Professions

A trade beside the sword

Professions are the working life of the world: the gathering trades that pull raw material straight out of the land, and a ring of ten crafts that turn it into gear, meals, potions, and tools. Everything feeds something else here. The ore you mine becomes a blade, the blade takes an enchant, and the enchant needs dust broken out of old gear, so a gatherer, a crafter, and a tinkerer are all links in one chain.

There is no profession limit to agonize over. Every character can raise nine of the ten crafts and every gathering profession side by side (Engineering is the one holdout: its recipes all start above the free ceiling, so its ladder waits for the Bombardier's oath); the only exclusive choice is your archetype, the identity you eventually swear to, though once you attune the crafts that fall dormant behind it climb only on their common recipes, and past skill 75 not at all. Skill never goes down, and nothing you learn is ever taken away.

The craft ring

Every craft on the ring caps at 125 skill: Weaponcrafting, Armorcrafting, Jewelcrafting, Inscription, Tailoring, Leatherworking, Cooking, Alchemy, Engineering, and Enchanting. At a cap the trade keeps working, harvests still yield, crafts still resolve, and masterworks can still happen; only the number stops climbing. Pick a card below for a craft's full recipe tables and numbers.

With Inscription taking up its quills, every seat on the wheel now ships real recipes. The ring is complete rather than finished: the caps rise with future zones, so a capped craft today is a head start on that expansion, not a finish line.

Gathering

The gathering trades feed the ring from the field: Mining, Logging, and Herbalism pull ore, timber, and herbs out of the land and cap at 100 proficiency, Farming raises crops from seed in tended beds and caps at the same 100, while Fishing runs on its own bite-and-reel rhythm all the way to 200. Each page below carries the exact node maps, tool ladders, and odds.

The wheel and its archetypes

The ten crafts sit on a fixed wheel, and geography on that wheel matters. Every two neighbors form a named pair: Smith for Weaponcrafting and Armorcrafting, Outfitter for Leatherworking and Tailoring, Apothecary for Alchemy and Cooking, Bombardier for Engineering and Alchemy, and six more around the ring.

Attuning to a pair is a quest, not a menu click. Four pairs can be joined today (Smith, Outfitter, Apothecary, and Bombardier), each anchored by a resident master in Eastbrook whose acceptance quest states the whole bargain up front before you take it. Until you declare, every craft advances freely on recipes up through the rare tier (any recipe asking skill 74 or less), so you can try everything before you choose.

Once you attune, your two pair crafts become your majors, with no ceiling short of the cap. The rest of the wheel does not go dark: one craft opposite your majors stays on as a hobby that keeps climbing through the rare tier (a repeatable quest at Smith Haldren's forge lets you swap which one), and every other craft goes dormant. A dormant craft keeps its skill and its common recipes, which keep teaching it on the normal curve until they gray at 75; everything above common stops paying at once, and a dormant craft never turns out a masterwork while it rests.

• Bombardier Engineering and Alchemy
• Apothecary Alchemy and Cooking
• Trapper Cooking and Leatherworking
• Outfitter Leatherworking and Tailoring
• Inkweaver Tailoring and Inscription
• Arcanist Inscription and Enchanting
• Gembinder Enchanting and Jewelcrafting
• Bladewright Jewelcrafting and Weaponcrafting
• Smith Weaponcrafting and Armorcrafting
• Gearwright Armorcrafting and Engineering

The Guild letter, and changing your mind

You do not need to seek any of this out. Work your trades, and once your craft skills first show a clear leaning toward one pair, the Crafting Guild notices and sends a Ravenpost letter naming the master to see and the quest to take. It arrives once per character, and only if you have not already sworn to a pair.

A declaration is not a life sentence, either. A pair you have never held is simply a fresh attunement quest, while returning to a pair you walked away from asks you to make amends first: five tasks the first time, and three more added for every return you have already made (taking up a brand-new pair never raises the count). The choice stays meaningful without ever locking a door for good.

The Mastery Curve

Skill gain follows one rule everywhere, the four-state Mastery Curve. Every 25 points of skill is a tier, and each recipe is scored by where it sits against yours: at or above your tier it grants full gain, one tier below grants half, two below a quarter, and three or more below nothing at all.

The crafting window paints this straight onto the recipe list in the classic colors: orange for full gain, yellow for reduced, green for a trickle, gray for none. Gains are deterministic, never a skill-up roll, so the same craft at the same tier always moves your skill by exactly the same amount, and a recipe turning yellow is your cue to train the next rung.

Gathering runs on the same curve with the same tier step, scored against the node instead of a recipe: easy nodes gray out as you pass them, and the richer nodes of the later zones are what finish a climb. Fishing keeps its own schedule: 0.08 of a point per catch below 50 proficiency, 0.05 to 100, 0.04 to 150, and 0.03 to 200, with junk catches teaching nothing from 100 on.

How long mastery takes

Honest expectations: the climb to a craft's 125 cap is at least 125 successful crafts, since each full-gain craft moves you exactly one point, and in practice somewhat more as recipes fade between trainer rungs. The crafting itself is quick; feeding it is the real journey, so budget a few dedicated evenings of gathering and crafting per trade.

The gathering trades reach their 100 cap over a normal leveling journey if you harvest as you travel, though the last stretch wants the high-tier nodes of the far north. Fishing is the long road by design: by its own gain schedule, 200 proficiency is more than three thousand catches. Master Angler is a title earned over a season of quiet evenings, not a weekend.

Provenance

Fine work in this world remembers its maker: rare or better harvests and crafts arrive signed (Gathered by, Crafted by), a masterwork finishes one quality tier higher with the maker's name always on it, and a commissioned piece binds to its recipient through the Maker's Bond. The Crafting Economy page carries the full rules, from signatures and stacking to unbind fees.

The Masterwrought endgame

Masterwrought is the shared family marked Unique-Equipped: Masterwrought. The older apex ladder still uses its found patterns, daily intermediate crafts, and shared endgame materials. The Crucible collections are a separate raid-funded route, not another set of costs added to that ladder. Both families share the same two-piece wearing cap, so they compete for the same two places in your build. Finished pieces trade freely until Perfecting or a commission binds the individual copy.

The older gear patterns are found rather than sold; the older consumable patterns are sold by the Heroic Quartermaster for Heroic Marks, and farming patterns use both routes. Crucible collection manuals and the Last Flame's Zeal formula instead drop from either Crucible boss on either difficulty. Their shared drop group has a 30% chance per boss, choosing one of twelve equally likely scrolls. The Crucible quartermaster also sells any of these scrolls for one core, a deterministic alternative to a lucky drop. Each collection manual teaches all three of its recipes at skill 100. A partly learned manual fills the missing lessons and consumes only one scroll. Manuals and formulas can be traded.

Each of the eleven Crucible collections offers chest, waist, and feet pieces in its own native armor and role profile. Any two pieces activate its only set bonus, even before Perfecting; there is no three-piece bonus. Each item starts at item level 35 and costs 3 Cores of the Last Flame plus ordinary high-grade gathering materials, so a pair costs six cores before the optional manual purchase. No Wyrmfall Core, daily intermediate, or Maker's Ember is required for the base craft. At rank four, Perfecting raises the primary-stat budget to item level 38. Perfecting still follows its own weekly Ember progression, independent of obtaining and wearing the base gear.

You can exchange Perfecting ranks between two copies from the same collection at the appropriate crafting station, with skill 125, while alive, idle, and out of combat. The ranks are swapped, never duplicated, and each slot applies its own Perfected stat bonus. The exchange has no material cost and no cooldown. Both copies bind to you; their individual names, enchants, and maker marks stay with their original items.

Three shared materials feed the chain. The Wyrmfall Core is the tradable catalyst: each of the deepest endgame's final victories pays a credited character 1 to 3 cores, once per source per day, the highest rift clears pay a fixed count of their own on the same daily clock, and the Heroic Quartermaster sells one for 12 Heroic Marks as the bad-luck backstop; cores trade freely. The Sundered Essence is soulbound, and sundering is its only source: any character can sunder, no profession asked, and the cast breaks a raid-won piece of epic gear, from any raid and either difficulty, into exactly one essence, the gear itself being the price. The Maker's Ember is soulbound too, and it is the chain's clock: one per week per character, granted on your first eligible endgame completion of the week, and a missed week is never lost, since the embers accrue and pay out on your next completion.

Perfecting, and the orange promotion

A finished apex piece is not the end of its story. Its owner, with 125 skill in the craft that made it, can walk the piece up four ranks of Perfecting. Each attempt spends one Maker's Ember, one Sundered Essence, and one Prismglass Setting, and succeeds four times in five; a miss costs the materials and nothing else, the piece is never harmed or set back. The first attempt binds the piece to the one perfecting it, so a copy meant for sale is sold before the work begins. A Perfected piece carries a stat bonus over its base, and Perfected is exactly what the Lucent Infusion waits for: the one enchant the Enchanting page marks Perfected only lands on nothing less.

The walk can begin one rank in. A masterwork proc on an apex craft cannot finish the piece a tier finer, since apex is already the top of the ladder, so it grants the head start instead: the piece comes off the bench at the first rank of Perfecting, with three ranks left to walk rather than four. It is the same roll and the same odds the Masterworks section on every craft page publishes, spent on a rank instead of a quality.

The last step is the orange promotion, and it is the Deed of Making's whole purpose. Bring a Perfected piece and one Deed of Making, an inscriptionist's skill-125 writ, and the copy is promoted into a legendary carrying a name of your own choosing. No roll rides it: the promotion is deterministic, the stats do not change at all, and what changes is the name and the color. The deed is tradable, so the scribe and the wearer need never be the same person, and the family cap keeps its one extra line: a character wears at most one legendary Masterwrought piece among their two.

Stations and the three hubs

Six typed stations serve the nine station-bound crafts, spread across the three town hubs. Eastbrook holds the forge (Weaponcrafting, Armorcrafting, and Jewelcrafting all share it), the kitchens, the loom, and the toolworks; Fenbridge keeps the tannery, and Highwatch the apothecary (Alchemy and Inscription share that bench). Each station has a resident master beside it who trains recipes, posts work orders, and offers the unbind service.

The working radius is 20 yards, roughly the station's own yard, so you craft standing at the anvil rather than from across town. Enchanting alone has no station: it works anywhere by design.

Deeds that remember the journey

The Book of Deeds walks beside every step of this. Your first attunement earns Craftsworn and your first masterwork earns Masterwright, both wearable as titles. All ten earnable crafts mark a milestone deed at 50 skill and crown their caps with a Grandmaster title, while Fishing gets Old Salt at 100 proficiency and the Master Angler title at 200.

There are quieter pages too: deeds for your first harvest and first craft, for the rare finds luck turns up in the field, and for taking up salvage. All of it is cosmetic, titles and Renown only. A deed never grants power; it only proves you were there.

Where to start

Fresh off the road in Eastbrook? Find Foreman Odell and take A Trade for Every Hand: he will point you at the ore veins around the Copper Dig northeast of town and hand you your first calluses. Mind the dig itself: the Deeprock Diggers camped on it stand a few levels above a fresh arrival, so work the outlying veins first and save the camp's heart for when you have leveled a little. From then on, harvest every vein, timber stand, and herb patch you pass while questing; proficiency comes naturally to travelers.

Back in town, press T to open the crafting window and work the common recipes every character knows from the start. Visit the masters at the forge, kitchens, loom, and toolworks to see what they teach, and take their work orders for steady coin. By the time the Guild's letter finds you, you will already know which pair feels like home.