3.1 Professions: The value of spoilers

I've been playing my rogue a lot lately. I like rogues and she's fun to play. But I've also kept her around as an enchanter, specifically to disenchant all the greens that I get in the course of play. She had been stuck at level 40 during BC — which allowed her to DE the greens and blues I would get. I've had a similar goal to get her leveled in WotLK so that she could DE the current greens.

Yesterday she dinged 58 and traveled through the Dark Portal to upgrade her professions. Safely back in Ironforge, I promptly leveled her enchanting to 300, at the cost of about 120 x [Illusion Dust], including about 40 that she had already and another 80 from the AH.

Today, I read the following on MMO-Champion:

Enchanting: Several recipes in the 250-300 skill range have been rebalanced, and the reagent requirements have been reduced.

D'oh! I spent about 200G at the AH on mats for leveling, and used another 100G worth of mats that I had in stock. As mistakes go, I guess that's not too bad, and I doubt that I'd wait until 3.1 drops to level up anyway. Even so, I wish I had known about the change in advance so I could make a decision rather than rationalize it away.

So to that end, what are some of the other relevant profession changes coming up? What might influence your buying or selling decisions? I'm going to look specifically at the pieces that might help you decide, say, to sell or buy mats, as opposed new recipes or questions like "is leatherworking worth it?", which is a different kind of question. Here is a list of the current profession changes. What stands out as AH-worthy changes?

First, there are some nice changes to Blacksmithing, Tailoring, and Leatherworking. Lower-level items for all three professions "have received major changes to make them more appealing." I read that to say that these items will now be very useful as leveling gear for newer toons. That in turn may make it worthwhile to make and sell this gear; at the least, I hope that any gear you make while leveling your profession will be viable to sell at auction.

There are a ton of new recipes coming, including some (presumably excellent) recipe drops from Ulduar. The recipes will be BoE, but I don't know yet whether the items they create are BoE or BoP. During Burning Crusade there were a good number of BoE recpies that created BoP gear, but my guess is that the trend of skipping BoP gear will continue. If so — if the new gear is BoE — you'll see price drops for the current high-end crafted gear in the same slot. Keep watching to see what specific recipes are available, and sell the corresponding gear soon.

There's an important twink-relevant change for Enchanting: "Some enchants now have level restrictions. Note: the enchant is never removed from the item to which it's applied, however, the player no longer receives its benefit until they reach the required level. Any enchants modified in this way have had their tooltips updated." So this will nerf twinks, reduces enchanter's income from selling these twink enchants, and may invalidate some enchants on your lower-level toons.

I need to research this Leatherworking change: "Added a recipe for combining Borean Leather Scraps into Borean Leather. You can still use Borean Scraps from your inventory to combine them." If they do the exact same thing, it's trivial/silly, but it might be in to help people who forget how to combine scraps. (I've been guilty of this myself.) My hope is that leatherworkers will actually get more leather out of scraps than other players, which would be kind of nice. If the latter, you should maybe hold on to your scraps until 3.1. I'll research more and find out.

There are a couple Jewelcrafting notes. The first: "Added a new recipe to cut black diamonds." Don't know how good the recipe is yet, but it might be worthwhile to stock up on ultracheap diamonds now — or at least hold on to the ones you have. The second: "Added a recipe for Shifting Twilight Opal to the daily jewelcrafting vendor." This is a +agi/+stam gem, which should be fairly useful.

Herbalism sees a simple change that may have major effects: "Northrend herbs now yield more herbs on average." That could drive down Northrend herb prices. On the other hand, a new, challenging raid will probably increase demand for flasks and elixirs, and a ton of new glyphs will also add to the demand for herbs. So I bet in the end that prices will not drop drastically — at least, I won't place any bets one way or the other.

Cooking sees some interesting changes. If you're leveling Cooking, you should know: "You no longer need to learn cooking from books. The trainers have finally done their reading and are able to teach you the same thing." That's probably not a big deal if you track down the vendors yourself, but it will end the sometimes-lucrative trade in reselling these books on the AH.

Another big Cooking change: "A new recipe has been added to cooking trainers for making Black Jelly, using several Borean Man 'O War as ingredients. While it looks disgusting, it restores more health and mana than the highest level food." Currently these fish don't have any use, so they're often vendored or just ignored. I'll be watching the AH to see if any come available though, because they should be really cheap.

Fishing sees some major improvements, including new daily quests (yesyesyesYES!) some big changes to leveling, and even a chance to fish up a mount. As noted under cooking, you're going to want to hang on to those Borean Man 'O War now. There are also new fishing options in Wintergrasp, including: "A new clam, the Giant Darkwater Clam, can be obtained by fishing in Wintergrasp. This mighty clam has a greatly increased chance to drop pearls, and yields up to five times the regular amount of clam meat." So you will likely see price drops on both clam meat and pearls.

That's the quick summary of auction-house-relevant changes. I'll probably look at some of the other profession changes in more detail, especially for Leatherworking, Cooking, and Fishing.