Do you suffer from buttonitus? (I'm amused that word didn't trip a spell-check alert.) Symptoms of this dreaded disease include having more spells and abilities than you have buttons, exploring assorted action bar add-ons that allow you to have more buttons than the default UI, and overall general frustration. Although this plague is not limited to a single class in World of Warcraft, hunters in particular have it worse than most.

In addition to the usual combat abilities, the shots, the traps, and whatever other profession-based buttons a hunter may have setup they have an added burden: tracking skills. I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that nobody can track as many different kinds of things as hunters, especially if the hunter is a miner or herbalist as well, or even a dwarf.

So, listen to me hunters (and others). Look at your action bars and all the tracking skills you have hot-keyed there. Now describe to me in a hundred words or less (in the comments section if you wish) the happy dance you will launch into if you could reclaim each and every one of those buttons and use them for something else. Allow me to introduce you to Fizzwidget's Trackmenu.

Installation of the add-on could not be simpler. Simply open it in your archiver of choice and extract the folder into your \Addons folder as per usual. Then launch World of Warcraft and look where the tracking indicator used to be on your mini-map. In it's place is the Trackmenu button. Click this button, and a list of all your tracking skills will drop down allowing you to make a selection. Unless there are some you want to hot-key you can now safely remove all your tracking abilities from action bars.

Enjoy one of my absolute favourite add-ons. You can look forward to further reviews of other Fizzwidget products in the future. He's got what you need!

We are back at our happy little camp of the power source spot in the press area to liveblog the WoW Professions and Items panel with Tom Chilton, Travis Day and Jon LeCraft.

Updated: This post has been cleaned up and extensively added to after it was partially eaten by a technical error.

Liveblog after the jump.

While some may argue that World of Warcraft doesn't have enough professions, there are enough choices to leave any new player at a loss when it comes to selecting one for the first time. So today we're going to discuss the good and bad of the game's ten primary professions and six secondary professions -- and hopefully give you the knowledge to make some informed decisions next time you need to chose a profession for yourself.

Interested in knowing a bit more about the game's professions? Keep reading! Want to tell us which professions you find the most useful (and why)? Leave us a comment!

Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.


Laugh all you like – for a sizable population of WoW players, an enchant's not worth the mats it takes unless it creates a cool glow. A long-time enchanter, I've made my share of snarky remarks in guild chat about dorky customers bringing me mats for completely inappropriate enchants on completely inappropriate weapons ... But then again, back in the day (ok -- way back in the day), I also made sure to equip an alternate staff enchanted with Demonslaying every time I zoned into town. Watch the peons swarm to see what the Great and Powerful Enchanter (TM) is wielding!

You'd probably be pretty surprised to learn that there is, in fact, an entire web site devoted to helping enchanters and players figure out which enchants make the coolest glows. GlowChart.com, the brainchild of Cordana of the Detheroc realm, offers screenshots of specific glows, lists of available enchants and their effects, and news on newly updated Burning Crusade-era glows.

Read more about glows after the jump, as well as an Insider Trader tip for miners trying to track elusive greyed-out "ghost nodes."

Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Need more bag space? It's a completely rhetorical question for most WoW players. Blizzard's tight rein on player bag space is a perfect example of what I only somewhat jokingly refer to as WoW's "relentless tuning." And nobody feels the pinch quite so strongly as professions addicts -- crafters whose bags are full of little bits of this and that for making, well, even more of this and that.

Specialty bags to the rescue! Crafters have access to a whole host of beefier bags designed especially for holding crafting materials. These player-made bags do have some drawbacks. You can only carry one at a time on your person, and since they only hold profession-related items, they do cut down on the space you have for general inventory. You'll undoubtedly catch yourself snarling at the banker when tussling with the specifics of what items will and won't go into these bags -- but for all their prissy limitations, you'll come across some sweet surprises, too.

No discussion of specialty bags would be complete without a mention of player-made ammo bags and soul shard bags for warlocks, too. We'll include details on those containers at the end of this article.

Whenever I hear the phrase in that title, I think of one of my very favorite children's books.

ANYWAY, this Breakfast Topic is entirely selfish. Lately, I've continued to try and build up enough gold to get my epic mount, as well as bring my alchemy skill up, so I've been doing lots and lots of farming lately.

And I've come up with a few tips for doing it-- watch a movie while I'm at it, make circles around zones that have exactly what I want (Felwood, Un'goro, and Hellfire Peninsula have been great for Herbalism, but I've never done Mining or farmed for Tailoring items or Motes), and make sure to pick up bags meant for crafting items, so I have enough room to haul what I need.

So what tips have you picked up for farming? Some people are crazy about it-- I know my guildleader has done it for hours, getting both mining mats and herbs for our guild-- and surely they know lots of inside stuff that us casual players take a long time to pick up. What would you recommend to someone who heads out into Azeroth and Outland looking for nature's gifts?

Just like in real life, in WoW, some jobs are harder than others. Gathering professions tend to be pretty easy and lucrative -- it doesn't take a lot of effort to wander around and gather stuff, particularly herbs. Skinning's a little tougher, but at least you get to control how many "nodes" you have by killing everything. Mining is widely considered to be annoying because of the intense competition for nodes, but it can also make you a lot of cash.

The crafting professions are much, much harder, and tend to require a significant gold investment. I've only been an alch/herb up to 375, so everything else is based on friends and guildmates.

Alchemy ... well, alchemy is easy. It doesn't require a lot of materials, the recipes are usually easy to find, and everyone loves the guild alchemists. Enchanting has the major negative of depending mostly on the kindness of strangers, most of whom want you to enchant their gear for free, but at least you can get the mats free by disenchanting your old gear. Tailoring has cheap mats, but you need a lot of them. Jewelcrafting is apparently difficult without mining, easy with it. Blacksmithing can apparently be really easy or really hard, depending on your luck (and your patterns!)

The two professions reported to be the "worst" -- both in terms of leveling and overall usefulness -- are leatherworking and engineering. Leatherworking from 350 up is a giant pain, since you need rare patterns, and you don't make a lot of money from LW unless you get hard-to-find epic patterns. Engineering requires a lot of rare materials and is just largely useless. However, on the pain-to-level scale, nothing beats fishing. I would seriously rather beat my head against a wall than fish for more than five minutes these days. Admittedly, it doesn't cost money, but the cost in brain cells is far too great.

What do you think is the hardest profession to level? What about leveling time vs. usefulness at 70?

Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a slacker.

My resto shaman is definitely my main, and he's very, very helpful-- he can heal like a priest, DPS close to a mage (or at least a well geared moonkin), and he's even got Mana Tide totem and that always useful Earth Shield. But one thing he doesn't have... is a 375 profession.

He's an herb/alch, and therein lies the rub: I can't collect anything. Skinning, I'm great at-- I've gotten multiple toons to 375 skinning, just because it's so easy to take a second after a kill to skin. First aid, I rock, because there's so much cloth around-- my 63 rogue is already at 375. But mining and herbalism, I just can't seem to get done. By the time I level out of a zone, I haven't picked up enough herbs to get my skill up, and eventually I'm leveling near herbs that are red to me. Now I'm leveling a blood elf mage, and she's having the same problem with jewelcrafting-- I'm not finding the mine nodes on my normal journey, and as a result I'm falling behind.

A high end guild would probably have kicked me out by now for not bringing potions to raids (fortunately, my guild is very forgiving). But it is wrong of me to show up to a raid empty-handed just because I've been lazy. So what's the problem here? Am I missing some secret method of collecting as I level up? I do forget to turn on my tracking sometimes, although I know there are addons out there that will help with that. Unfortunately, since I've already hit 70, it looks like I'm just going to have to go back and grind it out, but maybe that's the best way to do it. Did you level your collecting profession while you were leveling or did you do it all in one big run? And what tips do you have for me to keep me from slacking off in the future?

The idea of a profession system isn't unique to WoW. Most MMOs have some sort of crafting available to their players, usually with a high degree of risk -- you can fail and lose your materials, or even take damage or die. By comparison, WoW's profession system is forgiving. You always succeed at making things and never lose mats. But a lot of people still don't like professions, and consider them a waste of time and money -- particularly crafting professions like leatherworking and engineering, where there's not that much of a market for the products in end-game.

Personally, I love professions. One of my favorite things about starting an alt is looking through the professions and figuring out which one I should level up. My main is alchemy/herbalism, which I adore because it gives me a way to help a group as a rogue. My recently resurrected warlock alt is tailoring and extremely low-level mining, which I'm having fun leveling up to BC standards. The next alt I make will probably get jewelcrafting just so I can try it out.

Do you like the profession system? Which professions do you think can use improvement, and which are the most fun to level?

There's rare as in "hard to find," and then there's rare as in "nonexistent." Some players were wondering which one Khorium, a new mineable metal in the expansion, and the rarest metal in the game, was, after a few of them leveled all the way to 375 mining without seeing one node of it pop up.
Neth first said it was spawning as normal (very, very rarely). Apparently it's a rare spawn from Fel Iron or Adamantite nodes, but players just weren't seeing it come up at all, or seeing it come up very, very rarely-- as in one node every few hours. Finally, earlier yesterday, Tseric acknowledged that the rate was spawning lower than intended, and a hotfix was planned and pushed. When players still complained that they weren't finding it, Tseric said one more fix was on the way, and so Khorium should now be back in the game and spawning as normal.

Now, fixed in three days isn't bad for a bug, and now that it's back in the game, there's really no problem. But didn't anyone in beta hit 375 mining? How did they not catch this one?

Enough miners and herbalists have complained about having to depend on random spawns -- and compete with gold farmers -- that Blizzard has finally put in a way for these two professions to control their own destiny.

Several mobs, including rock giants in Hellfire Peninsula and nature elementals in Zangarmarsh and Coilfang Reservoir, can be "skinned" for ores and herbs, just as if they were a node. While running through the Underbog in Coilfang Reservoir Thursday night, I got a couple of Ragveils, a Terocone, some quest herbs, and a few useless gray mushrooms from skinning the elite Loatheb-like marsh elementals inside. The skinning results are kind of random, and the mobs will be farmed as easily as the herb spawn points were, but it's still an interesting new way of getting your base materials.

Have you found anything else while "skinning" for herbs and ores? If so, what and where?

I must admit, I don't dabble a lot in the professions. In fact, I have only leveled mining, herbalism, alchemy and tailoring to 300. Some of my alts are low level leatherworkers or enchanters, but I have never really given the other professions, especially the crafting ones, a chance.

Perhaps that is because of my bad experience with tailoring. I picked up tailoring to make my priest the Truefaith Vestments after I lucked into the pattern on a Live Strat run. I made some OK money selling bags, then the bag market fell through the floor on my server. To make matters worse, a lot of the best tailoring items were (at the time) bind on pickup. Ouch. That made it awfully hard to raise money.

Now I have had the opposite experience with herbalism and its little brother, alchemy. I have always been able to make good money, and what I create is generally very useful for myself and my guildies. Flowers for the win.

What about you guys? Any favorite profession? Any profession you pretend doesn't exist?

Some of this has been categorized as rumor before, but now there's official word on some updates for existing professions. All crafting professions can expect new recipes and all gathering professions can expect new types of item to gather, but there are a few interesting tidbits mentioned as well.

• Alchemy will have specializations that will occasionally allow the player two create two of their specialization's items. (Potions, elixirs, and transmutations.)
• Blacksmiths will be given powerful bind on pickup items for their specialization. These items will be upgradable to keep up with the blacksmith's progression in the game. (Nope, there are no further details on this yet.)
• Enchantments now seem to have a minimum level requirement (based on the sample enchants being shown) and there will be new enchants for rings in the game.
• Engineers are promised "many new and intense gadgets" but I'm not personally impressed by any of the previewed items.
• Herbalists can expect to find plant-based monsters beyond the Dark Portal from which a trained herbalist will be able to harvest herbs, much like a skinner skins beasts.
• Jewelcrafting will, as we know, allow for the creation of necklaces, rings, trinkets, and socketable gems. If you match the color of the gems to the color of the sockets on a socketed item, you'll receive an additional bonus from them.
• Leatherworking will offer more high-end armor options, with claims of viable crafted gear to help you venture into end-game dungeons.
• Miners will also find some creatures of the Outlands to yield harvestable minerals when killed.
• Tailoring is set to have its own specializations, though there's no announcement on what these will be, the specializations will allow the creation of multiple items occasionally, like alchemy. Most interesting, however, are the tailor-made (and tailoring skill required to use) nets that can be used to capture targets for several seconds.
  

[Thanks, Bonemouse!]

Last week we made a post about what sorts of benefits various gems could provide when inserted into socketed items (all rumor, of course), but a jewelcrafter will be able to do more than simply cut gems for socketing. Jewelcrafters will also be able to create necklaces, rings, and trinkets -- and if this list on World of Raids is right, some other armor slots, as well. All of the items have interesting effects, and all I have to say is Truesilver Boar ftw! Read on if you don't feel up to scrolling through all of World of Raids' profession information to find jewelcrafting.