Professions Are the Whole Supply Side

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

Four changes that matter for money

Everyone gathers, from level three

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

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

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

Six hundred 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 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.

The Legacy system pays you to level tradeskills

A Legacy Point lands the first time each tradeskill passes 150, 225 and 300 — earned on the account, not the character. Points spend in three trees, and the Professions tree includes a better chance at skill points and Bountiful Harvest: five ranks, up to 20% more scarce materials from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning.

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.

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 three, fewer wasted hours thanks to camping, and perks that multiply what a route yields.

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.

All of that assumes people are doing the farming. The first reports of bot fleets on the beta 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 two to cancel out neatly; watch the tracker instead of anybody's forecast, ours included.

Where demand stays real: riding training at 100 and 1,000 gold, consumables for the three 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. You earn a Legacy Point the first time each tradeskill reaches 150, 225 and 300, and the Professions tree spends points on things like a better chance at skill points and up to 20% more scarce materials from Mining, Herbalism and Skinning.