Gold Making For Casuals: Professions for Alts Part One – Crafting

Gold making for Casuals is a series of gold making tips for World of Warcraft players that want to make some extra gold but don’t want to spend a lot of time doing it. These tips will be things that you can quickly and easily and won’t take too much time and effort out of your regular play. But will help net you a bit of extra gold on the side to save towards those ever spiking token costs. You can catch up with the full index list of posts here Gold Making For Casuals Series Index

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Choosing a profession for your alt can be an important decision when it comes to making gold. In this post, I break down most of the main professions and which ones and the best choices and why so sit tight!

Why Alts need Professions

I’m assuming here that you in reading this have some interest in making gold. Due to that being the whole premise of this series. If you don’t want to make gold, then no, you’re alts don’t professions. If you do want to make gold however they really should have some.

You can make a butt-ton of gold from professions and it can be a lot easier than you think. Even if you are not down with the idea of crafting a bus-load of items regularly and cancels scanning and keeping on top of trends, you can still make a lot of gold with professions. I certainly don’t do those things and professions account for a lot of my income.

It doesn’t have to be difficult and it doesn’t have to be awfully time-consuming. And it can make you bags of profits. So here’s the break down on all the professions your alts could potentially have and what’s good and bad about each.

Professions Break Down

Alchemy

This is my go-to profession for new alts. You can never have too many alchemists. I have leveled a character with every single one of the crafting skills, but alchemy I have multiples of. Why? Transmutes. Each Alchemist has a daily transmute cooldown. They can turn one material into another but they can only do it once a day.

That keeps the price of these materials high on the AH, so there is always value in crafting them. And if you have a handful of alchemists you can make multiple items a day. Perhaps even more if you have them Transmute specialized. More on that in Part 2!

Engineering

This is the other one I have multiples of. And for the same reason. Engineering also have a daily cooldown; Jard’s Power Cords. These are made from Ghost Iron Bars and can only be made once a day with no chance of specializations or multiple crafts. And they are soulbound. So only Engineers can make them and only engineers can use them. They can be used in three crafts; two battle pets and a mount.

The mount is my main focus; it takes 30 power cores, so I can make one every 30 days. Per Engineer. The more engineers you have the more mounts you can make. These always sell within 12 hours of posting for me for about 60k. So that is 60k a month for every engineer you have and all you have to do is a daily cooldown.

Enchanting

If you have the time to do some actual crafting then the rest of the crafting professions can shine. Enchanting is one of my favorites. I can make about 40-50k a week on enchanting and that is without restocking it daily, without running any cancel scans, etc. That is with running on full steam lazy mode.

Remember old crafts with your enchanter. Go back and pick up the weapon enchants if nothing else from old farms because those appearances now are wardrobe unlocks. People will pay 6-16k for them. The illusion tomes will also net a nice profit if you have old materials floating around or cheap on your server. And that’s before you even get to endgame enchants for raiders replacing gear. Its useful and the material can be farmed while your questing and doing your own stuff simply by DE’ing things. I mail all BOE’s worth less than 200g to my Enchanter to break into materials.

Tailoring

As above tailoring is another profession where you should remember old recipes. Particularly TBC era ones, they tend to net a good payback from people looking to get the appearances and a lot of the world drop patterns have unique appearances and require primals to make making them sell for 20k+

Tailoring is also easy to level and always a solid bet to have at least one of to make bags. Bags are always, always needed ingame, no matter where you are. Bags will always sell. If you have space you could even make several tailors with Garrison buildings to increase the amount to hexweave and ergo hexweave bags you can churn out. I still work with one, however, as I’m wary of Blizzard dropping a new bag size at any point. As I only have one, I mail all my cloth that I collect on all my characters to this alt and rarely have to buy much more.

Blacksmithing

Again you can sell endgame armours, but don’t forget the old ones. If you have the time to collect up some recipe drops and vendors, then do so. A lot of people won’t and you can charge for their laziness if they want the appearances but don’t have the recipes.

It’s a little bit more difficult to supply materials for this profession as you need a dedicated miner. But I will take about gathering materials a bit more below.

Leatherworking

I’m not going to repeat myself here, leatherworking works much the same as tailoring and smithing. But you can also make things like drums of fury and armour kits here that can provide a useful consumable boost. So it can be worth having one of these on hand. Even if you don’t delve into collecting up some profitable old recipes.

Inscription

This is a good one to have as well as it’s a consumable market. It’s something people need over and over for various characters and alts. It does require a bit of awareness in terms of herbs and pigments and which is needed for what. But if you have the abundance of current level herbs you can just trade them in at the inscription vendor for whatever you need which makes the process a lot smoother.

Jewelcrafting

Endgame gems are always a hit, and if you can get in on that market at the launch of a new expac or raid it’s like printing gold. It does require rushing to get the recipes and materials however and it is something I have never done. But you can still make some money with jewelcrafting either way though it terms to be restricted to the more current crafts and markets.

In Conclusion

What professions you choose for your alts will depend on how you play your game. If you are into keeping up with current materials and endgame markets then consumables and the like are going to be the ones that will work for you. If you would rather focus on slower selling higher profit items then armour and weapon crafting professions will work better. Only you can decide what way you want to play it. But I hope this breakdown helped make the reasons for each choice more clear. 

In Part Two I’m going to cover gathering professions; whether or not to have a ‘Gathering Toon’ or to spread out your gathering over your alts. Sit tight and we’ll have that one up on Wednesday in place of our usual Roleplay guide. Just to make sure you have all the info in a useful timeframe. 

I hope you found this useful. If you did please let us know and share it around. If you would like weekly catch-ups and updates about the blog here; you should sign up to our mailing list in the box below or the button on the top right. Until then good luck with crafting!