The Professions Grind – The Climb #850

Monday 21^st June 2021

I woke up with a terrible headache. This was a major problem as I only had half a day to write.

I’m on the second day of disruption. Yesterday I had a Pokemon Go PvP tournament that took up half the day. Tomorrow I have my second jab and today I had to help a friend.

Yesterday I had managed to squeeze some writing in during the morning, meaning that I still managed to get 2000 words done, but today, with the headache, I wasn’t able to do any before the headache cleared and I had already left.

I have to write in silence so with people milling around, even in other rooms, there was no way to concentrate. So instead, I got my laptop and treated it as a big World of Warcraft session.

Setting out in Shadowlands, I had two aims. One was to get my alts to level 60. The other was to maximise their professions.

Technically I have 3 alts still to level. Two are at 55, and one is at 53. I may still level them. However, they – like a lot of the others -just have professions duplicating others. Having multiple tailors might be useful for the barn in Draenor, but that’s not current content. Likewise having both a gnome and goblin engineer is helpful in terms of completion, but not for current expansion.

There’s an achievement in Warcraft for maxing one of every profession in Shadowlands. That seemed to me to be a sensible goal. The idea of the alts is that they can all help each other, plus I have all my bases covered. Not having herbalism or Mining maxed on an alt is not going to slow down that character from doing what they are supposed to be doing, which is supplying the other characters,

So this means I have a set of characters I’m going to call my professionals, a collection of main and alts which cover all the professions. And my task was: to get them all maxed in their relevant professions.

What I’ve been doing until now has primarily been to do Darkmoon Faire once a month. There are profession quests that give five levels and whilst small, it can help you over specific humps. I’ve also routinely shared ore, cloth and other gathered items to my professionals. It might only get them a level or two, but every little helps.

Shadowlands is weird where not all professions are equal. Some only go to 100, others are 175 or 200. A few I’d got close to max. Typically, the resources get more difficult the closer you get to max. That’s where Darkmoon Faire can help. Others, I’d not really touched apart from dipping in and doing the Faire profession quests to get them to around 20 – 30.

But unable to write, I decided to go for a massive grind. Resources were shuffled. Resources I didn’t have were bought, and I sat down and maxed profession after profession: Engineering, Alchemy, Enchanting, Jewelcrafting. One by one they fell. Sometimes I’d take a break from one and go do another.

I spent a lot of gold, but seeing that I’m able to craft max level items, technically I should be able to make that back now… especially with a new patch and raid coming up.

I got the achievement for getting all the professions maxed (although technically I still need to do inscription as I did that on my alliance alt, rather than all on horde). I’m immensely proud of myself. I know it’s only a game, but this has been something I’ve been chipping away at for months and something I gave myself a deadline to complete.

When they announced the date of the new patch, I originally felt like I did with the bronto last year, that I’d lost my chance… but thanks to shuffling those resources off to various guild banks I own, I was able to get this done and not completely break the bank.

Going into the next patch, I‘ve got things in place to start making in-game money, and the task for next patch is to start to do that. Hopefully I can make enough over the next couple of patches to ensure that come the start of the next expansion when new resources are expensive, I can afford to take the hit and max out my professionals again, but this time earlier on. Six months is better than two years into an expansion (and technically I only leveled the character not their profession) but I want to do better next time.

I’m not sure whether I’ll get any writing done tomorrow, but given what I did get accomplished today, I’m OK with not getting any done today. I’ll need to make up for it later in the week though