What Skill-Ups Cost in Materials and Gold
Learning a trade in Forever is nearly free. Pushing the skill bar from nothing to a rank that produces something worth selling is not, and the bill arrives in stacks of raw material rather than in coin handed to a trainer. This is where that spending goes, and which parts of the system reduce it.
The bill that arrives before the first sale
A quest in the first few levels hands out a manual for Herbalism, Mining or Skinning, and it teaches the trade outright if a slot is open. That is the part of Forever's changes to professions everyone notices, because it removes the entry fee entirely. What it does not remove is the climb. A gathering skill rises by gathering, so its cost is paid in hours and in travel rather than in purchases, and the only real outlay is storage for what comes home.
A crafting trade works the other way round. The trainer fee is modest and paid once per rank, while the materials behind each rank are bought in bulk or dug up over several evenings. A character deciding which crafting trade to keep is really deciding which pile of raw material it intends to consume, because that pile is the actual price of the slot.
The useful habit is to count the climb in stacks rather than in coin. Coin varies with whoever is listing that night; the number of bars, hides or leaves a rank consumes does not move with the market, and it is the figure that tells you whether an evening of gathering covers the next few points or only part of them.
Where the spending concentrates
Material cost is not spread evenly across a trade. It piles up at the points where a recipe stops granting skill and nothing better has unlocked yet, so the same item gets made over and over for a bar that moves slowly. Those stretches are the expensive part of any profession, and they are the reason a trade looks cheap on the first evening and expensive on the third.
Most of what gets produced in those stretches is not sellable. Some of it is wearable by nobody, some of it is already listed by a dozen other crafters working the same stretch, and the rest goes to a counter. Treating it as crafted goods made for vendor value rather than as stock changes the arithmetic, because the recovery rate on a counter is fixed and known in advance.
The second concentration is early, not late. A character that gathers its own materials pays in time; a character that buys them pays into the first weeks of listings, when early supply on the auction house is thick with raw material from levelling gatherers and thin on anything refined. Buying the raw side cheap and refining it yourself is the normal way that bill is reduced.
The mechanics that cut consumption
The clearest reduction sits in the Legacy tree. A perk slot opens at 10 points, and Bountiful Harvest runs to 5 ranks for up to 20% more scarce materials from nodes you were clearing anyway. It does not make a recipe consume less, but it raises what the same route returns, which is the same thing to anybody gathering their own skill-ups. The detail of how those points spent on gathering yield are counted belongs with the perk itself.
Skinning is now shared across a party, so each skinner in a group takes a full set of hides from the same corpse rather than splitting one. For a leatherworker pushing ranks, hides taken by the whole party turns an ordinary dungeon run into a supply trip that costs nothing extra. Mining and herbalism were left alone and still go to whoever clicks first.
Two smaller levers are worth knowing. Tools that mine by charge let a character with no gathering slot feed its own crafting trade, and orders placed with another crafter move the material cost onto the person who wanted the item. Neither changes a recipe, but both change who pays for the stack.
What we cannot cost yet
We do not have skill-up tables. Forever adds a large block of new recipes to the trades, and until the ranks and material lists behind them are published or measured on a live realm, nobody can say how many of a given item a rank consumes. Any figure quoted for a full climb right now is an estimate carried over from an older version of the game, and the trades have changed enough that we would not repeat one here.
We also do not know whether any perk reduces material consumption directly, as opposed to raising gathering yield. Bountiful Harvest is described as a gathering bonus, and we have seen nothing confirming a crafting-side equivalent. Until that is clear, plan the climb as if every recipe costs its full list.
The last unknown is crowding. How expensive a stack is depends on how many people are working the same route and selling into the same listings, which is why how many players picked each trade is worth reading beside any material count. That number moves, and we do not publish it as a fixed figure.
Questions
Is it cheaper to gather my own skill-up materials or buy them?
Gathering is cheaper in gold and more expensive in hours, and which one matters depends on what else your evening could earn. A character with a gathering slot and a route it already knows will usually cover its own crafting climb without buying anything. A character with two crafting trades has no choice but to buy, and should expect the raw side of the market to be its main expense rather than the trainer.
Does the trainer fee matter next to the material bill?
Not much. Rank fees are paid once and are small beside the stacks consumed between them. The one place the fee is worth checking is location: trainers sit in particular cities, discounts depend on standing with the faction running that city, and a character learning a trade away from home pays full price at the counter and repeats the trip at every rank.
Do the Legacy perks make crafting cheaper?
Not directly, as far as anything confirmed goes. The gathering perk raises how much scarce material a node returns, which lowers the effective cost of a climb you supply yourself, but it is not a discount on a recipe. We have not seen a crafting-side equivalent described, and we are not assuming one exists.
What should I do with the items made purely for skill?
Assume most of them go to a vendor and treat the counter price as part of your recovery rather than as a disappointment. A few will be worth listing in the first weeks, when levelling characters are buying anything usable, but the stretches where a recipe stops granting skill produce exactly what every other crafter is producing at the same time.
Sources
- Blizzard's news hub, where profession and system changes for Forever have been announced — World of Warcraft news.
- Community database used to check recipe and trainer details as they appear on the test client — Wowhead.