Shadowlands Professions: Overview

Professions in Shadowlands will be significantly different than how they worked in Battle for Azeroth. This page provides an overview of the new items and professions changes in Shadowlands.

Table of Contents

Recipe Ranks

In Shadowlands, most recipes only have one rank, and you can learn most of them from your trainer. Only a few recipes are gated behind reputations. This makes leveling professions much easier since you don't have to grind reputations to get higher rank recipes.

You can get most recipes with a level 50 alt. Only the new Legendary recipes and the recipes from reputation vendors require level 60.

Shadowlands Reputation Gated Recipes

These are the new profession recipes in Shadowlands, which are locked behind Reputation.

All crafting professions

Alchemy

Blacksmithing

Cooking

Enchanting

Engineering

Inscription

Jewelcrafting

Leatherworking

Tailoring

Shadowlands Optional Reagents

Optional reagents are new types of reagents that can change the item level and the secondary stats of the items you craft. You can probably guess from its name, but it isn't required to fill the Optional Reagent slot when you create something. You can craft an item with no optional reagents, or you can fill as many Optional Reagents slots as you prefer.

Secondary Stat Changing Optional Reagents

These Optional reagents basically let you choose which secondary stats you want on an item, instead of just getting two random stats. (you can't use two from the same stat)

All 4 of these below are crafted by Scribes.

Item Level Changing Optional Reagents

These reagents change the item level of a crafted armor or weapon. (You can actually downgrade an item's item level and its level requirement if you use a lower level optional reagent)

These 3 optional reagents below can only be used to craft items from Shadowlands. All 8 manufacturing professions can craft these.

Crafting Shadowlands Legendary Items

Crafting your own Legendary Armor is one of the new features in the Shadowlands expansion. The Legendary armors require 4 different components before you can craft them, and one of them is the Base item (Rune Vessel) that determine the slot you are making your armor for, and the item level of your armor. These base items are crafted by players with Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, or Jewelcrafting professions.

Base items can be bought and sold at the Auction House, so you don't have to have these professions. You can just buy the base item.

I will only cover the items crafted by profession here, but you can check out my full Shadowlands Legendary Gear crafting guide.

Where to learn Shadowlands Legendary Recipes?

Once you reach 100 in Shadowlands Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, or Jewelcrafting, the Runecarver will offer you one of these quests:

Read my Shadowlands Legendary Gear crafting guide to learn how to unlock the Runecarver.

Full list of Base items

How to craft higher ilvl Legendary Items?

Every base item has four ranks, and 3 of them will have their own little experience bar. You will gain experience each time you craft a base item, and once you fill the experience bar, you will learn the next rank. Crafting a higher rank base item will give more experience.

Higher rank base items also require a lot more materials. A rank 4 item usually costs around 4 times as much as a rank 1.

Rank (ilvl) XP / Craft Total XP for next rank
Rank 1 (iLvl 190) 5 75
Rank 2 (iLvL 210) 10 150
Rank 3 (iLvL 225) 15 225
Rank 4 (iLvL 235) - -

Manufacturing Professions

Alchemy

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Alchemy Guide.

  • All potions now have a 5-minute cooldown, and they are no longer limited to one use per encounter. Combat potions, such as primary stat potions and mana potions are still on a separate cooldown from health potions.

  • Speed, stealth, and invisibility potions from old expansions no longer work above level 50. You will have to use the new Shadowlands potions.

  • Instead of 3 different flasks for each primary stat, the new flask Spectral Flask of Power gives the primary stat (agility/intellect/strength) that your spec uses. There is also a new stamina flask Spectral Flask of Stamina, which is much cheaper to make than the primary stat flask.

  • There are two new Alchemy transmutes Shadestone and Shadowghast Ingot. Both of them have a 1-day cooldown.

    • Shadestone is used for crafting your Alchemy trinket Spiritual Alchemy Stone and the Eternal Cauldron.

    • Shadowghast Ingot is mainly used to craft Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing legendary items and used for some of the higher-level rare Blacksmithing armors. Blacksmiths can make the same item without the 1-day cooldown, so this transmute seems pretty useless right now.

  • Embalmer's Oil and Shadowcore Oil are a new type of consumable buffs that you can apply to your weapon.

Blacksmithing

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Blacksmithing Guide.

  • Blacksmiths can craft base items for Legendary Armors.

  • Shadowghast Ingot is a new crafting material created by Blacksmiths and Alchemists. It is used in Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting recipes.

  • New Weapon mods provide a small Attack Power buff for 1 hour when you apply them to your weapons. Sharpening Stones are used on swords, daggers, axes, polearms, and fist weapons. Weightstones are used on maces and staves.

Cooking

  • There are two tiers of stat foods and feasts, just like in other expansions.
  • Smothered Shank - causing you to periodically breathe fire, dealing 510 damage to enemies in front of you.
  • Seraph Tenders - While out of combat, heal for 1625 every 5 sec for 1 hour.
  • Fried Bonefish - Gain Speed for a short time after killing an enemy. (+20%)

Enchanting

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Enchanting Guide.

Engineering

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Engineering Guide.

  • A new set of ilvl 151 Engineering Goggles.

  • Auctioneer accessible only to Engineers in the new Shadowlands city hub Oribos.

  • New bombs, belt attachments, devices, scopes.

Inscription

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Inscription Guide.

Scribes can craft 4 new Optional reagents. Every single player will want these because they are needed for crafting Shadowlands Legendary Items. These items will probably be good moneymakers through the whole expansion.

Darkmoon Card of Death will create a random Darkmoon Card from one of the four Darkmoon decks, and sometimes you will also get a blank card that you can use to craft a card from a specific deck.

Jewelcrafting

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Jewelcrafting Guide.

  • Jewelcrafters can craft base items for Legendary Necks and Rings.

  • There are now only three base gems colors:

  • You no longer get rare gems from prospecting. Instead, they are created by combining different uncommon base gems.

Leatherworking

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Leatherworking Guide.

  • Leatherworkers can craft base items for mail and leather Legendary Armors.

  • All Drum recipes were nerfed to 15% haste, and you can't use drums from older expansions because they no longer work above level 50. You have to use the new Drums of Deathly Ferocity.

  • New Armor Kit recipes:

Tailoring

You can see the full list of new recipes in my Shadowlands Tailoring Guide.

Gathering Professions

Herbalism

There are 6 new herbs.

Mining

The new ores are a bit different from the ores in previous expansions because 4 of them are zone specific.

Skinning

All skinnable mobs can drop these 5 skinning materials:

Fishing