In the background, I have World of Warcraft running as I level my death knight’s professions. I’m following a guide so she can hit 525 blacksmithing as soon as possible. After that, I’ll be grinding out her leatherworking skill, following a guide to minimize my material investment and maximize my skill point gains.

Dammit, I have to buy ten stacks of iron bars, and they cost 20 gold each on the auction house. I might have to start doing mining runs on my main if I want to cut costs.

Right now in World of Warcraft, we’re at the end of an expansion, literally hours away from the launch of Mists of Pandaria. I don’t know why I’m bothering to level my professions now when I know the cap will just increase by another 75 points (to 600) in less than a week. I’m just going to have to grind them out when I reach 90 anyway, right? This brings me to the actual question: why do we not like professions? (While this talks largely about WoW, these same ideas can apply to other games with crafting professions.)

Let me begin by saying that my experience with Guild Wars 2 is limited to the beta weekend that took place between April 27, 2012 and April 29, 2012. Since it was a beta weekend, and the game has no official release date, I was obviously only able to experience a work in progress. The final game may be significantly different than the game I saw. The only class, or “profession” as the game refers to it, that I played was the Necromancer and I only reached level 15 before the beta weekend finished. My background in massive multiplayer online (MMO) games comes from playing World of Warcraft since July 2008. I never played the original Guild Wars game. With that in mind, let me tell you what I thought.