WoW demon Cortyn has thoroughly “misallocated” some characters in the professions – and now warns you not to take these specializations ever.
The professions system in World of Warcraft The War Within is largely based on the new system from Dragonflight. Although the specializations of the individual professions have changed in some cases, most of the core remains the same.
However, the fact that not everything runs 100% smoothly is especially shown by a few specializations of the gathering professions. One should definitely avoid these if one does not want to waste numerous knowledge points.
Because I play several alternate characters that essentially have herbalism and mining on the side to supply my remaining characters, I have invested in different specializations for these alternate characters. One is particularly good at mining bismuth, another at aqirit, and yet another mines Arathor’s spear better than anyone else.
But there are two specializations that I want to warn you about emphatically. Because with those, you are throwing your knowledge points directly into the trash.
Mining Lodes – The ores that don’t even exist
If you have invested in “Mining Fundamentals” as a miner to be able to mine ores without dismounting, you will surely wonder in the end: Should I invest in “Rich Veins” or in “Lodes”? Both can consume up to 25 points and make you better at mining rich ore veins or lodes.
To cut it short: Invest in Rich Veins. Always.
Lodes are extremely rare. In the three weeks of gameplay during which I spent a lot of time farming, I probably came across maybe 15 lode deposits and certainly several hundred rich ore deposits.
As if that weren’t already bitter enough, lodes are usually deep in some caves, so you have to fight through many enemies just to reach them.
Moreover, you can completely ignore that The War Within takes place 80% in a cave anyway; after all, everything is underground. You will still primarily find the lodes in regular caves (which are already in caves). Very rarely can you also find a lode in a riverbed – but it simply isn’t worth the points.
Mulching consumes 40 knowledge points and endless gold
However, things are even worse with the specialization “Mulching” in the herbalism profession. In theory, it sounds like a nice specialization since you can process mycopract into mulch. If you invest a whopping 40 knowledge points into the project, you even get two additional variants of mulch.
Mulch can be used once and grants a bonus to your finesse. The finesse grants a bonus chance to find additional herbs of the same type when harvesting. But let’s first take a look at how World of Warcraft describes the various mulch types:
- Magical Mulch: Covers the next herbs you want to collect to receive a medium amount of finesse.
- Enchanted Mulch: Covers the next herbs you want to collect to receive a large amount of finesse.
- Powerful Mulch: Covers the next herbs you want to collect to receive a huge amount of finesse.
What sounds like a nice bonus in theory is complete nonsense. Because when you try out the different mulch types, you see the bonus to finesse in absolute numbers:
- Magical Mulch provides 2% finesse.
- Enchanted Mulch provides 3% finesse.
- Powerful Mulch provides 5% finesse.
Depending on the mulch used, you have an increased chance of 2% to 5% of getting a few additional herbs when gathering flowers next. That doesn’t sound so bad on paper, but as soon as you look at the costs for producing mulch, that thought crumbles immediately. In parentheses, you always see the current price that one would have to pay for the materials in the auction house.
- Magical Mulch costs 5 Mycopract. (75 gold)
- Enchanted Mulch costs 10 Mycopract and 2 Ley Line Residues. (450 gold)
- Powerful Mulch costs 15 Mycopract and 4 Green Spores. (325 gold)
Since a Powerful Mulch provides 5% finesse, this means that these 5% lead to getting additional flowers in 1 out of 20 cases. That means you would have to spend 6,500 gold (20×325) in order to benefit from the mulch on average just once. And that is the grand “bonus” you get for investing 40 points of profession knowledge. Grand.
Even if these 5% finesse were to trigger and you were really lucky to receive, for example, 5 golden “Arathor’s Spears”, you would then earn 1,000 gold. Even in this absolutely utopian case, that would still be a loss of 5,500 gold.
Maybe I made a big mistake somewhere – but at least I haven’t noticed it, nor has the community in the World of Warcraft subreddit.
I assume that Blizzard will adjust these specializations in one of the upcoming patches because their usefulness is currently extremely poor. At least the mulch is a pure waste of time and gold that fulfills no use even in the cheapest case.
If you want to ensure that you do not waste your profession knowledge as a gathering profession, then you should definitely stay away from the two specializations I have presented here. Because no matter how I turn it – they sound like a pure waste of resources. Farming gold is actually easier than ever right now.
