Which WoW Forever professions make money

What makes a profession pay

One question decides most of it. Is the thing you make used up, or kept? A player buys a chest piece once and never thinks about it again. That same player buys food, potions, bandages and arrows for as long as they play. A profession whose output is consumed has a market that renews itself; a profession whose output is kept has to find a new customer for every sale.

That is why the crafted-gear professions look impressive and earn slowly, while the unglamorous ones that make stacks of small things tend to earn steadily. Neither is wrong. They are different jobs.

Gathering: no reagents, no risk

Herbalism, Mining and Skinning have a property no crafting profession has: their input cost is zero. Whatever the market pays is the whole margin, because you spent time rather than gold. There is no recipe that can turn out to be unprofitable, no reagent whose price moved against you, and nothing to guess about.

In the opening weeks that makes gathering the most reliable earner in the game, for a reason specific to a fresh economy: everybody is leveling professions at once, so demand for raw materials runs well ahead of supply while people are still training the skills to produce them. Herbalism, Mining and Skinning all have their recipe and reagent relationships listed, and the gold guides by level say which nodes and skins pay in each bracket.

The catch is that gathering scales with your time and nothing else. It does not compound, and it does not benefit from knowing anything. It is the floor, not the ceiling.

Things that get used up

The professions that sell into renewing demand are the ones making things a player destroys by using them. Look for outputs like these in any recipe list:

• Potions, elixirs and food. Consumed per attempt at whatever the player is doing, so demand tracks how much people are playing.
• Bags. Not consumed, but every character and every alt needs several, and a new player base means a great many first characters at once. Bags hold value longer than most early crafts.
• Ammunition and reagents. Bought in stacks, repeatedly, by anybody whose class needs them.
• Enchants and augments. Reapplied whenever gear changes, which in the leveling months is constantly.

Every consumable in the catalog and every container are listed with their own price pages.

Gear, and why it is harder

Crafted gear is the hardest place to make money and the easiest place to think you are going to. The problems are structural rather than bad luck. Each piece competes with whatever drops from the content players are running, so its value falls as soon as the equivalent drop becomes common. Every buyer buys once. And the recipes that make the good pieces are usually the ones everybody has, because everybody read the same guide.

Where gear does pay is at the edges: the piece that fills a gap nothing drops into, the one whose reagents are tedious enough that few bother, and the early levels where everybody is equipping a character from nothing at the same time.

How to judge a profession from its recipe list

The table at the top ranks professions by what pays today. A recipe list tells you what will still pay when prices move, and it works for a recipe the market has not priced yet. For each profession, open its page and ask four questions.

• How many recipes are there? A long list means more places to find a margin and more skill points that are cheap to gain.
• What do they consume? Recipes that eat things a gathering profession produces are predictable. Recipes that eat things dropped by a specific mob are not.
• Is the output used up or kept? The question from the top of this guide, applied one recipe at a time.
• Would a player want it, or only a vendor? A recipe whose result sells to a vendor for more than its reagents cost is a skill-up, not a business.

Every profession and its recipes, each with reagents and skill requirement: Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Enchanting, Engineering, Leatherworking and Tailoring. The same recipes appear ranked by margin on the crafting page, with the cost of every reagent and the auction house cut already taken off.

What a realmless market does to all of this

On a realm, a profession could be profitable because you were one of few people on your server who had it. That protection does not exist in Forever: your market holds everybody on your ruleset and faction, so you are competing with all of them at once. Rarity of the profession is worth nothing.

What is worth something is friction. A recipe whose reagents are annoying to gather, or which needs a skill level most people stop short of, or which consumes something with a slow supply, keeps a margin because fewer people bother rather than because fewer people can. Look for the tedious recipe, not the rare one.

The rest of the reasoning is in what having no realms changes and how crafting profit is calculated, including the median that the margin is measured against.