Monday, January 24, 2011

Counting the Cost (Part 2)

Just as a reminder, here's the scenario: you have a character with 450 skill in a profession, and you want to level him/her to 525 skill. What's it going to cost you for the various professions?

In part one, I covered tailoring, blacksmithing and jewlcrafting. Today, I'm going to look at engineering, inscription, and alchemy. As before, I'll be using the profession leveling guides from The Noob School as a guide for what materials are needed to level, and either AH pricing on my server (Kirin Tor) or from wowhead data to determine what those materials will cost ya.

And yes - if you're working on your professions while leveling in Cataclysm, you'll likely be gathering some materials along the way as well, one way or another. As I stated before, though: keep in mind that those materials aren't free. There is zero difference between farming 1000g and spending it on materials, and farming up 1000g worth of materials yourself. Either way, at the end of the day, you've got 1000g less than you could have had, and have opted to have 1000g worth of materials instead.


Accounting for up to 2x the number of Heat-Treated Spinning Lures, as warned in the guide.
Assume 3 obsidian bolts per 2 bars.
  • 33 electrified ether - 66 volatile air @ 38g = 2058g
  • 37 obsidian bars - 74 obsidian ore @ 4g = 296g
  • 4 alicite - @ 15g = 60g
  • 242 elementium bar - 484 elementium ore @ 6g = 2904g
  • 92 volatile earth - @ 15g = 1380g
  • 40 embersilk cloth - @ 5g = 200g
  • 10 volatile fire - @ 25g = 250g
  • 6 dream emerald - @ 49g = 294g
Total? 7442g. Cheapest so far! Engineering apparently got a break in this expansion.


Assume that inferno ink is purchased from Jessica Sellers in Dalaran, at a cost of 10 blackfallow ink.
  • 905 blackfallow ink - @ 17g = 15385g
  • 80 resilient parchment - @ 0.5g = 40g
  • 15 dust of disappearance - @ 12.5g = 188g
  • 2 scavenged dragon horn - @ 17g = 34 g
  • 156 volatile life - @ 9g = 1404g
  • 18 volatile air - @ 38g = 684g
  • 12 volatile fire - @ 25g = 300g
  • 12 volatile earth - @ 15g = 180g
  • 1 bleached jawbone - @ 40g = 40g
  • 2 deathwing scale fragment - @ 6g = 12g
Total? 18,276g. Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch. The actual cost will probably be less, given that milling Cata herbs can produce inferno ink, but still... ouch.

  • 59 cinderbloom - @ 5g = 295g
  • 16 stormvine - @ 6g = 96g
  • 51 Azshara's veil - @ 12g - 612g
  • 46 heartblossom - @ 10g = 460g
  • 55 volatile life - @ 9g = 495g
  • 17 twilight jasmine - @ 11g = 187g
  • 23 whiptail - @ 10g = 230g
  • 3 jasper - @ 18g = 54g
  • 3 hessonite - @ 18g = 54g
  • 15 zephyrite - @ 19g = 285g
  • 15 alicite - @ 15g = 225g
Total? 2,993g. Wow.

I had to go back and check my numbers... and, as far as I can tell, I have the quantities correct, here. What I may have wrong is the price of herbs; rather than using AH data from my server, I went with the buyout price listed in wowhead, which may be a little low for your server. Still... you'd have to double the price of herbs to get into the same range as engineering, and triple the cost of herbs to approach the same cost as tailoring and jewelcrafting.

Next up: leatherworking and enchanting, and some concluding thoughts on crafting in Cataclysm.

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