench out to the route rather than the other way round.

The camp is tied to its fire rather than to the character. Everything set up around it works within 100 yards of the spot,

What a supplier earns at that fire stays on the character that earned it, and what a gold trade records starts to matter the moment it moves to somebody else.

Which of those moves counts as a transfer at all is decided by the rules on moving gold rather than by the trade window.

and stepping outside that radius ends the use of the stations instead of carrying them along. A gathering route planned around a camp is therefore a loop back to one point, not a bench that travels with the gatherer, and the ore, hides or herbs have to come back to the fire to be handled.

Where those stacks go after the fire is a roster question, and moving materials between low-level alts decides whether a second slot is worth opening at all.

One limit on the camp comes from a player report out of beta rather than from a published note: items cannot be sold to the stations.

That full bag is a market of its own as well, and who sews the reagent bags decides which of the 2 crafting trades gets paid for it.

That full bag still has to be emptied somewhere, and selling cheap stock to a vendor is often the shorter sum once a listing charge is counted against it.

The buyer list for crafted stock also has a deadline on it, and a pre-raid set before December is where a large share of that demand lands.

Part of that stock never reaches a buyer at all, and binding rules on crafted gear sort the recipe list before demand does.

They process and they buff, but they do not buy, so a full bag of grey drops and spare materials is still a full bag when the route ends.

Most of what leaves that bench is burned rather than kept, and buyers who reorder every week are the reason a crafting slot pays at all.

Part of that bag is leaving again on the next trip, since reagents a class has to carry are restocked before the route starts rather than after it.

Some of that spare stock has a second life, and greens broken down into dust is where an enchanter's materials come from.

What that dust turns into cannot be posted or mailed, and an enchant delivered in person is the only form the sale takes.

The scarcest stock on that shelf is held by a handful of gatherers, and controlling Black Lotus spawns decides what a realm pays for a flask.

Route planning is on sale as well, and a guide addon with a licence is priced in dollars while everything it gathers is priced in coin.

Who that stock eventually sells to is wider than one ruleset, since one shelf shared by every ruleset sets the price a gatherer gets.

A camp is a bench on the road, not a field vendor, and treating it as one is how a gatherer ends up logging out with 20 slots of vendor trash nobody has paid for.

Some of that stock is never posted anywhere, and a guild bank stocking crafters is where a gathering route ends for most raiders.

The stations also have a materials bill of their own. Recipes for camp items pull T1 resources — the low-level herbs, ore and hides that come out of starting zones — which means a character well past that tier still needs a steady feed of the cheapest stock on the shelf to keep a fire and its benches running. On beta that turned into a straight choice for players: ride back to a starting zone and gather the tier again, or buy it instead, and herbs posted as a commodity are where most of that second option gets settled.

In a group the fire works as a shared station rather than as one character's bench. Whoever sets it up pays the materials bill, and everyone inside the radius uses what is standing there, so the cost lands on one person while the benefit is split across the party. Most groups settle that by splitting the contribution: the miner brings the ore the stations ask for, the herbalist covers the plant side, the skinner covers hides, and nobody rides back to a starting zone alone. What one profession brings to the fire is cheap stock in isolation and awkward to collect on a schedule, which is why the resources a camp consumes are usually pooled rather than bought outright.

The second effect is internal demand. A party camped together is a small buyer list that does not go through the auction house at all: the alchemist wants herbs that are already in the group's bags, the enchanter wants greens nobody else is using, the leatherworker wants hides from the same route. Those trades tend to settle at whatever the group agrees on rather than at a posted price, and a gatherer who is the only one carrying a given material inside the party has more leverage over that number than the open shelf would give them. Our reading is that camps move a share of low-tier reagent trade out of the listings and into group chat, which is worth knowing before pricing the same stock for strangers.

One request that keeps coming back from players is the stack size on potions: raise it from 5 to 20, the way later versions of the game handle consumables.

A secondary trade sits outside those 2 slots entirely, and fishing as a secondary profession adds a supply line without taking anything away from the pair already chosen.

Nothing has been published on whether Forever intends to change it, so the working assumption is the old limit until a note says otherwise. We are repeating a request here, not a confirmed change.

The 2 profession slots on a single character also decide how much of a craft is paid for in time and how much in coin. Alchemy run on a main with Herbalism sitting on alts is the cheaper arrangement: the alts work the free gathering slot, the stacks ride across the roster, and the only real cost is the hours spent on the routes. That makes herbs handed down from alts the quiet subsidy behind most potion and flask output, and it is why an alchemist with no gatherer behind them pays a visibly different bill for the same recipe.

A Tauren character arrives at that pair of slots with one of them already half-decided. The Tauren racial raises Herbalism and adds herb tracking to the minimap, and the tracker is only worth anything if Herbalism is actually trained, so the free gathering profession handed out in the starting zone goes into that slot by default. The real choice is then the remaining slot, which is a narrower question than the one a character with both slots open gets to ask.

Gathering is not the only place a race touches income. A Dwarf running Find Treasure keeps chests on the minimap for the length of the route, and chests pay in coin and items that never pass through a profession at all, so the bonus lands on the same gathering loop without competing for either slot. A Gnome carries a bonus to Engineering instead, which matters less for the skill-up curve than for the devices themselves: a crafter who turns out fewer failed items spends less on the materials behind them, and that is the part of the trade that shows up in the ledger rather than in the skill number.

Two cautions on this group. We have seen the name Artisan's Precision used by players for a crafting-side racial, and we have found no published note describing what it does or who has it, so we are repeating a name here and nothing more. Forever has also reworked racials elsewhere, which means the old Classic wording is not a safe source for any of them — the tooltip in the client is, and it is worth reading before a profession pair is chosen around one of these. For the collecting side of the same question, racials that change what a route returns are the shorter list and the better documented one.

Our reading: this is a soft push rather than a rule, and it cuts both ways. A Tauren who skips Herbalism keeps the full range of pairs but throws away a bonus that cost nothing to acquire, while a Tauren who takes it is locked into feeding the same shelf as every other herb supplier on the realm. Either way the decision is made before the first node is touched, which is also how income attached to a race tends to work in Forever: it moves the starting point rather than the ceiling.

Tailoring is the opposite case, because it has no gathering profession attached to it at all. Cloth comes from kills and from other players, so a tailor either farms humanoid packs for the drop or buys the stock outright

A crafter without a gatherer behind them often has a roster instead, and a guild's profession masters are how a recipe gets filled without a purchase.

, and cloth posted in bulk is where the second route is settled. Our reading: treat a craft without its own gatherer as a purchased-input business and price it that way — the margin is the gap between what the bolts cost and what the finished item sells for, with none of the slack a self-supplied alchemist gets. We have not seen Forever publish anything that changes how cloth is acquired, so the old arrangement is the working assumption.

Where the trainers are not

The map is not even. Not every capital trains every profession, and the gaps are not symmetrical between the factions. Player reports out of beta point at Thunder Bluff and Darnassus as the 2 capitals where a character can land, walk the whole city and still not find the trainer they came for. For Horde characters that makes Mulgore a staging area rather than a destination: the workaround points players describe are trainers reached outside the city, with a flight path or a long ride attached, rather than a second trainer added inside it. Nothing has been published as a trainer list, so these are accounts from players, not a confirmed layout.

Our reading: the bill here is paid in travel, not in coin. A profession parked on a character who lives in a capital without the matching trainer turns every skill tier into a round trip, and that time comes out of the same hours the route was supposed to fill. Decide which character holds which slot with the trainer location in mind, and do not expect the fire to cover it — benches set up at a camp process and buff inside their radius, but they do not train anything and they do not unlock a recipe tier.

Our reading: while a stack holds 5, the stack size is a supply constraint rather than a comfort issue. A crafter who makes consumables in bulk fills bags with partial stacks long before the materials run out, a buyer collecting a raid night of flasks and potions spends slots that would otherwise carry reagents, and every hand-off between characters moves more items for the same quantity of product. That pushes work onto stock parked on bank alts and makes the storage side of a crafting operation larger than the crafting side. It also changes how batches are listed, since potions posted as a commodity are easier to sell in quantity than to carry in quantity. If the limit is lifted to 20, the recipe economics do not move at all — only the volume one character can handle in a single trip does.

Our reading: that is the quiet buyer the low end of the market gains back. Starter materials normally lose their audience as the server levels, but camp recipes keep a use for them at every level, and the gatherers who stay in those zones are selling to campers rather than to levellers. How large that demand is we cannot say — nothing has been published on how much a station consumes per use — so treat the direction as the point, not the size.

That keeps the town trip on the schedule. The loop is still gather, return to the fire, process, and then ride in to empty the bag and post what is worth posting, which means hours spent reaching a city stay in the cost of every run instead of being cut by the camp. Our reading: plan the route so the end of it is near a settlement anyway, and count the camp as something that saves carrying raw weight, not something that saves the journey. We have not seen this confirmed in writing by the developers, so treat it as a beta observation until it is.

The fire itself is graded: the quality of the campfire decides which set of buffs the camp hands out, so a better fire is not only a longer-lasting one but a different list of effects.

Another trade works the same ore the camp processes, and explosives and repair devices are restocked far more often than they are listed.

Which effects sit at which grade has not been laid out in detail, and we are not going to invent the table. What matters for the supply side is the direction — part of what a levelling character used to buy from an alchemist or a cook can now be produced at a campsite for the cost of the materials gathered on the way there. The buyers that disappear first are the ones at the cheap end of the shelf, which is the same group that settles the mana bill casters pay in food and drink.

One thing the camp does not replace is the trainer. Teaching, ranking up and anything above the first tiers still happens at a person standing in a city

What comes back from that route is sold under rules of its own, and posting materials as a commodity works nothing like posting a named stack.

, and the version of Dalaran that Forever uses has been described as the place where those trainers sit together rather than being spread across 4 or 5 capitals. If that holds, the practical effect is on the calendar rather than on the recipe list: a supplier plans one trip instead of several, and hours spent reaching a trainer stop being the reason a skill point waits a week. We are reading this from what has been said publicly, not from a trainer list we have seen.

The same caution applies to specialisations. Players keep asking whether the old splits survive — Dragonscale and the other leatherworking branches, Gnomish against Goblin engineering — because those are the choices that decide who can make a given item at all, and therefore who sets its price. We have no confirmation either way in the files, and no statement from the developers that names them.

The same gap between a statement and a retelling turns up elsewhere, and claims about beta gold buying run on forum memory rather than on anything published.

Until there is one, treat the branches as an open question rather than a plan: a crafter who picks a slot on the assumption that one specialisation will be worth more than another is betting on something nobody has published yet.

Gathered stock sells to levellers as well as to crafters, and stacks bought for collection quests are the shelf those stacks land on first.

Race belongs in the same calculation, and it does not always pull toward income. A Tauren gathering bonus to herbalism sits on the skill itself, so it applies to every stack picked along a route without the player pressing anything. The Horde Skyborne racials are built differently: a glide and a short burst of movement speed, both of them active buttons that leave the gathering number untouched.

Because those lists are faction-bound, the raw material flow is not identical either, and Horde and Alliance auction houses drift apart on supply before demand touches them.

A supplier who picks that race expecting the same kind of help a herbalism bonus gives is picking mobility instead.

Mobility is worth something, but it is worth it in a different column. A glide shortens a descent and a speed burst shortens a gap between nodes, which means whatever those racials return shows up as hours lost moving between nodes rather than as more herbs per stop. Our reading: for a character built around a gathering slot, a flat skill bonus is the safer pick, and the active racials pay best on a route that is already long and vertical.

On the crafting side one trade produces nothing a listing can hold, and tips paid for an enchant are how that slot is settled instead.

How that figure is reached before anybody meets is set out in pricing an enchant in trade chat, where memory stands in for a sales history.

Those free slots are repeated once per client a household runs, which is the arithmetic behind gathering slots on boxed characters.

What that free slot returns per evening depends on the road as much as the route, which is the case made in travel between routes and trainers.

How those free slots are divided once there are several names on the account is the arithmetic behind professions split across 4 alts.

Not every income on a character comes from a trade slot, and services sold by class ability pay without any gathering at all.

The setup players describe most often is a pair: one character carrying the gathering slots and a main carrying the crafting one. Herbs, ore and hides travel by mail from the gatherer to the main, and the main never has to leave a city to keep its bench fed. That part works. What does not travel is the finished item when the recipe produces something bound on pickup: a craft made through Tradesman's Favor comes out tied to the character that made it, and sharing an account does not change that. The gatherer can send materials in; it cannot send a bound result back out.

Our reading: this is one of the quieter reasons a stack of raw material never shows up in a listing. It is gathered, mailed and consumed inside one household, so the auction house sees neither the ore nor the item it became. The volume involved is not something we can measure, and we are not going to put a figure on it. The practical consequence for anyone planning slots is that a bound recipe has to sit on the character meant to use the output, not on whichever name happens to have the free slot — which is a different question from how trade slots are divided for income.

Where that free slot is worked matters as much as the slot itself, since gathering routes on a PvP realm lose hours no herb list accounts for.

That free slot is also the cheapest reason to roll another name, which is where spare profession slots on alts starts to pay.

What a supplier earns still has to reach a buyer, and how gold reaches a receiving character is the step most restock plans skip.

A crafting slot also pays in account progress, which is why profession milestones at 225 compete with rolling another alt.

Some of what those suppliers sell never reaches a crafting bench, because buffing, porting and resurrecting consumes stock on its own schedule.

Those free gathering slots pay differently depending on how long the climb takes, which is set out in levelling hours and the gold they cost.

The manual names 3 trades and leaves out the 4th, which is where fishing as a supply line starts to price differently.

The buyers at the other end are not all levelling characters, since tournament demand for consumables arrives in short bursts on a narrow list of items.

A larger burst of the same kind is scheduled rather than spontaneous, since 3 raids opening together put every buyer on the same shopping list in the same days.

Downstream of those materials sits a steady buyer, since a caster's restock bill is settled in food and drink made by other players.

A second steady buyer arrives on a fixed night, since what a raider restocks weekly clears the same shelves before every pull.

That buyer can also cut the order without buying anything, and downranking to save mana is how the restock list gets shorter.

Gathering also feeds the shelf that refills a mana bar, since the mana bill casters pay is stocked largely by cooks and fishermen.

The trade is free, but the ore and hides need somewhere to sit, and bag slots a gatherer buys arrive as a bill of their own.

Gathering still stops at 300. The free manual removes the cost of entry, but it does not move the ceiling: a herbalist, miner or skinner tops out at the same skill number as in Classic, and from there the trade produces whatever that cap allows and nothing above it. Blizzard has not announced what happens after 300 — no higher cap, no second tier of nodes, no date for either. Anything written about a continuation, including on this site, is reading between the lines rather than quoting a plan.

Players have been asking for two things in particular: a raised cap of 600 or 900 in the style of later expansions, and a second gathering slot so one character can run both a crafting trade and two sources of materials.

The steadiest buyer for that supply orders on a lockout clock, and consumable demand from raid nights arrives on the same days every week.

Neither has been confirmed, and we have no information on whether either is being considered. For now the practical answer to wanting more supply from one account is the same as it was at launch — more characters, which is the arithmetic behind gathering trades across several alts.

Racials feed the same ledger, but only a few of them do it in coin. Three kinds are worth separating. Tracking effects that put chests on the minimap pay in items picked up while a route is being run anyway — the pickup is incidental, and it is the repetition over a long session that turns it into a number. Racial bonuses to a crafting trade pay by wasting less stock: fewer failed or low-value attempts on the way up means fewer stacks bought to reach the same skill point. Anything that shortens the distance between two nodes pays in the part of a gathering hour nobody writes down, the walking. We are not quoting rates for any of these, because Blizzard has not published what Forever does to racials specifically, and the Deep Dive did not name them as a change.

The practical part is that none of it can be adjusted later. Race is fixed when the character is created, so whatever multiplier it carries is decided before the first node is touched — there is no retraining step the way there is with a profession, and a gatherer who wants a different one is really talking about another character on the roster rather than a change to the one already levelled. Our reading: that makes racials a tie-breaker at creation and nothing more after it, and it is a weak reason to reroll a character that already has skill, bags and a route worked out.

Working Overtime changes how a recipe is chosen, not what it costs. Blizzard named the mechanic in the Deep Dive as a change to how crafting skill is awarded; the exact rates have not been published, and we are not quoting any here. What it does to planning is simpler than the rules behind it: once a low-colour recipe still returns something, the question stops being which recipe is orange and becomes which recipe costs least per skill point. Those are not the same recipe, and on most trades they are not even close.

The arithmetic runs on materials, not on colour. An orange recipe grants a point on every craft, but it usually sits one tier up and takes the reagent that drops rarely, or the bar that needs 2 ores plus a flux. A green recipe needs more attempts for the same point, and each attempt takes common herbs, vendor reagents or the metal already stacked in the bank. Multiply attempts by material price and the cheap recipe often wins outright, especially in the stretches where the next orange recipe needs something bought at auction rather than gathered on the way. Count the trainer's fee and the bag space as part of the same bill, because both are paid before the first craft and neither shows up in the skill-up window. The cases where the orange recipe is still the right answer are the ones where its output sells — a craft that clears at auction pays part of its own way, while a green recipe made only for the point leaves a pile of stock nobody is bidding on. That trade-off is also how crafting milestones worth Legacy points get reached without emptying a gathering alt's supply first.

A build chosen for gathering can be unwound later, and resetting Legacy talent points is a charge kept apart from the class trainer's till.

The barrier to becoming a supplier is now nothing at all.

The free manual covers gathering only. A crafting trade still needs a trainer, and the trainer for the one you want may not live in the capital you started in.

A crafter restocking from a seller still has to collect the coin, and auction buyout as delivery is the route that needs no meeting at all.

A trainer fee is easier to justify once the trade takes work in, and crafting with a customer's materials is how most crafters first charge for the slot.

One crafted item is bought for what it unlocks rather than what it is, which is why skeleton keys a blacksmith makes sell to players who never touch the trade themselves.

What that trainer teaches is not all sellable either, since gear that binds on pickup never reaches a listing.

Whether that trip and that trainer fee are paid by the character itself or out of a main's bank is the question behind funding a second character.

Not every income here needs a trade slot at all, which is the point of selling warlock summons.

Those offers have somewhere to go, and where services are advertised in Forever decides who ever reads them.

The buyer at the other end is often a levelling healer, and what levelling a healer costs decides which of those purchases comes first.

That healer can cover part of the same bill by charging for the role itself, and the rate a healer asks moves with the hour and the dungeon.

The same slot decision reads differently when nothing can be bought to fill the gaps, which is the case for professions chosen for self-found play.

Each city teaches a limited set

Whatever the trade turns out, it has one buyer who is always present, and crafting purely for vendor value is the floor under a slot that is otherwise idle.

, so a character who settles on a particular crafting profession early often has to cross the continent to learn it, and that trip is made on foot until riding is affordable

The fee is the small half of the decision, and what skill-ups cost in materials is the half that decides whether the slot pays for itself.

The ceiling is 225. With the level cap at 30, a crafting trade is meant to stop at 225 rather than climb to the number a long Classic character eventually reaches, and that same figure is where Legacy points for crafting are handed out. Everything a trade can sell in this bracket is therefore priced against a short ladder: the recipes worth learning are the ones that still pay at 225, and the materials for the last ranks are bought knowing there is nothing above them to aim at.

Beta feedback is less positive about what fills that short ladder. Testers report that the low-level crafted greens come in a narrow set of stat combinations, so a crafter working toward 225 ends up with several recipes that turn out near-identical items

A crafter's bill still has to be settled, and payment held mid-order leaves the materials with one party and the coin with the other.

and little reason to learn more than one of them. For a buyer that means the crafted shelf competes badly with quest and dungeon rewards in the same bracket. For a crafter it means the slot earns on consumables, bags and materials rather than on gear, and the gear that does sell is usually bought for a missing slot rather than for the stats on it.

Engineering carries a split the other trades do not. Part of its recipe list sits behind a faction choice, so two engineers at the same skill level can have different things to sell depending on which branch they committed to. The branch is not a permanent sentence: dropping the profession and learning it again lets a character come back on the other side of the split. What that costs is the part worth pricing before doing it, because the skill bar starts from the bottom again and the climb back up is paid for in stock, which is the same arithmetic as what skill-ups cost in materials the first time round.

In the builds tested so far there are no vendors that take a ticket or token in exchange for the recipes on the other branch, so the reset route is the only one available to an engineer who wants the full list. Whether such a vendor is added later, and whether the reset itself stays as cheap as it is now, we do not know and are not going to guess. For a crafter deciding between branches today, the safe reading is that the choice is reversible but not free, and the bill falls on materials rather than on the trainer.

Part of that short ladder produces nothing you can sell. A share of the recipes a trainer teaches turn out an item that binds the moment it is made, so it goes on the crafter and nowhere else. The materials are still bought, the skill-ups still count, and the item still fills a slot — but the auction house never sees it. A recipe like that belongs on the saving side of the ledger, not the earning side: it is worth learning when the item it makes is better than what you would otherwise pay another player for, and worth skipping when it is not. The same arithmetic runs through crafted items that bind on pickup, where the only return is the purchase you did not have to make.

The practical effect is that two crafters at the same skill number can be in very different positions. One has spent the climb on consumables, bags and materials that go straight to a listing; the other has spent it on bound gear and owns a set of items instead of a balance. Both are legitimate uses of the slot, but only the first one pays rent on it, and that distinction is worth making before the materials for the last ranks are bought.

The blue recipes reported so far sit behind a different wall: a low drop rate from dungeon bosses, or a purchase made with a separate commerce currency rather than with gold. The currency mechanic is not confirmed — it has been described by testers, not stated as final, and we have no figures for what it costs or how it is earned. Until that is settled, a crafting slot is worth planning around what skill-ups cost in materials and around the items that reliably sell, with blue patterns treated as something that may arrive later rather than as the reason to take the trade.

Vendor prices on crafted output were cut for 6 professions. The items a crafter turns out while climbing toward that ceiling sell back to a merchant for less than they used to, which changes how the climb is paid for. The old pattern was to craft the cheap skill-up item in bulk, sell the stack to a vendor and recover part of the material bill that way.

The steadiest buyer for a finished craft is not a merchant at all, which is the case behind the weekly raid consumable bill.

A crafter who tries to set the price of their own output instead meets the problem described in auction house price fixing.

One group of buyers keeps those benches busy without ever entering a raid, and the consumables battleground players burn explains which recipes they ask for.

That pattern belonged to a wider set of merchant loops, covered in buying and reselling to NPC merchants.

With the reduced return, a larger share of that bill stays with the crafter, and the vendor value of crafted goods no longer covers as much of the gap it used to close.

What that means in practice is that skill-ups have to be funded either by selling to players or out of pocket. Recipes that produce something another character actually wants become worth more of the ladder than recipes chosen only because the reagents were cheap, and the materials a skill-up consumes are the number to check before committing to a trade. We have not seen a published list of which 6 professions were touched or by how much, so treat the direction as known and the size of the cut as something to verify on your own crafts.

The racial bonuses attached to gathering moved again on 15 October. Cultivation was retuned to 15 minutes, Find Treasure was changed to turn up additional items, and the old Mace, Sword and Axe Specialization racials were replaced with bonuses that no longer depend on which weapon type is equipped. The first two change what a gathering alt is worth per hour; the third removes one of the reasons a supplier picked a race in the first place.

The same build cut the strength of racial bonuses across the board rather than touching gathering alone. Weapon specializations were taken out entirely, and part of what they used to give was moved into flat percentage damage against particular creature types. For a supplier that is a different kind of bonus: it does nothing for the pick-up itself, and it only shows up in how fast the mobs standing on a skinning route or a mining vein actually die. A race that looked strong for farming because of a weapon line may now be strong only against one family of mobs, which narrows where the choice pays.

Camp gear sits in ordinary bag slots. The bedroll, the tinder and firewood, and the cooking and crafting utensils a camp station needs are carried like any other item: they occupy the same squares as ore, herbs, hides and the stack of food a character is already hauling. Nothing in what has been shown so far sets aside a separate container or a dedicated slot for them, and players have asked for one. Until that changes, a crafter who wants to set up away from a city pays for the station twice — once in materials, and once in the carrying space the kit takes up for the rest of the trip.

That second cost lands on the same budget as every other storage decision, which is why the price of larger bags is worth settling before a camp routine becomes a habit. It also explains a behaviour already visible in groups: characters turning up to a dungeon having left the camp kit in the bank, because the slots are needed for loot and consumables. Our reading is that camp stations are best treated as a field activity with its own packing list rather than something carried by default, and that a character who both gathers and camps will feel the squeeze earlier than one who only does the first.

Treat the racial section above as provisional. The values moved once already, the full datamine of that build was not settled at the time of writing, and we are not going to put per-hour figures against bonuses that may be retuned again. What is worth doing now is checking which creature types a candidate race is actually strong against and matching that to the route, rather than to the trade; the rest of the arithmetic belongs in racial bonuses on a gathering character once the numbers stop moving.

Tuning here arrives in waves, so the sensible reading is that the direction is fixed and the exact values are not. A race chosen in week 1 for a gathering bonus may be carrying a different bonus by the time that character is actually farming at the ceiling, and the cost of that mistake is a whole levelling run rather than a trainer fee.

Which of those bonuses survive into a farming evening is worked through in gathering racials after the retune.

It matters most where nothing can be bought in to cover the gap, which is the situation described under professions chosen for self-found play.

A station only covers the step that needs it. Naming the stations tells you nothing about the price of using them, because the materials still have to be in the bags before the camp goes up. By trade, what the bench expects you to arrive with:

• Blacksmithing and engineering: bars rather than ore, plus the hammer and the tools a recipe lists by name.
• Leatherworking: hides already worked into leather, since the skinned stack off a hunting trip is not what the pattern asks for.
• Cooking: raw meat or fish and something to light, which is the one input a camp reliably supplies for itself.
• Tailoring and alchemy: cloth, herbs and empty vials carried in; here the recipe is the scarce part, not the bench.

Our reading: smelting is the step that catches people out. Ore mined on the road is not usable until it has been through a forge, so a camp pitched a long way from a capital is a place to craft from stock, not a place to turn a morning of mining into finished gear. Do the melting and the shopping before you leave, count the stacks against what skill-ups cost in materials, and allow for the return trip, because the output comes home in the same bags and bag slots a gatherer buys are spent twice on the same expedition.

On the test client the ceiling has not always held. Characters have been reported at 226 and above, which puts artisan engineering items and the higher tier of consumables inside reach of a bracket that was not built to produce them.

Not every supplier sells a crafted item, and selling a healer's dungeon time is the version of this market with no materials behind it.

We do not know whether that is a deliberate allowance or a fault that will be closed before launch, so it belongs next to the other faults recorded on beta rather than in any plan for what a trade will earn. If it survives, the goods above the cap are the ones that will look mispriced first, because the supply of them depends on how many crafters got past 225 rather than on how many wanted to.

. The fee itself is modest next to the material bill, but it is paid at a counter rather than handed over by a quest.

Our reading: the part that gets forgotten is the discount. Vendors and trainers charge less to characters who already stand well with the faction running the city, and a character walking into a capital held by another race of the same faction arrives neutral there, so everything on that counter is listed at the full price. Learning a trade away from home costs more than learning one at home, and the gap repeats at every rank you travel back for.

On the test client a paid-for stack can also fail to change hands, and stacked lots that split oddly belong to the same set of beta faults.

It is not large enough to decide which trade pays, but it is a reason to check where the trainer actually sits before committing a slot, and it is one more early expense sitting next to the cost of riding training for a character still deciding which crafting trade to level.

Our reading: this is the biggest change for prices on the list. In every previous version the early market was thin because gathering was a deliberate choice made by people who already knew the game.

The same shortage of hours that thins a route also creates a customer, which is where what boosters charge for levels comes from.

That same early market is where levellers shop, and low-level weapon prices at auction move with it.

Here it is the default, and the flood of raw materials in the first weeks will be larger than Classic veterans expect.

Skinning is now shared across a group. A skinnable corpse is no longer one player's prize: everyone in the party with the profession can take hides from the same body, and each of them gets their own materials rather than splitting one loot.

Those hides only become income once they change hands, which is why restrictions on the mail and the guild bank matter to a supplier.

Where a guild runs its own supply line, those hides often end up as materials deposited in a guild bank rather than in the listings.

Hides are not the only materials collected by someone who never learned the trade, since items that mine a vein by charge hand the same job to anyone carrying one.

The other 2 gathering trades were left alone. A mining node and a herb still go to whoever reaches and clicks first, and the rest of the group gets nothing from it.

A supplier whose stock cannot leave the bags is in a different position again, which is what the guild bank under a hold looks like from the inside.

How many people are working those nodes in the first place is a separate measurement, and how crowded each trade is decides how quickly a route recovers after it is picked clean.

Where the materials are not shared by the game, they get shared by agreement, and splitting drops without a gold pot covers how groups write that agreement.

What a gatherer gets for the same stack also depends on who is working the auction listings that evening.

Scarcity on the herb side can also be answered from the other direction, which is the argument for cultivating herbs instead of gathering.

The list at launch is not the final list. In interviews the developers have described new professions as part of horizontal expansion: content added across the world rather than stacked at the top of a level range. They have not named which trades would come next, or when, so the set on offer now reads as a starting point rather than a closed catalogue. We have no numbers on that and will not invent any.

Our reading: this changes the arithmetic on a slot you intend to keep for a long time. A trade picked today is picked against a roster that may grow, and a later addition can pull buyers away from an established trade or hand it a new customer, depending on what it makes. It is not a reason to leave a slot empty, but it is a reason to treat the choice of a crafting trade as a decision you may revisit rather than one settled for the life of the character.

The trades that are not here. The question that keeps coming back is Inscription and Archaeology. Neither is part of the Forever profession list, and nothing announced so far suggests they are being added. We have no statement from Blizzard about them one way or the other, so treat this as the current state of the list rather than a decision we can quote.

Our reading: the absence of Inscription is the one that shows up in auction behaviour. Glyphs would have been a repeating purchase tied to respecs and new ranks, the kind of item a character buys again every time a build changes, and no other trade on the list fills that slot. Without it, repeat demand sits almost entirely with consumables — flasks, food, bandages, ammunition — and those are made by a handful of trades that were already crowded. Archaeology's absence matters less for listings, since it produced little that moved between players, but it also removes a gold sink for characters with nothing left to level. Anyone weighing which crafting trade to level should read the list as it stands, not as it looks in later expansions.

The list of trades is still the base vanilla set. Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering, Leatherworking and Tailoring on the crafting side, Herbalism, Mining and Skinning on the gathering side, with cooking, fishing and first aid as secondary skills. Jewelcrafting and Inscription, which arrived in later expansions, are not in Forever, so there is no gem market and no glyph market sitting alongside the trades that are here.

Our reading: parts of the community have asked for both to be added, and the argument is usually that they would give enchanters and alchemists a rival buyer for the same raw materials. We have not seen anything from Blizzard confirming or ruling that out, so we treat it as a request rather than a plan. For now the money decisions are made inside the existing set, which is what which crafting trade to level is about.

Scarce ore and herbs are also what the Legacy tree pays on, through a perk that boosts rare materials no crafting-only character can use.

What the list leaves out

Jewelcrafting is not on it. The trades a character can learn in Forever are the ones Classic shipped with, and gem cutting is not among them. Player threads keep asking for it to be added, usually on the grounds that it would give a second crafting sink for ore and a buyer for the gems that currently sit in bags with no recipe behind them. We have not seen any statement from the developers either way, so the only honest position is that the list stands as it is until something says otherwise.

Our reading: the argument against the request is worth noting, because it is about demand and not about flavour. Enchanting already sells the same thing a cut gem sells — a permanent stat increase bought over and over as gear turns over — so adding a second trade in that business splits one stream of repeating orders across two shelves rather than creating a new one. A character weighing which crafting trade to level is really choosing how many buyers it will have each week, and the number of trades competing for those buyers is set by the list itself. If a trade is ever added, the first effect is on enchanters, not on gatherers.

Every handover of those materials now opens with a notice, and what it is and is not doing sits in telling transfers from gold sales.

What that does to an evening's takings when 2 gatherers walk the same loop is set out in gathering together against gathering alone.

We took the rule apart on its own, including what shared skinning and leather prices look like once every member of a party is collecting from the same kills.

On the current test client that supply never arrives at all, which is the subject of why the better hides stay scarce.

What happens to that supply once the shared rule is rolled back, and who is left bidding for the hides, sits with leather, leatherworkers and tailors.

The Camp Tent is the one camp item with a price attached. Of the stations a group can put down in a camp, the tent is the only one that sets rested experience, and it carries up to 5% of a level. A campfire does not do it: cooking and the buff that comes with it are a separate thing, and no amount of sitting at one builds rest. The tent is also not a drop or a vendor item — it is made by a leatherworker, which puts a crafting trade between a levelling group and the only portable source of rest in the field.

Our reading: that makes tents an early seller rather than a long one. In the first weeks the people who want them are the ones levelling fastest, away from inns and unwilling to walk back for rest, and they are buying for a whole party rather than one character. Demand on that scale does not last past the point where most of the server is sitting in capitals, so the window for charging anything for a tent is the same window in which hides are scarce and leatherworking's material bill is at its highest. We have no figures for how many tents a group gets through, and we are not guessing at one.

Not every new recipe makes something you can sell. The recipes that come out of waylaid supplies boxes split along trade lines. What Alchemy makes from them leaves the crafter normally, and so does the work of an Enchanter, so those 2 trades turn a box recipe straight into something that can sit on the auction house. The gear taught by the Leatherworking, Blacksmithing and Tailoring boxes does not travel: it is bound to the character that crafted it, and nobody else can wear it.

Our reading: that split decides where the money from these recipes actually shows up. For the 3 gear trades the box recipes are paid back in skill points and in kit the crafter wears instead of buying, while the visible market effect is on the input side, since the hides, bars and cloth still have to be bought or gathered before the piece exists. The only coin such a piece returns directly is what the merchant counter pays, and vendor prices on crafted gear set that floor. Alchemy and Enchanting carry no such restriction, so their box recipes read as supply that reaches other players and comes back as gold.

Our reading: this makes Skinning the only gathering trade that does not punish you for having company. A group killing its way through a levelling zone now produces hides at something close to the number of skinners in it, while the same group produces exactly 1 player's worth of ore or herbs. Expect leather to be the cheapest raw material of the early weeks and to stay soft afterwards, because the supply grows with group size instead of competing with it. The mirror of that is that Mining and Herbalism keep their scarcity, which is the thing worth remembering when picking a gathering trade to fund a character. How large the effect is in practice depends on how many people level in groups, and nobody has published a figure for that, so we are not going to put one here.

The camp stations are worth what the crowd around them is worth. The stations named for the camp — the fishing basin, the first aid box and the rest — lend a trade to whoever is standing at them. That makes their value a count of the people present who do not already hold the profession. A character carrying both trades himself gets nothing out of setting either one down, and the complaint that keeps coming back from testers is the same one: the campfire is more often sat at alone than shared, so the station is hauled around for a benefit that never shows up.

Our reading: this matters to the supply side because the consumables that pass through those stations are priced on the assumption that camps fill up. If they mostly do not, the buyer is the station owner rather than a group of strangers, and the volume is a fraction of what a crowded camp would move. It is the same question as gathering together against gathering alone, pointed at a different part of the economy, and it also decides how much of the catch coming off fishing as a supply line gets eaten at the camp instead of listed. We have no figure for how often camps are shared, and we are not going to invent one.

A profession may also be a gate on Legacy points. Players working through the current test client describe capping 1 primary profession as one of the conditions for collecting 10 Legacy points on a character, listed next to reaching the level cap and clearing dungeon content. We have not seen that written down in the BlizzCon Deep Dive or the September 18 breakdown, so treat it as a report from testing rather than a confirmed rule, and expect the wording to be checked again closer to launch.

Our reading: if it holds, it changes the question of why you level a trade at all. A crafting profession that never turns a profit still pays, because the points it unlocks are spent on the same tree that carries the Legacy profession perks, and a character who stopped a trade halfway would be leaving that currency on the table. It also means the cheapest route matters more than the most profitable one: a gatherer taken to the cap costs materials nobody had to buy, while a crafting trade taken to the same place is paid for in stacks bought at auction.

Crafted gear is worth wearing again

Forever pushes self-made equipment up the ladder: a crafter who makes an item for personal use gets a better result out of it than the same recipe hands to a buyer. That changes the shape of the decision, because the armour type a class actually wears decides which crafting trade is worth the slot. A plate class gets most of the benefit from Blacksmithing, a leather or mail class from Leatherworking, a cloth class from Tailoring, and a character who picks the trade that does not match its armour keeps the recipes as a selling business rather than as a source of its own gear. That pairing is part of choosing a crafting trade to level, and it is a tighter constraint than anything Classic put on the same slot.

Our reading: tying the bonus to the wearer moves demand off the finished item and onto the reagents. The person who wants the good version has to craft it, so what they buy is components, and components include the small vendor-and-market goods that nobody used to track. On the test client Cerulean dye sat at 4.30 g, which is a reagent cost rather than an item price, and it is the kind of line that gets paid once per craft and then forgotten. We would not carry that figure into live without checking it, for the reasons set out in reagent costs recorded on beta.

One caveat on race. Racial abilities are being reworked, and the changes are due in the next build rather than in the one on test now. Anything written on this site about a race having an edge at gathering — faster herb pickups, extra skinning output, bonuses that shorten a loop — is written against the current set and may not survive that pass. We have not seen the new list, so we are not going to guess which bonuses stay, which are moved to another race or which are dropped outright.

The same caution applies to anything priced on the current client, which is the subject of why beta prices keep moving.

What this means in practice: treat race as the smallest of the factors when you are deciding which gathering trade to level. Bag space, where the trainer sits, how often you play in a group and how far you are willing to ride all outlast a build. A racial bonus can be rewritten between 2 patches; the time cost of a gathering route cannot.

The same caution applies to the perk tree, where spending points on yield is a trade against everything else those points could buy.

We will revisit the racial section here once the reworked abilities are actually readable in a client, and until then the block below should be read as a description of the current build only.

The Legacy tree charges an entry fee before it pays anything. Its first tier is built around gathering: the nodes that unlock the rest of the branch reward herbs, ore and hides, and there is no side route past them. Getting to the perks further in — Bartering, Luremaster and Master Chef — means committing about a third of the points on the way to effects a crafting-only character never triggers. The tree is usually described as extra income, but the first third of it is a cost.

Our reading: this changes who the perks are actually for. A character who gathers anyway pays that first tier with points that were already earning, so the later nodes are close to free. A character who only crafts pays full price for nodes that do nothing on a bench, which is worth weighing before the points are committed, since resetting Legacy points is billed on its own counter. We have not seen a published figure for what the later perks return per point, so we are not going to put one here.

Camping: vendors and repairs in the field

Place a campfire almost anywhere and it becomes a campsite with vendors, repairs, tradeskill workspaces and buffs. Every player there may set down one object from their own profession, buffing the whole camp

Field repairs only matter because deaths and damage keep arriving, which is counted up in what a death costs a farmer.

The mechanics underneath that bill, and the part nobody has priced yet, are set out in what durability and repairs charge.

; those buffs match class buffs and do not stack with them.

Our reading: less travel is more farming. The hours lost running back to town to repair and unload are exactly the hours that cap how much a farmer produces in an evening.

Those saved hours change which way a farmer answers a corpse run against a rez.

Expect effective supply per player to rise, and the first weeks of the auction house to be noisier than usual because of it.

Those extra hours arrive on a market that is already wider than a Classic realm's, which is the pairing behind group gathering and material prices.

The objects are now known by name, and several of them do not buff anyone — they make materials or remove a trip to town. Those are the ones that touch the price of things:

• Greenhouse grows herbs over time from planted seeds, and Seed Hybridizer multiplies seeds or combines them into rarer tiers. A herbalist can produce without flying a route.
• Rock Garden spawns a common mining node over time.
• Fishing Rack gives uncommon fish for an hour, Fishing Hut rare fish.
• Reagent Bot sells reagents in the field and Repair Bot repairs gear there — 2 of the usual reasons to ride back to a city.
• Fermenter, Tanning Rack and Spinning Wheel each create certain reagents outright.
• Arcane Salvager makes disenchanting more efficient.
• Anvil, Master Forge, Loom, Sewing Machine, Molten Foundry, Alchemy Laboratory and Arcane Forge unlock recipes that otherwise need a city.

Unlocked by an early quest called The Great Outdoors. A camp holds a limited number of objects and the cook's kit sets the limit: 3 at the first tier, 5 at the second, 10 at the third. You do not need to be grouped with whoever built the camp — sit for a minute and the buffs are yours.

What the buff objects hand out. The stations listed above make materials or remove a ride to town; the rest of the camp list exists to buff whoever sits down, and the set is uneven. Going by a player's own count on the beta rather than anything written in the notes, the leatherworking object is the odd one out: it gives an experience bonus instead of a stat.

Why that one object is worth more than the stat buffs beside it, and who it competes with, sits with camp objects against cooked food.

The others behave like weakened versions of the class buffs on characteristics — the sort of thing a priest, a mage or a druid already brings to a group, at a smaller value, and they do not stack with the real ones. The gap in that set is agility: nothing described so far buffs it, so a rogue or a hunter who sits at a camp takes the experience and whatever general stat is down, and nothing aimed at their own gear. Treat all of that as one person's observation of a build that is still moving, not as a published list.

Our reading: this makes the camp buff a thin argument for most crafting trades and a real one for leatherworking. A diluted stat buff is worth nothing to a party that already has the class supplying the full version, while an experience bonus is worth something to every character still levelling, which is most of the realm in the early weeks. It is a tiebreaker rather than a reason when choosing between crafting trades, and it does not sell a single crafted item: the camp is open to anyone who sits for a minute, so the buff reaches players who never levelled the profession. What it does change is where people stop. A camp with the experience object down collects traffic, and traffic is what turns a parked crafter into charging for work done on request.

The recipe and the object it needs do not unlock together. The leatherworking recipe for the Tanning Rack becomes available at 125 skill, but placing the rack in a camp asks for 140. That is a stretch of 15 points where a leatherworker holds the recipe and cannot set the object down on their own camp. The same shape can appear elsewhere on the camp list, since the skill a station asks for is a separate number from the skill its recipe asks for, and we have not seen a published table pairing the two for every object.

Our reading: a gap like that turns a crafting step into a favour or a fee. The player in the gap either waits for the missing skill or finds a camp where somebody further along has already placed the rack, which is the part worth noticing: camps are open to anyone who sits down, so the station is usable by people who cannot build it. That creates a small market in access rather than in goods — a crafter parked somewhere busy with the right object down is supplying a service, not inventory, and the money there behaves more like charging for work done on request than like listing stock. It also means the supply of processed hides in those 15 points depends on other people's camps being up, which is one more reason the early end of leather, leatherworkers and tailors moves in fits rather than smoothly.

Owning the recipe and being able to make the item are 2 separate things. A recipe bought over a counter goes into the book the moment it is learned, but part of the list will not start a craft without the matching station in range — the leatherworking entries that ask for a Tanning Rack behave the same way the city recipes behave around an anvil or a forge. That is worth checking before the purchase rather than after it, because a recipe paid for and then left unusable is money sitting idle until a camp with the right object is within reach. Which entries carry a station requirement is not something we have seen published as a table, so the recipe tooltip on a live character is the source we would trust.

The decorative versions do not count. Vendor stalls, quest hubs and NPC camps are dressed with props that look like the real thing, and a tanning rack standing as scenery is not an object you can use: it has no interaction and the craft stays greyed out next to it. The station that works is the one a player placed from their own profession, or the city fixture the game marks as usable. Our reading: this is the quiet condition on whether a bought recipe ever pays for itself. The cost of the recipe is only half the entry price; the other half is access to the station, which means either the skill to place it yourself or a habit of crafting where somebody else has. It is the same arithmetic we applied to rare recipes bought from vendors — the margin only exists if the item can actually be produced on demand rather than when a camp happens to be up.

The same mismatch sits inside Mining. Smelt Iron opens at 145, while gold ore cannot be mined until 155. The smelting recipe is therefore in the book 10 points before one of the metals it belongs next to is reachable on a route, so a miner in that stretch either grinds the gap out on the ore they can already pull or buys the gold from somebody further along. Whether other smelting recipes line up with their nodes is not something we have seen published as a table, so treat this as one documented case rather than the shape of the whole list.

Our reading: a gathering trade earns in a chain — mine, smelt, list the bars — and every break in that chain costs more than the points suggest. A miner holding a recipe they cannot feed is doing the slow half of the work without the part that pays, because raw ore of the tier below sells for less than bars of the tier above, and the 10 points have to come from somewhere. The practical answer is usually to buy the missing ore rather than wait for the skill, which turns a levelling step into a purchase and moves a slice of margin to whoever is already past it. It is also a reminder that skill numbers in Forever are set per recipe and per node separately, so the ceiling that matters on any given evening is whichever of the 2 is lower. Anyone weighing Mining as a funding trade should expect a few of these stalls on the way up rather than a smooth climb.

How much a Greenhouse yields in an hour, or how often a Rock Garden spawns, is not published anywhere. We are not going to guess at it.

The same caution applies to the trader currency and its crates, which pays into a balance the auction house never sees.

The same caution applies to the Inscription and Jewelcrafting traces players keep pulling out of the client, which name trades the game does not have.

Where those stacks land once they are posted, and what it costs to post them twice, sits with how a lot is bought out.

Which channels a gatherer is left with when the market itself is down is worked through in selling without the auction house.

The camp list moved again in the 1 October build. Camping is still being adjusted from one build to the next, so the objects a camp can hold, and what each of them does, are closer to a snapshot than a settled list. We have not read a full change list for that build and we are not going to describe entries we cannot source. What is worth keeping from it is the direction: every object that produces a material in the field, or removes a ride back to town, lands on the supply side of the ledger rather than the demand side. The tradeskill window and the cook's kit on a live character will show the current list sooner than any guide does.

A later build carried 3 more changes to the same ledger. Crafted wands of common and rare quality now sell to a vendor for 1 copper, so the wands a crafter turns out while climbing a skill range are no longer worth the bag space or the trip to a counter. Blacksmithing and leatherworking recipes were moved onto dungeon drop tables, which puts 2 of the main crafting trades behind the same scarcity the camping blueprints already carry.

Who gets paid for taking a lower character through those dungeons is a market of its own, set out in charging for a dungeon carry.

And skinning went back to 1 player per corpse, so the shared version described above is no longer how hides come off a kill.

The wand repricing belongs with the rest of what NPC buyers still pay, where the same trims are read as one policy rather than 3 build notes.

Recipes sold over a counter rather than taught by a trainer behave differently again, which we took apart in rare recipes bought from vendors.

Our reading: each of the 3 lands somewhere different. The wand price removes a small vendor income that levelling crafters used to lean on, and it leaves the skill points as the only reason to make one. The recipe change means a blacksmith or a leatherworker who wants the better list is running dungeons for it rather than buying from a trainer, which narrows the number of players able to make any given item and keeps margins on it wider for longer. The skinning rollback is the one that moves raw supply: with hides going to a single skinner again, leather competes with ore and herbs for whoever clicks first, and the cheap early supply we expected from group farming does not arrive. That shifts the balance in leather, leatherworkers and tailors back towards the gatherer.

One rule from the same period cuts the vendor-to-auction loop. A Bind on Equip item whose appearance you have not collected becomes bound when you sell it to a vendor, so the buyback window no longer hands back something you can trade. Our reading: the habit this breaks is the ordinary one — empty the bags at the nearest vendor, notice afterwards that something in the pile was worth listing, buy it back and put it up. On a drop you have neither worn nor collected, that sale is final as far as the market is concerned, which moves the auction house check to before the vendor rather than after it. It matters most to anyone earning from reselling BoE drops, and barely at all to a gatherer whose bags hold ore and herbs.

600 new recipes, and knowledge you have to find

Over 600 new recipes across every profession and every skill range, with many old ones reworked. The better camping objects come from blueprints that drop off dungeon bosses

The stretch of skill where those recipes cost the most and return the least is set out in the 100 to 225 skill gap.

— the first time a Classic recipe list has had real scarcity built into it.

Our reading: for the first month, gathering beats crafting. You cannot craft what you have not found the blueprint for, and crafted goods spend the early weeks competing with quest rewards. Raw materials have no such problem. Which trade actually pays is a longer answer.

The interface around the recipe list moved as well. A recipe can be tracked, which puts it and its materials next to your quest objectives, so the shopping list travels with you instead of living in a window you have to reopen. The profession book itself can be linked into chat, which means a crafter can show the whole list rather than answering one item at a time. And the list can be filtered — by skill level, by the materials you are already carrying, and by gear slot — so a long list becomes a short one for whatever question you actually have.

Our reading: this is a matching tool more than a crafting tool, and matching is the slow part of the trade. Finding the player who has the blueprint you need has always been the friction in a Classic economy, and a linkable book turns that search into a chat message. The materials filter is the one that changes daily behaviour: it answers what you can make right now, which is a different question from what you could make if you went shopping first. Expect crafted goods to reach buyers faster than in earlier versions, which tightens margins on anything common and leaves the money where it always was, in recipes other people cannot make. None of this changes how much a material costs to gather, so it moves the demand side of the ledger rather than supply.

Gear that changes how fast you process. Recipes are not the only thing Forever attached to drops. Some equipment shortens the crafting step itself rather than the material bill. The piece players meet earliest is Smelter's Pants, which cut 25% off the time it takes to smelt copper, tin, bronze and silver. They come off a drop in the Deadmines, and they are leather, so a character without leather proficiency cannot wear them at all.

Our reading: smelting time is dead time, and it is the part of Mining nobody plans for. The saving is worth most to the player who smelts ore into bars in bulk before a trip to the auction house, and worth almost nothing to someone processing a stack at a time between quests. The named metals are the low ones, so the pants are a levelling tool rather than something you carry to 60. Whether other pieces carry similar effects on other professions is not documented in anything we have read, and we are not going to assume they do.

The source is narrow. Smelter's Pants drop from Gilnid, the goblin smelter in the Deadmines, so owning a pair means a dungeon run rather than a vendor purchase, and because it is a drop a single run is not a guarantee. A miner who wants them either plans repeat trips or buys them from whoever pulled a pair and has no character to wear leather on.

Our reading: the question worth asking is whether the 4 metals named on the item are still the ones you are smelting by the time you have it. The Deadmines sits in roughly the same levelling window as copper, tin and bronze, which leaves silver as the only one likely to matter for long after. That makes the pants a bracket-specific tool: useful to a miner who is still in that range and processing ore in bulk, close to irrelevant to one who has moved past it. How often they drop is not published, so we are not going to put a number on how many runs it takes.

The request players keep making is for the rest of the set. A pair of legs covers 1 slot, and the thread that comes back on every profession discussion asks for the obvious extension: head, chest, hands and legs that each shorten a step of the same trade, and equivalents built for professions other than Mining. Nothing of that kind has been announced. What is documented is a single leather drop out of the Deadmines that helps with smelting, and no statement about whether more pieces exist or are planned. We are not going to fill that gap with guesses about items nobody has seen.

Our reading: the interesting part is not the time saved, it is what a set would do to gear habits. Crafting bonuses on equipment turn a profession into something you dress for — a second outfit carried in the bags and swapped in before a smelting session, the way a fishing hat already works. That costs bag space, which is the resource nobody has spare while levelling, and it means the pieces are worth most to players who batch their processing into long sittings rather than doing it a stack at a time. The armour type matters too: leather legs leave out anyone whose character cannot wear leather, so the buyer pool for that particular drop is narrower than the number of miners on the realm. If more pieces do arrive and they drop rather than being crafted, the tradeable ones behave like any other bind-on-equip item and the money sits with reselling BoE drops to crafters rather than with the profession itself. Until the item list is known, it is not something to weigh heavily when choosing which trade to level.

The smith's hammer moved into a gear slot. The tool itself was reworked as well: the blacksmith hammer in Forever is a thrown weapon rather than an ordinary item kept in the bags, so it is equipped into the ranged slot and worn while you work. That is the whole of what is documented. Whether the tools of the other crafting trades were changed the same way, and whether any of them carry crafting effects on top of being tools, is not stated in anything we have read, and we are not going to extend the list on a guess.

Our reading: taken with the pants that shorten smelting, the direction is clear enough — profession work is drifting onto equipment slots instead of living entirely in the tradeskill window. The hammer frees a bag slot, which is worth something while levelling, but it also means the tool now occupies a slot a character might want for a weapon, so a smith who swaps it in before crafting is doing the same outfit change a fishing pole already asks for. The market effect is small and sits on the demand side: a tool that is also a piece of gear is something players buy once and rarely replace, which makes it a poor line of stock and a reasonable thing to have on hand if you are selling crafting work on request. It is a convenience rather than an argument when weighing Blacksmithing against another trade, and until the rest of the tool list is known we would not plan a slot around it.

The same 25% cut turns up in cooking. Smelter's Pants are not the only item that shortens a crafting step rather than the material bill. The Cook's Stirrer takes 25% off cooking time the way the pants take 25% off smelting, so 2 separate trades now have a piece of equipment that does nothing except make the processing go faster. On the tool side, the Arcanite Smithing Hammer stands in for the ordinary smith's hammer as the blacksmith's tool, which is a replacement rather than a bonus. Whether anything comparable exists for the trades not named here is not stated in anything we have read, and we are not going to extend the list on a guess.

Our reading: a timed saving only pays if you batch. Cooking in single stacks between quests loses nothing worth measuring, while a cook working through a bag of raw meat before a raid night gets back a slice of an evening, and that is the same shape as the smelting case — the bonus rewards the player who sits down and processes in bulk, not the one who crafts in passing. It also means these items are bought once and kept, so they are a poor line of stock and a reasonable thing to own if you are selling crafted food in bulk. For anyone stocking a guild's raid night, it sits with the rest of the arithmetic in elixirs, poisons and reagents rather than changing what a stack of materials costs to gather.

Health potions moved to First Aid. The other reshuffle worth flagging is not a new recipe at all, it is a recipe changing owner. In Forever the healing potions sit with First Aid rather than with Alchemy. First Aid is a secondary profession, so it costs nobody a primary slot and every character can carry it alongside 2 gathering trades. The staple consumable of levelling and of every raid night is therefore no longer produced by a limited group of players who gave up a slot for it.

Our reading: a consumable that everyone can make is a consumable with a thin margin. The interesting question is what it does to the raw material underneath, and that depends on something we have not seen documented: whether the First Aid versions are built from herbs, from cloth, or from both. If herbs, then Herbalism trades a small buyer pool of alchemists for a buyer pool of roughly everybody, and the floor under common herbs goes up rather than down. If cloth, the same demand drains out of the herb market and into drops that cost nothing to farm. We are not going to assume which, and the recipe list on a live character will answer it faster than any guide. Until then it is a real variable in choosing Herbalism over Alchemy, and one of the few places where a profession change touches both sides of the market at once.

The potion tiers are spread across the whole of First Aid. The recipes unlock at skill 1, 55, 110, 155, 215 and 275, so a stronger healing potion arrives at roughly every stage of levelling rather than waiting at the top of the skill. First Aid costs no primary slot, which means every character on the account can climb that ladder at the same time as 2 gathering trades, and the potion a player carries at 60 is one they were already making at 30.

What that self-supply takes out of a guild's weekly order, and what is left for a crafter to sell, sits with elixirs, poisons and reagents.

Our reading: 6 tiers spaced that way move a slice of consumable demand off the auction house entirely. The alchemist used to be the default supplier of the potion everybody drinks, and that was steady volume at a small margin on every raid night and every levelling week. It does not disappear, but a large part of it is now self-supplied, and what alchemy keeps is whatever First Aid does not cover. Which recipes those are is something the profession list on a live character will show sooner than any guide, and it is worth checking before committing a primary slot. For anyone planning around it, the money in the trade shifts further towards consumables raiders cannot make themselves.

Part of what you craft cannot be sold at all. Librams, idols and totems — the relic items for paladins, druids and shamans — are announced as Bind on Pickup, so a crafter makes them for their own character and for nobody else. Enchanting sits apart for a different reason: an enchant is applied out of the spellbook through the trade window, onto an item the buyer hands over, rather than produced as an object that can be listed and left on the auction house.

The same window carries the payment, and the faction and region limits on moving coins between two players apply to it like any other hand-over.

How that exchange is arranged, priced and paid for is worked through in selling enchants without listings.

Whether any recipes outside those 3 relic families carry the same binding is not stated in anything we have read, and we are not going to extend the list on a guess.

Our reading: this quietly splits every profession into 2 halves — what you sell and what you can only supply to yourself. Bind on Pickup output means the demand for a relic never reaches the market at all; the class that wants one either levels the trade or does without, and the crafter gets no income from it. Enchanting keeps its money but it is a service rather than a stock business: the earnings depend on being online and findable at the hour somebody has an item in hand

Where that sits beside carries, summons and crafting requests is worked through in charging gold for a service.

, which is a different working pattern from listing goods overnight. Anyone weighing Enchanting against a crafting trade should count that in, and anyone planning income around it is closer to charging for work done on request than to selling inventory.

There is a gap in what the crafting trades cover. Blacksmithing supplies melee weapons across the whole skill range, and players levelling a hunter or a rogue keep pointing out that nothing equivalent exists for bows, crossbows and guns at their level.

The same shortage sits one slot over, where weapons carrying spell power have no crafted or vendor path either.

The requests go to Leatherworking and Engineering, because those are the trades that already touch ranged gear in other ways, but no crafted ranged weapon list has been announced for either of them. Until one is, a ranged weapon arrives from a Bind on Equip drop, a quest reward, or a dungeon boss.

Our reading: of those 3 sources only one can change hands. A quest reward is tied to the character that earned it and a dungeon drop goes to whoever was in the group, which leaves the Bind on Equip weapon as the entire tradeable supply for a slot every physical class has to fill. That is why ranged BoE items sit higher on the auction house than their item level suggests, and why the price does not soften the way a crafted item's does once a few players learn the recipe. Anyone planning around it is closer to reselling BoE weapon drops than to running a crafting business, and it is one more thing to weigh when choosing Engineering over Leatherworking. Whether Forever adds crafted ranged weapons later is not stated in anything we have read, so we are not going to assume it.

Reagent access is not the same on both factions. A number of the low-rank cooking recipes are built around ingredients that come off creatures living in Alliance starting and levelling zones. An Alliance cook walks into them while questing; a Horde cook either buys the ingredient on the auction house or rides out to farm it through territory where the quest hubs, the flight paths and the guards belong to the other side. The recipe itself costs the same skill points to learn on either faction. The material behind it does not cost the same to obtain. Which recipes and which ingredients those are is something the recipe list on a live character and the drop tables answer more precisely than a guide, so we are not going to enumerate them here.

Our reading: the asymmetry shows up as price rather than as a wall. Anything that drops mostly in one faction's zones is cheap on that faction's auction house and costs whatever a reseller asks on the other, and the Horde cook is choosing between paying that gap or spending the travel time, which is the expensive half before a mount. That makes low-tier cooking ingredients a steady line for anyone who keeps characters on both sides, closer to reselling cooking reagents than to running a crafting business. It is also a reminder that the two halves of a realm run on separate faction auction houses, so the cost of levelling the same secondary profession is not a single number for everybody on the server.

Apprentice crates attach a material bill to a rare drop. The crate itself is an uncommon find rather than something a vendor stocks, and it does not travel as it is: sealing it takes low-level herbs, the common ones a character picks up in the first zones. That is the whole mechanic in one line — a scarce container plus a stack of cheap herbs, after which the sealed crate is an ordinary item that can be listed on the auction house like any other. How often the crates drop, which herbs each seal asks for and what the contents are worth is not stated in anything we have read, and the recipe on a live character will answer it faster than a guide, so we are not going to put numbers on any of it.

Our reading: the interesting part is that the demand lands on the cheapest end of the herb market, which is normally the part nobody wants. Starter herbs are what a new gatherer produces by accident while levelling, and until now their buyers were low-rank alchemy and First Aid. A sealing cost puts a second buyer behind the same stacks, and it is a buyer whose budget comes from a drop they got for free. That keeps a floor under common herbs for longer than the levelling curve alone would, and it makes the crates closer to reselling sealed crates to collectors than to a crafting line. For anyone weighing Herbalism as a first trade, it is one more reason the early stacks are not dead weight.

The Legacy system pays you to level tradeskills

Blizzard published the whole system on September 23, and the detail that matters is easy to read past. A Legacy Point lands at 150, 225 and 300 in each non-gathering primary profession. Mining, Herbalism and Skinning earn no points of their own. Points are held on the Battle.net account and shared by every non-Hardcore character; they spend in 3 trees, and the Professions tree includes a better chance at skill points and Bountiful Harvest: 5 ranks, up to 20% more scarce materials from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning.

Which professions actually pay out. The tradeskill points come from the crafting trades only. A gathering profession at 300 pays nothing, and the secondary professions pay nothing either — First Aid and Fishing sit outside the list, so the potions everyone can now make and the fish a Fishing Hut produces do not move the point total at all. In practice that means the 18 tradeskill points are reachable only by levelling crafting professions to 150, 225 and 300, and a character carrying 2 gathering trades plus the secondaries earns points from class levels, PvP, dungeons and exploring instead.

Fishing earns nothing from that list either way, and what it does return is worked through in fishing tackle and pole access.

What the same skill returns across stations, cooking stock and contests is worked through in raising fishing for gold.

Our reading: this is the part of the system that pushes against the way most people want to fund a character. The obvious plan for a farmer is 2 gathering trades and no crafting, and that plan collects exactly 0 of the tradeskill points — including the ones that would buy the gathering perk.

What those 18 tradeskill points cost once the materials are bought rather than gathered is set out in the gold price of Legacy points.

Anyone who wants both is looking at dropping a gathering slot for a crafting trade and carrying the material cost of taking it to 300, which is a different question from picking the trade that earns fastest. One caveat on the sourcing: the split between crafting, gathering and secondary is how players are reading the Legacy tab on the beta, and Blizzard's own description does not enumerate every profession, so check the tab on your own character before planning a slot around it.

The money follows that split. A point sits at 150, 225 and 300 in a crafting trade, and nothing is paid for taking Mining, Herbalism or Skinning to the same numbers, or for Fishing and First Aid at any value.

Those tradeskill points are one of the 3 currencies beside gold that no listing and no trade window can move.

So the player who wants the points is pushed up a skill bar that consumes materials rather than one that produces them, and the materials have to come from somewhere. Gathering them yourself means a second character or a dropped slot and a long stretch of route-running at the tier the recipes ask for; buying them means stacks off the auction house. Most people will buy at least part of it, because the gathering hours needed to feed a crafting climb are rarely the hours the same player wanted to spend.

Our reading: that turns a progression system into standing demand for raw materials. A crafter levelling for gear stops when the gear is made; a crafter levelling for a point stops at 300 and no earlier, and the stretch where that bill is heaviest is the one set out in the 100 to 225 skill gap. The buying is also account-wide in effect, since the points are shared and an alt taken up a second crafting trade adds a second material bill. For a gatherer this is the quiet good news on the page: the perk that raises yield cannot be earned by gathering, but the people chasing it are the ones bidding on ore, herbs and hides, which is the pairing behind group gathering and material prices. For anyone planning income around it, supplying the climb is closer to selling stacks to levelling crafters than to selling finished goods.

65 is the account total, and it is not the number that constrains you. Players working through the trees on the beta put the realistic ceiling for a single character at about 29 — 3 from levelling, up to 6 from tradeskills, 12 from PvP, 2 from exploring, 6 from dungeons and raids. Against 29 earned, a cap of 16 spent is a real restriction rather than a formality, and that is why it is there.

One more thing players have noticed in the trees: some perks sit behind others. Reaching Talented means putting 5 points into Well Rested first, so the perk that looks like 5 points actually costs 10 of your 16. Worth knowing before you spend.

Our reading: a character may spend only 16 of those 65 at launch, so this is a choice rather than a checklist. And a farmer cannot fund it by farming. The perk that raises gathering yield is bought with points earned somewhere else entirely — a crafting profession levelled to 300, class levels, or a PvP rank. The gatherer who never crafts and never fights stays on the base rate.

Our reading: a fifth more rare materials on the same route is an enormous edge, and it compounds across alts because the points are account-wide. The gap between a prepared gatherer and a casual one will be wider than in any previous version.

Profession skill is bounded by character level. That is the limit behind most of what the beta does not show. At 30 the upper half of every recipe list is simply out of reach: the skill value it asks for cannot be trained on a character that has not levelled far enough, so those recipes exist in the book and nowhere else. Everything listed on a beta realm therefore comes out of the low and middle brackets of each trade, and the missing tiers are a cap on the crafter rather than a sign that nobody wants the goods. We have not seen a published table mapping character level to the skill ceiling it allows, so we are not going to put numbers on which level permits which value.

Our reading: the same ceiling explains why alts get pushed to 35 rather than parked at 30. Legacy points sit on the Battle.net account and are shared by every non-Hardcore character, so the levels put into a second character are not spent on that character alone — they bank points the whole account can spend later. Whether the skill ceiling at that level is high enough to reach the first tradeskill point at 150 depends on the mapping nobody has published, and the Legacy tab on a live character will answer it sooner than any guide. Two things follow for anyone reading the beta market: the assortment there is narrower than launch will be, which makes beta auction house prices a weak guide to what crafted goods cost later, and the argument for levelling a crafting trade is stronger on an account than it looks on one test character.

Race still decides something, and it is gathering

Everyone gets a gathering profession free at level 3, so the profession is no longer the gate. The race is. 5 racials touch collecting directly, and one of them removes the profession requirement altogether.

Race	Racial	What it does on a route
Tauren	Cultivation	Grows a duplicate of a nearby herb that can be picked without Herbalism at all. Each plant can be cultivated once
Dwarf	Find Treasure	Tracks treasure, and it runs at the same time as other tracking — it no longer costs you the herb or mineral slot
Skyborne, Horde	Skysight	10% run speed
Night Elf	Quickness	2% run speed
Gnome	Engineering Specialization	More reliable engineering devices
Tauren	Plainsrunning	Speed that builds the longer you keep moving — the only racial that substitutes for part of what riding buys

Our reading: run speed and the tracking slot decide how long a route is in an hour; Cultivation decides how much comes off the same route. Neither is large on its own. Both are permanent, and a farmer picks a race once.

It is worth splitting them by which side of the ledger they sit on, because they are not the same kind of advantage. Cultivation and Find Treasure add to what you collect — one produces a herb that needed no profession, the other opens chests that would otherwise have cost you a tracking slot to find. Plainsrunning, Skysight and Quickness subtract from what you spend, because every minute not spent travelling is a minute of the route, and before level 40 there is no mount to make up the difference.

Nobody has published what any of this is worth per hour, and we are not going to invent a figure. The useful thing to take away is the shape: a Tauren is the gatherer's race twice over, a Dwarf is the one that finds what others walk past, and the rest trade in minutes rather than materials.

The same racials read from the spending side, against riding training and trainer prices, are set out in what a race costs a farmer.

One caveat that matters if you are choosing a race to farm on. The Cultivation tooltip shows no cooldown, but the ability carries a server-side script, and a player who tested it in the beta reports the button greys out for an hour after use and says so in the interface. Treat it as roughly 1 extra herb an hour, not as a tap you can spam. How much any of this yields over a session is published nowhere, and we are not going to estimate it.

The second caveat is when Cultivation becomes usable at all. In Forever the racial is tied to level thresholds rather than granted at character creation, so a freshly made Tauren does not have the free herb from the first minute of play, and the ability does not arrive in one piece. Which levels those thresholds sit at is not stated in anything we have read, so we are not going to put numbers on them — the tooltip on your own character is the only source we would trust here.

Our reading: this narrows the window where the racial does anything for you. The free herb is worth most to a low-level character who has not yet picked up the gathering manual, and that is exactly the stretch where a level threshold can still be sitting in front of you. It changes nothing about the long run, but it does mean the race is not a shortcut through the first few levels. If you are picking a farmer on the strength of one racial, treat Cultivation as something that switches on partway through the early game rather than at the start, and weigh it against choosing between Herbalism and Mining on the same character.

What all of this does to the price of gold

Everything above points one way: supply ramps faster in Forever than it did in Classic. More gatherers from level 3, fewer wasted hours thanks to camping, and perks that multiply what a route yields.

A Token would have moved coins between players rather than adding materials to that supply, which is the confusion at the centre of a Token's effect on supply.

That is the half of the market that actually moves the rate. Cheaper production means a cheaper coin, and everything Forever did to professions makes production cheaper.

None of that touches the account side, where sanctions attached to bought gold are written down separately from the market.

All of that assumes people are doing the farming. The first reports of bot fleets describe something with no floor under it at all.

The demand side moved too this week — GDKP was banned and a dungeon currency arrived for gear that gold cannot buy — but that shrinks how many people trade rather than what a coin costs, and the promised crackdown on buyers pushes the price the other way by loading risk onto the seller. Do not expect those 2 to cancel out neatly; watch the tracker instead of anybody's forecast, ours included.

The buyer's half of that risk, down to which parts of an account it touches, is set out in the scope of a gold ban.

Where that crackdown is actually written down is the policy on bought gold, which names confiscation alongside the account side.

What that has looked like on the test client so far sits with what happened to beta buyers.

Neither side of that ledger covers gold entry fees at duel tournaments, which move coins between players without touching supply at all.

The crackdown itself has only ever been described in general terms, which is why the policy on gold buyers is worth separating from the forum summaries of it.

Where demand stays real: riding training at 100 and 1,000 gold, consumables for the 3 raids on December 9, and the ordinary repair-and-reagent bill of playing at 60.

Questions

Which profession makes the most gold in Forever?

Nobody knows yet, and anyone claiming otherwise from a level-30 beta is guessing. What the design says is that gathering pays first: raw materials sell from day one, while the crafted goods worth money sit behind blueprints that drop in dungeons nobody has run yet.

Is cooking worth levelling this time?

It has a job now. Cooked food gives stats and a small experience bonus, which turns the most skipped profession in the original game into something every levelling character wants. Steady demand rather than spiky demand.

What is camping?

A campfire you can place almost anywhere in the open world, which becomes a campsite: vendors, repairs, tradeskill workspaces and buffs, out in the field. Each player there can place one object from their own profession to buff everyone at the camp, and those buffs do not stack with the equivalent class buff.

Do professions matter for the Legacy system?

Directly, though not the way it first reads. A Legacy Point lands at 150, 225 and 300 in each non-gathering primary profession — gathering itself earns nothing — and the Professions tree then spends points on a better chance at skill points and up to 20% more scarce materials from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning.