Farmcraft

I try to avoid repetitive tasks whenever I can, either by automating them or putting them off for obscene periods of time. Automation isn't even an option being forbidden by the rules of the game so mostly I just put stuff off for like ever. Until I want/need something that is.

I haven't farmed so much leather in a short period of time since I was making my druid a tanking set in burning crusade. I still have unpleasant memories of skinning clefthoof for hours. I managed to make it though the 505-510 leatherworking bottleneck over the course of the weekend though. Basically there is one green pattern which uses lots of leather and one yellow recipe which uses volatiles and less leather. So a half hour per attempt with no guarantee of getting a skill up. Lets just say I have a lot of cloaks of the beast now.

It is funny how farming one thing drives me to farm for others though. My main goal is leather, but for some patterns I need volatiles so I go after those. Volatile water farming makes my fishing go up and leaves me with quite a collection of cooking mats. Same for killing critters to skin, lots of meat. So before my bank explodes I've gone and started leveling my cooking to use up some of this extra meat. Other volatiles point me toward mining on a different toon which in turn led me to level engineering to the point where I could make an electrostatic condenser for more volitile airs. After all it would really suck to spend time farming and be missing out on some free mats.

My latest whim is to level my blacksmithing which I left at around 365 I believe. Ironically I dropped mining on that toon and took up engineering just because I didn't want to grind up my mining skill on a third toon. So that means flying around northrend for hours just to get to using cataclysm mats which I will again need to farm for. All this to make myself belt buckles which are a ridiculous 300 gold in the auction house right now. It takes a special occasion for me to go over 100g on a single item enhancement. That means leveling blacksmithing all the way to 525 just to get the pattern. That will be a while.

I'm pretty sure I have my farming planned out for the next 18 months. I plan to level every profession with the exception of jewelcrafting and inscription. If anyone has taken those professions I laugh in your general direction, ha. It's actually a good thing that some people take those professions or else I wouldn't have anything to buy in the auction house. Inscription is more or less a one time thing now with permanently learned glyphs and jewelcrafting has a daily on top of the already annoying grind. My jewelcrafter learned exactly one epic cut last expansion after maxing out, unless you count dragon's eyes, I did take advantage of my profession bonuses at least. My scribe is still floundering in wrath herbs. Neither toon is likely to see much action this expansion, apparently I'm a professionist.

There really should be a mechanism to switch professions without starting from scratch. Something along the lines of switching profession specializations, once you've done the work you pay your gold and switch to whatever you want. Even if every recipe you learned got permanently clobbered it wouldn't be so bad. Probably have to limit it such that gathering professions and crafting professions weren't interchangeable as they represent very different levels of commitment. Lots of professions sound great in the starting zone, but after a significant commitment don't seem so great later on.

The other thing that I would really love to see would be the ability to have another profession. Mostly I would like skinning to be part of leatherworking, but the result would be the same. To be able to have all the professions I enjoy on the toons I play most often would be a pretty sweet deal. I think this is a definite possibility as characters get more powerful and professions become more balanced to the point where adding another wouldn't be too powerful or throw the balance off terribly. We're already at the point where gathering professions are pretty much a joke reserved for alts for anyone lucky enough to be planning that far ahead or sadistic enough to start the grid over. The only solutions would be to let everyone have another crafting profession or buff the crap out of gathering professions.

Wrath was a bit of an experiment for me, I dabbled in pretty much everything to see what I really liked and what I really didn't. My first expansion BC, I only really had time to learn the game, learn my couple toons/specs and work on the professions I chose on a whim at like level 12. In Cataclsym I got to choose my favorite combination of classes and professions to work on first, but it was kind of frustrating to compromise between classes and professions. In the end I am rather happy with what are to become my "mains" this expansion, but there is a lingering feeling of regret which will likely last the duration of the expansion. Of course I want one toon to do everything so I'm likely never going to be completely satisfied, but my druid gets me damn close.