The Professions and Items panel provided an incredible amount of information both on the philosophies behind creating them and what we can expect in the future.

A quick consumable introduction showed us that there are now more than 1900 recipes, 945 pieces of armor, 289 consumables and 137 weapons in the game that can be made by players.

The creation of a recipe is a 4 step process that includes questions like "What do we make?", the materials the recipe uses, the skills it requires, and how the recipe will be obtained.

Things that the professions team wants to do more of in the future:

• More "Best In Slot" gear like Blacksmithing weapons, Engineering helms, etc.
  • Alchemist-only potions will be added.
• Create great leveling gear that is competitive with quest rewards, similar to the TBC crafted armor.
• Provide what's missing which fills in itemization gaps whether intentional or not.

Things they want to improve:

• Transmutes
  • Blizzard is looking at making the cooldown a daily reset similar to raid and heroic instance resets where it occurs at a set time, so you can log on at any time of the day and do your transmute.
• Discoveries will be looked at to be improved, as Blizzard feels this is a great mechanic to introduce cool recipes.
• Vendor Recipes
  • It's not fun at all to have to camp a vendor for a recipe and Blizzard knows this. They're going to do away with rare spawn and limited quantity recipes as best they can.
  • Vendors in the future will have large lists of rare and epic items so that finding something on a vendor can be as cool as finding it in the rest of the game world.

Inscription

• Inscription is not like Alchemy or Enchanting. Players will create a tradeable scroll that other players can then use to enhance their spells or abilities.
• Inscription's main purpose is to inscribe spells and abilities with additional power. Some examples given were:
  • Backstab could be enhanced to crit more often.
  • Shadowbolt could be enhanced to do additional damage.
  • Fireball could be enhanced to also cause a knockback effect. (This was a player idea that they felt was cool but probably not likely to happen.)
• Inscription will also allow the player to create completely new items, but this part of the profession isn't fleshed out enough for Blizzard to talk about just yet.

Coming soon:

• Profession Daily Quests for Cooking initially in 2.3 and others will follow suit.
  • Players will receive a crate that has a chance to drop rare food recipes, including:
    • +Melee hit food, +Spell crit food and Storm Chops. Storm Chops will cause you to do additional nature damage to your target as well as doing damage to your attackers.
• New crafter-only gear including Alchemist-only potions and Jewelcrafter-only gems as well as upgrades to current crafter-only gear.
• Smoothing out the progression from 275-300 for all professions. The progression was intended to be challenging when 300 was the cap, but since this isn't the case anymore it's being changed.
• Enchant: Executioner will be added with the Zul'Aman patch. This enchant is an Armor Penetration proc, and is promised to have a glow at least as cool as Mongoose. Its proc allows your attacks to ignore 840 of your target's armor.
• Steady Talasite recipe is being added to Halaa in 2.2 for a cost of 4 Research Tokens.

After that we had a chance to listen to the design philosophy behind item creation and itemization, as well as being given some details on upcoming items and changes.

• TBC doubled the number of uncommon, rare, and epic items in the game.
• PvP shouldn't require raiding, and raiding shouldn't require PvP. Players should be able to focus on what they like, with both choices offering equal but different progression.
• Resilience was added with the purpose of introducing a new defensive mod that worked against everyone and everything, primarily because crit strings and being insta gibbed aren't fun.
• The token system will continue on in Wrath of the Lich King, and some improvements to it will be made.
  • The system made them realize, Hybrid does not mean healer, which then allowed them to introduce different armor sets without penalizing other classes.
  • Tokens allow them to create set bonuses not possible before, including talent-specific bonuses.

Things to come:

• Free spell damage for healers.
• Legendary ranged weapon in the next 25-person raid dungeon.
• Zul'Aman
  • Each class is going to have a full compliment of epics available in the dungeon, some especially tailored for off-spec talent choices.

Q&A Session

Blizzard answered a number of questions about professions and items:

• They're talking about going to an item-based enchanting system with all but the most powerful enchants, allowing enchanters to create an item that is then useable by other players.
• There are no plans to add armor dyes.
• There are no plans to upgrade older Legendary items through quests or any other means.
• They're looking into reworking Spirit for the expansion, possibly by adding in a secondary effect to make it desirable by all classes, not just Priests.
• More Engineering recipes are coming that allow engineers to make items for other players.