World of Warcraft: 8 Best BfA Professions

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While World of Warcraft has shifted most of their focus to Shadowlands, there’s still value to be found in the earlier expansions. This is especially true of professions — surprisingly, Battle for Azeroth’s professions have continued to offer useful items and perks since release. Here’s our roundup of the best BfA professions you should invest in.

Whether you’re leveling an alt and want to benefit from BfA professions or just giving the game a trial before picking up Shadowlands, we hope our guide to the best professions in Battle for Azeroth helps give you an idea of what each profession can offer on your adventure.

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Foreword

Since we’re covering an older expansion, we won’t be directly ranking each profession. We also won’t be discussing the gathering professions, as their only benefit involves collecting raw resources.

Instead, we’ll focus on what you can get out of each of the crafting professions and the perks they offer. All the crafting professions have a unique Tool of the Trade that confers special bonuses. They can typically be created after completing a quest chain unlocked at 120 skill points, and though most of them became obsolete with Shadowlands, you might still want to collect them.

With all this in mind, let’s get started on the best BfA professions in WoW.

Alchemy

• Benefits: Create stat-bolstering flasks and quick buff potions. Powerful BoP trinket.
• Transmogs: None
• Tool of the Trade: Silas’ Sphere of Transmutation. Turns into one of four useful items:
  • Curing — Reusable healing potion once every minute.
  • Disguise — Random cosmetic disguise for 10 minutes.
  • Transportation — Teleport instantly to any flight master in a BFA zone.
  • Prosperity — Chance to craft additional alchemy items for 10 minutes.

Take herbs and brew potent potions and flasks to give you stat buffs along your journey. Much like in the past, Alchemy in BFA allows you to create the usual potions and flasks you expect in each expansions.

Sadly, all of the potions that can be made in BFA become unusable beyond Level 50, so use them as you’re leveling! The flasks can still be used beyond 50 and can serve as a cheaper alternative to the Shadowlands ones if you still want the stat boost.

Alchemists can craft a unique BoP trinket known as an Alchemist’s Stone, which has multiple tiers of upgrades at each new step. It bolsters the effect of healing potions and can give a burst of your primary stat. Quite useful for leveling, but it may be a bit hard to obtain enough crafting materials.

As for the Tool of the Trade, it’s unfortunately only valuable these days in its transportation variant. It’ll get you around a BfA zone much faster by instantly warping you on a 9-minute cooldown. That said, the curing variant isn’t bad while you’re trying to level up.

Blacksmithing

• Benefits: Create plate armor, weapons, and mount-affecting equipment.
• Transmogs: Many (weapons, shields, plate armor for each slot)
• Tool of the Trade: Khaz’gorian Smithing Hammer. Repair one gear piece to full for free every hour.
  • Crafting BFA armor/weapons has a chance to gain the Indestructible (no durability damage) property. Does not work beyond Level 50.

Create powerful plate armor and various weapons from the ores scattered across the lands. As is tradition, you can create a large variety of plate armor and weapons. Additionally, you can create some very useful mount boosting equipment to make navigating easier.

Of particular note are the Inflatable Mount Shoes and Stirrups. The first one allows your mount to walk across water, and the second one allows you stay mounted while interacting with objects in BFA zones. Avoid the Hoofplates, their supposed boost to mount speed doesn’t stack with any other speed boosts like the guild one.

Beyond that, you’ll mostly be looking at the huge variety of transmogs that you can obtain. There are some incredibly good-looking faction-based weapons and shields that you can make. The armor doesn’t look half bad either, but you can probably get better elsewhere.

The Tool of the Trade sadly can’t be used beyond Level 50, otherwise it would be fantastic for saving on repair bills. If you manage to obtain it, use it often on equipment like your weapon to cut down on costs.

Enchanting

• Benefits: Create powerful enchants and convert less valuable gear into reagents.
• Transmogs: Very Few (a couple wands)
• Tool of the Trade: Iwen’s Enchanting Rod. Gain extra reagents when disenchanting and empower a golem in BFA zones to fight by your side.

Disenchant weapons and armor you find along the way into reagents to enchant your gear with useful effects. As expected of enchanting, you focus primarily on providing buffs to your armor pieces. However, BFA has rather limited slots on what you could enchant (just weapons, rings, and gloves). Sadly, none of these enchants work on items above iLvl 140 (Shadowlands gear), but they are still very good while leveling.

However, they are the strongest tier enchants you can apply to heirloom gear, as Shadowlands enchants can’t be thrown on them. If you’re leveling an alt, they are fantastic to use to give yourself a boost.

There’s a pet and a few transmog wand appearances you can obtain as well from Enchanting if you’re looking for something to spend your resources on. Due to the lack of players obtaining BFA gear, the raw reagents can actually go for a bit on the market now.

Engineering

• Benefits: Create various useful items and unique gadgets to handle any situation.
• Transmogs: Moderate (head pieces for each armor type, some guns/maces)
• Tool of the Trade: Ub3r-Spanner. Create one of three specified constructs to aid you in the open world:
  • Target dummy (draw aggro)
  • Sustained DPS dog
  • Burst damage bomb bots

Put your mind to work and create a wide-range of tools to provide on-field utility and damage. In BFA, engineering focuses predominantly on giving you access to some incredibly powerful helmets with fantastic, unique Azerite powers. You also gain access to special belt enchants that can provide a shield, fear and knock back enemies, and more.

There are other, less-notable inventions like DPS bombs, special hunter scopes/ammo, and mediocre weapons, but they’re mixed with useful convenience items like deployable stable masters, transmog stations, and temporary boats that are still useful in Shadowlands. You can also create unique battle pets and the coveted Mecha-Mogul mount (flying goblin head).

One last major perk is that you have access to a special auction house in your faction’s BFA capital!

Inscription

• Benefits: Create class-buff war scrolls, Vantus Runes, talent swapping tomes, cosmetic glyphs, and reputation contracts.
• Transmogs: Very Few (a small handful of off-hand weapons)
• Tool of the Trade: Sanguine Feather Quill of Lana’thel. Allows you to create Blood Contracts and heal from dead mobs in the outside world.
  • Blood Contracts summon one of four possible avatars that can serve as a healer, tank, or melee/range DPS in the open world.
  • Crafting requires farming materials off the Blood Trolls in the Underrot dungeon, a world boss in BFA zones, and the Golden Serpent boss in the King’s Rest dungeon.

Mill herbs down into potent inks and create magical scrolls and tomes that can provide buffs on your journey. Inscription has seen a few small changes in BFA, the biggest being the addition of contracts. These one-time use items grant the user a week-long buff that give extra reputation upon finishing a world quest in BFA zones. Each faction’s quartermaster sells the recipe once you hit Friendly with them. These are incredibly valuable if you’re trying to grind out the reputations required for unlocking flying in BfA.

As is tradition, you can also create Vantus Runes to give yourself an edge against BfA raid bosses, and tomes to swap out your talents in the open world. Additionally, war-scrolls were added to give a weaker variant of certain class buffs to parties that are missing a warrior/mage/priest. Unfortunately, these buff scrolls have a level cap of 50. A pity, since Shadowlands has yet to introduce an upgraded equivalent.

Beyond that, there a few cosmetic glyphs you can craft for druids and mages and a handful of transmog-able off-hand items. Those and the contracts are the items most likely to be bought.

The Tool of the Trade isn’t particularly powerful. The avatars you can summon are rather weak and are more likely to just aggro nearby enemies. The AoE healing you get from using the item requires channeling and is somewhat slow, but it is very flashy and thematically fitting for certain classes.

Jewelcrafting

• Benefits: Create stat bolstering gems for your armor sockets.
• Transmogs: Very few (a couple staves)
• Tool of the Trade: Jewelhammer’s Focus. Allows you to extract socketed gems without destroying them. You can also interact with statues in each BFA zone for daily gems.
  • Only usable while Level 50 or below.

Carefully cut the precious stones of the earth into magical foci that can be inserted in your armor for additional stats. This profession hasn’t seen much change with BFA. You cut gems into various stat-boosting ones that can be socketed in your gear’s gem sockets. You can craft some staves for transmog, but they’re not great for much else.

The unique rings you craft are the strongest ones you can obtain, but as BFA is old content, there’s not much purpose to it.

Surprisingly, the leviathan gems still have some use in Shadowlands, as the current expansion has not introduced any primary stat gems. If you’re looking to have +8 to your primary stat, then you may want to look into the BFA gems.

Leatherworking

• Benefits: Create powerful leather and mail armor,
• Transmogs: Many (leather/mail armor for each slot, bows/fist weapons)
• Tool of the Trade: Mallet of Thunderous Skins. Functions as an unlimited Heroism drum. Interact with drum in each BFA zone for a random 30-minute buff.
  • Only usable while Level 50 or below.
  • This buff does work in Shadowlands.

Take the hides and skins of the wild beasts and forge them into sturdy leather and mail armor. As is typical, you can create sets of leather and mail armor for yourself. The legs and boots are the pieces you can substantially upgrade, but are bit difficult to make. There also mediocre fist weapons and bows.

The most useful item you can create is the Barding, which prevents you from being dazed while on your mount. The permanent mount equipment is still very useful for Shadowlands. The heroism drums sadly can’t be used beyond level 50.

Tailoring

• Benefits: Create powerful cloth armor, healing bandages, and group buffing flags.
• Transmogs: Many (cloth armor for each slot)
• Tool of the Trade: Synchronous Thread. Gather cloth from mending random rifts in the world, resurrect if you die in a BFA zone, and occasionally spawn the Time-Lost Trader for rare tailoring recipes.

Weave the delicate sea-blessed fabrics into spell-enhancing cloth armor and useful items. The usual applies here, you can create powerful cloth armor for spellcasters, with the gloves and legs able to be upgraded even further.

What’s special is you have access to unique back enchants such as reducing threat, applying slowfall, and avoiding the daze effect while in BFA zones. Additionally, you can create bandages to heal yourself and allies.

The most useful items are the Saddle Blanket and Battle Flags. The first one is a core component in most permanent mount equipment, while the second one is a unique item that can be planted in unrated battlegrounds for a substantial buff like percent reduced damage, reduced CC effects, or more move speed.

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That’s it for our guide on the best BfA professions in WoW! Have any specific thoughts you want to share or want to see more articles like this? Subscribe to High Ground Gaming, leave a comment below, and stay tuned for all the latest gaming guides and articles.

Happy gaming!