Attention herbalists and mountain farmers – I crafted something stupid so you don’t have to

WoW demon Cortyn has mastered the professions with some characters – and now warns you not to ever take these specializations.

The profession system in World of Warcraft The War Within is largely based on the new system from Dragonflight. Although the specializations of individual professions have changed in some cases, the core remains the same.

However, a few specializations in collecting professions show that not everything runs 100% smoothly. You should avoid them if you don’t want to waste a lot of knowledge points.

Because I play several secondary characters who essentially have herbalism and mining on the side to support the rest of my characters, I have invested in different specializations for each of these secondary characters. One can mine bismuth particularly well, another can mine aqirite, and another can mine Arathor’s spear better than anyone else.

But there are two specializations that I would like to warn you about. Because by doing so you are throwing your knowledge points straight into the trash.

Mining Seams – The ores that don’t even exist

If you, as a miner, have invested in the “Mining Fundamentals” in order to be able to mine ores without getting off the mount, you will probably end up asking yourself: Should you then invest in “Rich Deposits” or in “Seams”? Both can cost up to 25 points and make you better at mining rich ore deposits or seams.

To shorten the whole thing: Invest in rich deposits. Always.

Seams are extremely rare. In the three weeks of play in which I actually spent a lot of time farming, I came across perhaps 15 seam deposits and certainly several hundred rich ore deposits.

As if that wasn’t bitter enough, seams are usually deep in caves, so you have to fight through a lot of enemies to even reach them.

You can also completely ignore the fact that 80% of The War Within takes place in a cave anyway, after all everything is underground. You can still find the seams mainly in ordinary caves (which in turn are already in caves). Very rarely you can find a seam in a riverbed – but that’s just not worth the points.

Making mulch costs 40 knowledge points and endless amounts of gold

However, the whole thing is even worse with the “Mulching” specialization in the herbalism profession. In theory, this sounds like a nice specialization because you can turn mycoglory into mulch. If you put a whopping 40 knowledge points into the project, you’ll even get two more variants of mulch.

Mulch can be used once and grants a bonus to your finesse. Finesse grants a bonus chance of finding additional herbs of the same type when mining herbs. But let’s first see how World of Warcraft describes the different types of mulch:

What sounds like a nice bonus in theory is, however, complete nonsense. Because once you try out the different types of mulch, you can see the bonus to finesse in absolute numbers:

Depending on the mulch you use, you have a 2% to 5% increased chance of getting a few extra herbs the next time you collect flowers. That doesn’t sound too bad on paper, but as soon as you look at the cost of producing mulch, that idea immediately falls apart. In brackets you can always see the current price that you would have to pay for the materials in the auction house.

Since Empowered Mulch provides 5% Finesse, that means that 5% will give you additional flowers 1 time out of 20. This means that you would have to spend 6,500 gold (20×325) to benefit from the mulch once on average. And that is the great “bonus” you get for investing 40 points in professional knowledge. Great.

Even if this 5% finesse were to trigger and you were really lucky to get, for example, 5 gold “Arathor’s Spear”, then you would still earn 1,000 gold. Even in this absolutely utopian case, that would still be a loss of 5,500 gold.

Maybe I made a big mistake in my thinking somewhere – but at least I didn’t notice it and neither did the community in the World of Warcraft subreddit.

I assume that Blizzard will adjust these specializations in one of the upcoming patches at the latest, as their usefulness is currently extremely poor. At least the mulch is a complete waste of time and gold that serves no purpose even in the best case scenario.

So if you want to make sure that you don’t waste your professional knowledge as a collecting profession, then it’s better to avoid the two specializations that I have presented here. Because no matter how I twist and turn it, they sound like a complete waste of resources. Farming gold is actually easier than ever before.