What if that isn’t for you though? What else could you do?

Well, the next batch of professions being covered are for those death knights who seem to have a problem with smashing things on a funda-metal level. Using herbs and plants found using the herbalism skill, these professions create mysterious glyphs and powerful potions and flasks which are very, very important for raiders everywhere.

Be warned: these professions are costly to level.  If you have herbalism as your other profession, you will have a much easier time leveling these professions, and a ready supply of herbs whenever you need them.  If you don’t, be prepared to sink thousands of gold pieces into leveling your chosen profession.

Alchemy

The closest thing the World of Warcraft has to a chemistry type profession, Alchemy is a powerful profession with many benefits, including a large potential for money making and potent bonuses from passive skills learned by the profession and the signature alchemist stones.

Although Death Knights aren’t the only class to benefit from Alchemy, they certainly benefit from it a great deal.  Alchemist stones can provide a large boost to your survivability or DPS, while also providing a bonus to hit point gain when drinking a potion.  Unfortunately, alchemist stones cannot be sold on the auction house.

What can be sold however are the Flasks and potions that are so famously important for raiders everywhere.  Alchemy provides some very powerful buffs through flasks and potions, which not only can benefit you a great deal but can be sold on the auction house for a great deal of money.

Inscription

For those Death Knights who really took well to Rune Forging and can actually write (a small percentage of you, I’m sure), it might be wise to become a scribe.

Inscription is a powerful profession for 3 reasons: first, it is the only profession that can alter abilities.  Scribes can create glyphs that improve already existing parts of a spell (Glyph of Horn of Winter), remove negative parts of a spell (Glyph of the Ghoul, or even add something completely new to the spell (Glyph of Howling Blast).  Obviously this is in high demand, so you can sell glyphs for a fair amount of money on the auction house.

Second, you can create the best shoulder enhancements in the game.  The shoulder enchants you can create as a scribe are better than the shoulder enchants you can buy from the Sons of Hodir at exalted, which makes your job that much easier.  Unfortunately, these can’t be sold.

Lastly, it is the only profession with the ability to make the Darkmoon Cards.  Darkmoon cards are normally pretty useless, but are still in high demand; why? Because if you can combine all the cards in a suit(i.e all the nobles cards from Ace to King) then you can combine them to make some of the most powerful trinkets in the game, the Darkmoon Decks.  As a result, even the cards can sell for almost 1,000 gold pieces each depending on the card and the deck.

Crafting A Better Death Knight

Crafting professions are notably harder to pick than the Gathering professions.  Both of the professions I’ve explained here are good for Death Knights of any kind, and I heartily recommend both of them.  The choice is really up to you, dear reader.

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Gathering Professions
2. Death Knight Professions: Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing & Engineering
3. Getting Acquainted With Death Knight Glyphs

We’re going to be looking at the jobs that force you to work with metals and stones in an effort to create and construct powerful weapons, durable armor, useful gadgets, or stunning jewelry.

Beware: unless these are supported by a gathering profession, crafting professions can be a very expensive venture, costing many thousands of gold to maximize your skill in your chosen profession.  

For the professions we are talking about today, mining is the most closely related crafting profession and will save you a great deal of money when practicing any of the crafting professions we’re talking about today.

Jewelcrafting

Death Knights delight in death and destruction, slaughtering and maiming all those in their wake; but once in awhile, don’t you wish you could wear something pretty?

Jewelcrafting is a powerful profession: it has a great potential for making money and provides many unique benefits and bonuses.  The cost of having the (arguably) most powerful profession is a slow leveling process and expensive materials.

Although Death Knights aren’t the type to work with delicate and beautiful things, jewelcrafting is an excellent profession for any Death Knight.  Higher level gear comes with slots for gems that you can create, and everyone is going to need those gems! Since you’re a jewelcrafter, you have access to gems that only you can use that are much more powerful than the gems that non-jewelcrafters can use.

Being a jewelcrafter also allows you to create trinkets that only you can use.  There are trinkets for every occasion that allow Death Knights an easier time tanking or dealing damage from the start.

Beyond these trinkets, a jewelcrafter can create neck pieces and rings that not only can you use, but they can be sold on the auction house for a hefty sum.

Blacksmithing

For those Death Knights who can’t stand the frivolities of jewels, but still want to work with rocks by smacking them into nice shapes, blacksmithing might be your profession.

Blacksmithing is a welcome profession on all servers.  It has potential to make money, and can create powerful weapons and armors that are normally better than the gear found in heroic dungeons.  Blacksmithing has areas of specialization, but since Wrath of the Lich King came out there hasn’t been any improvement to these specializations, and they are now an archaic reminder of what once was.

The cons to having this profession are as follows: there are multiple materials that can’t be found through mining alone that will likely have to be bought to increase your skill in blacksmithing, it’s a slow process, and it can be very expensive.

Despite the aforementioned issues, Blacksmithing is a powerful profession with a great potential for money and great gear whether you’re a tank or a DPSer! You’ll always be in demand, and not only that…

You get to smack things repeatedly with a hammer!

Engineering

Are the rest of your Death Knight brethren completely stupid? Do you have “gud mathz”? Do you delight in explosions, fire, and explosions? Then maybe engineering is for you!

Engineering is a powerful profession that, thanks to all the gadgets you can make, makes your death knight feel very different from playing a normal Death Knight.  From Nitro boots and mote extractors to grenades and jumper cables, Engineering gives your death knight a little bit of everything from every other class!

Engineering allows you to create explosives and gadgets that, although they do backfire from time to time, allow you to have significant advantages over non-engineers in the same situation.  The sheer number of unique little gadgets you can make can be overwhelming, and are way too many to list allof them.

There are specializations for engineering, and they are still important in Wrath of the Lich King.  Gnomish and Goblin engineering has a different feel for each, with gnomish engineering leading the weird but fun engineering (such as the shrink ray) and the goblin engineering leading the explosive but dangerous front (such as sapper charges).

The most famous engineering items can only be used by engineers, making engineering a very selfish profession.  Engineers can add gadgets to pieces of gear to create Rocket launching gloves, EMP belts, or parachute capes.  These tinkers often come with other passive bonuses such as crit rating, stats, and better stealth detection.  They also create grenades and explosives that can stun adversaries or cause siege damage in an area on top of doing fire damage.

Another thing that engineers are famous for are their goggles.  The goggles in TBC used to be some of the most powerful gear in the game, although that has been changed to force engineers to get different headpieces.  The goggles are the signature of an engineer, and there are goggles for every kind of death knight.  They also create the best guns you can get before you enter a raiding environment for Hunters, Rogues, and Warriors; this has the potential to make money sometimes, depending on your server.  They can create items that can help revive players, repair items, access your mail, fly helicopters, make motorcycles, escape things, chase things, find things, stall things…

Engineering is a profession based on completely changing the feel of your class.  It’s not a profession, it’s a lifestyle.

The cons to engineering are proportionate to the pros.  Because of all the extra stuff engineers get, they do not have a high potential to make money.  In addition, engineering is very slow to level, requires many materials outside of mining to maximize your engineering skill, and has lower head on benefits (such as stats) than other professions such as jewelcrafting.

In short, engineers are eccentric, funny, full of surprises, and flat out broke more often than not.

Crafting a path is your job

The Crafting professions are notably harder than the Gathering professions.  All three of the professions I’ve explained here are good for Death Knights of any kind, and I heartily recommend all of them.  The choice is really up to you, dear reader.

Related posts:

1. Death Knight Gathering Professions
2. Working On My Death Knight
3. The Three Original Death Knight Trinkets

But you don’t have a job, do you?

Not to worry! Death Knights have a variety of professions they can pick from, so I’ll give you a breakdown of which ones to look at so that your plutonium wielding, rune illiterate Death Knight can actually do something other than kill people.

For starters, let’s look at the manual labour positions.

GATHERING PROFESSIONS

Mining
Mining is (on most servers) the gathering profession that gives the most money.  Not only that, but it gives a stamina bonus to your character when your mining skill reaches a certain level.  The stamina bonus is actually pretty hefty: 50 stamina once your skill reaches 450.  This makes mining a powerful profession for tanking and PvP Death Knights.  Even if you’re a damage dealing (DPS) Death Knight you might want to pick this up as it gives a huge revenue.

Skinning
Skinning can be used to make money, although you’re going to have to kill a lot of beasts to make as much money as a miner.  Not that any of you Death Knights have a problem with that, right?

The fun part of being a Skinner is the increased Critical Strike rating it gives based on your skill level, much like the Mining stamina bonus.  It currently gives 32 critical strike rating, which isn’t a terrible amount at all.  For DPS and PvP Death Knights, this bonus can be very beneficial to you.  Tanking Death Knights won’t see as much output from Skinning so they might want to pass.

Herbalism
Herbalism is for you Death Knights who are a bit more… passive.  Instead of smashing rocks and mashing animals, you daintily pick up flowers.  Despite just how un-Death Knightlike the profession is, it’s normally a big money maker.  This is especially true on servers where a large number of raiders are present: Potions, Flasks, and glyphs don’t make themselves you know.  Herbs are needed in 2 very important raiding professions, so if you know your server has a lot of raiders, this profession might be for you.

Like the other two gathering professions, Herbalism has a bonus.  Unlike the other two, the bonus is an activated spell called Lifeblood.  Lifeblood can be used whenever you like, and is a self targeted Heal over Time (HoT) spell that becomes more powerful the higher your Herbalism skill is.  With 450 Herbalism, Lifeblood heals 2,000 hit points.  For PvP and Tanking Death Knights, this bonus is a very welcome one.  DPS Death Knights won’t see as much use out of it, but it’s still nice to have.

So Which Is Right For You?

Like most of this game, all of this depends on what you want to do.  Do you want to make boatloads of money, or do you want to deal the most damage you possibly can?

One way to help make this choice is to decide what kind of Death Knight you’re going to be.  As an example, say you want to be a DPS Death Knight.  The obvious way to make your Death Knight do more damage is to pick up skinning.  What a tanking Death Knight? Mining would be a great way to go since it gives a great stamina bonus, or herbalism for the extra heal.

By knowing in advance what type of Death Knight you’re going to be, choosing a gathering profession can be very simple.  It’s also a great way to make money, since all 3 professions gather the materials the crafting professions need.

Next time, I’ll talk about the crafting professions for the job seeking, death dealing, and disease ridden Death Knight.

Related posts:

1. Working On My Death Knight
2. Death Knight Addons
3. The Three Original Death Knight Trinkets