Quote Originally Posted by ryuplaneswalker View Post
Bull crap. The Utility of the profession has never existed. Mining, Herbalism and Leatherworking were ALWAYS garbage professions to take. Starlight Roses are expensive because HALF of the ones you harvest turn to dust. And why is that? So they have have an arbitrary perk at level 2 which you only get at random. I love how people are blaming "TEH GARRISONZ" on stupid profession decisions.

Here is a hard truth. The Garrisons did not put that much money into the economy. 20K a week? that is chump change compared to farming of old raids. "Garrisons!" are a great scapegoat for something that everyone has known. Gathering professions should have been secondary professions that everyone can take, they should have been that way from the start of the game and there is literally zero reason for them not have been made secondary in the WOD prepatch when they gutted every other profession to make it "more fair" to the people who went gathering.
First of all, the farming of old raids might have been more profitable for amount of gold generated per week, but you could simply not beat them for gold generated per hour of active player time, and while gold-farming Cata raids might have been the proclivity of the particularly motivated, anyone and everyone could easily tool their garrison (or if they were slightly more industrious, every garrison on all their alts) to produce massive amounts of gold in seconds of active play, leaving them free to do whatever else they cared to spend their time doing, yes, even farming Firelands. If you're a player with limited play-time, you don't farm old raids. EVERYONE with a functioning brain had at least one optimized garrison for gold farming. 20k a week may not sound like much, but 20k a week from all 5 million active players for a year adds up to a LOT of money (over 5 trillion gold, more of course, because of alts), and guess what? Most of it wound up in the hands of players selling runs for non-raiders to get their Moose mount, or regular old Goblins. Nobody sells commodities so as to receive them back in the mail, so if they're going for 15k gold, it's because there's someone willing to pay for them.

Second of all, the drop rate is a factor in the relative cost of a reagent, so yeah, high rarity ingredients are going to command more money, but when a single piece of leystone ore, the most common rock in the Broken Isles, is selling for 23 gold (100g for a few swings of a pickaxe on my server), that's not rarity pushing up the price, it's inflation. Anyway, if professions have no utility, then what the heck are you complaining about? Don't do them.