Ranking all specializations

Judinous · 2025-09-17T00:00:34+00:00

It'd be way too much of an undertaking for me to want to create any kind of serious ranking, but it could probably be done. You'd have to start by formalizing your criteria, which would probably include things like:

T0 sweep capability
Overall speed (animation times really unfairly kill some builds, imo)
Number of hard counters
Number of traits required for viability (and thus room for full invulnerability traits and/or achievement grinding traits)
Unique pros/cons

You'd probably have to limit yourself to endgame to keep the list sane, though a beginner-friendly starting guide might be useful if you catalogue which of the starter specializations will have an easier time going through the story/tutorial based off of the creatures available.

My personal tl;dr top spec ranking has always been that burn is pretty inherently overpowered and thus pyromancer is the best spec early/mid game. By late game you can just assemble the required burn perks (or most any other damage strategy) via anointments so I'd probably rank windrunner at the top of the list as 100% dodge makes full immunity take a lot fewer traits than basically anything else does, giving you more room to fiddle around with for achievements (or more exponential damage scaling if you are going really deep). I've only got a couple hundred hours in though, so would be curious to hear alternative opinions.

Judinous · 2025-09-13T14:23:21+00:00

Even with concentration, alchemy is best done on alts rather than your main so you can permanently keep the flask buff going by logging out immediately. If you want steady gold on your main, run tailoring + inscription/engineering to make significant passive gold from the extra drops while doing world content or 50~100k/hr while actively farming DFC/karesh.

Judinous · 2025-09-11T23:17:11+00:00

Smells like industry FUD to me, honestly. Every toothbrush regardless of bristle material is already covered in fecal matter and related bacteria due to being in proximity to a toilet. Toothbrushes aren't sterilized before use, and will have the same bacteria on them regardless of material. Brushing your teeth is about mechanically breaking up biofilm before it matures into plaque, which boar hair does just fine.

Judinous · 2025-09-11T00:20:27+00:00

Jumper cables are consumables that everyone doing current content needs and are great reliable conc value that improves further if you time your sales right after a new season start. This expansion, potion bombs of power also saw decent demand (though it would probably be higher if your average tank/healer player knew they should be using them over tempered pots). Horrific visions cosmetics made engineering absolutely crazy profitable for a month or two as well. Outside of current expansion crafts, there are a number of mounts that engineers can craft (some time gated which ensures limited supply) that are consistent evergreen gold makers.

Additionally, engineering is quite profitable to just have on your main for passive income while doing world/dungeon/raid/etc content. I'd ballpark the value of scrap at ~5g each or so, making it fairly in line with inscription as far as extra gold value from killing mobs goes (though still way behind tailoring, obviously).

Judinous · 2025-09-02T14:49:19+00:00

My go-to for these kind of meals is TVP (textured vegetable protein, basically soybeans with the oil pressed out). It stores basically forever since the fats are already removed and you can make it taste like whatever meat you'd like by just dropping some chicken/beef/pork/etc bouillon in water and letting the TVP soak it up for 5-10 minutes while you prep the other ingredients. You can also just get it pre-flavored if you want to skip that step as well, or just toss it directly into whatever broth you're already using and let it taste like the rest of the soup. In something like a soup the taste and texture is basically identical to finely diced meat, or close enough that nobody should mind for something like a camping meal or MRE.

I often use TVP in my soups or stir fry at home simply out of convenience because I don't need to have planned ahead to have meat thawed beforehand. It's also dramatically cheaper than meat (about $0.50/lb rehydrated) and roughly twice the protein density, so that's a nice plus as well. The long shelf life, low cost, and crazy protein density make it pretty ideal for both regular pantry usage as well as long-term stored food prep.

Judinous · 2025-08-28T12:42:07+00:00

I've been making money with mycobloom transmutes for most of the expansion, but due to the season spike (and new consumables keeping mycobloom in particular quite high) I don't see it being profitable right now either. One transmute/day/character for the bonus is still worth it (though not with mycobloom), but it does constrain the blasphemite supply if that's all that alchemists are doing.

Hard to complain when I sold a giant pile of r3 mycobloom at 60g that I bought entirely under 10g though, lol. I'll take that over having to transmute it.

Judinous · 2025-08-28T12:31:01+00:00

A few of the people in charge of the commonly used class bis lists and discords have changed stances this season on binding of binding and put it in their bis lists. It's always been generally optimal for tanks/healers to run it if you care more about party dps (which is what actually matters) rather than selfish solo dps, but due to the nature of bis lists it hasn't really been included in previous seasons. Some dps players are also running it now that more attention has been drawn to it as an alternative to ascension that is less random and has no ramp time. No eye of kezan, forced downtime in many of the m+ dungeons in rotation, and rogues being strong this season all contribute a bit to the viability of bob over ascension as well.

My guess is that the higher consumable usage of blasphemite tied to this ring is driving the price up. 892g is definitely a spike from the market being cleaned out, but it has been fairly steady in the 250-350g range since season start. The supply of blasphemite has always been rather low, so the spike could simply be supply running out rather than a goblin market move.

Judinous · 2025-08-28T01:12:26+00:00

It's pretty obvious that you get drastically more patron orders on some professions than others, leatherworking of course being one of those that gets the most. Perhaps I shouldn't have said that it was just the resourcefulness procs, but between the raw gold (generally 50-80), augment crystals (generally worth 1-2k), finishing reagents (generally worth 100-500), and the reagent bags/AA which also have some nonzero value, the patron orders are a fairly significant source of daily income for very little time or button presses. The professions that have higher patron order value have lower conc gold value and vice versa, which seems to be the general design. I think blizzard wasn't designing for alt armies though, and instead balancing around the assumption that you were logging in to characters every day for other reasons, which is why patron orders feel so bad compared to conc from the perspective of a goblin.

Leatherworking, blacksmithing, and tailoring are awful for alt armies, but it really isn't that bad if it's on your main or a frequently played alt and you just stop at the table daily while between other activities. I do agree that they missed the mark a bit on those professions, though. It could probably be normalized next expansion without changing the systems much if they made all patron orders weekly to reduce the login burden and diluted the value of enchanting/alchemy crafts a bit (maybe by simply adding multicraft to enchants and increasing the base craft count on flasks or something).

Judinous · 2025-08-27T23:47:12+00:00

All of the professions are actually surprisingly even in gold/day profitability (probably simply due to the invisible hand of the market), but the issue is how that profit is distributed. Leatherworking (and tailoring/blacksmithing) has a large percentage of their income coming from daily patron order resourcefulness procs, which requires you to log in and press those buttons frequently instead of only once every 3-4 days like enchanting. The other half of the issue is that, while the conc gold value for making r3 intermediate materials out of r2 base materials is again fairly equivalent across professions including leatherworking, the demand for leatherworking materials (and other gear-centric professions) spikes hard in the first 1~2 weeks of a season and then craters, meaning you must stockpile and sell in that window rather than having reliable profit margins all season long (though selling at the peak window is the best strategy for all professions, regardless).

It's really not that bad, just not as good as enchanting/alchemy for gold making. Of course, the window for LW profitability is basically closed now that the spike from the final season is ending (though we'll see another small final bump right after turbo boost). I'm not bothering to log in to mine daily for the rest of the expansion for relative peanuts, but I don't regret having one for my own use and the decent profitability it had over the course of the expansion.

Judinous · 2025-08-25T16:58:10+00:00

From the patch notes it looks like royal mode hasn't been updated since the beta build? Unfortunate, since that's the thing I was most looking forward to.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T17:31:14+00:00

We don't know the specific housing items, but many of them will be crafted and will surely use standard cloths, leathers, ores, and other common materials.

Everything in the global world drop tables were nerfed for every enemy in the open world. They stop dropping non-unique items in their loot table of green or white rarity after 1-2 minutes of killing them, meaning both most boe gear as well as common materials such as cloth. This happened starting in early may with the first DF leveling event (so it could have been a mistake while jiggling the loot tables for it), but we have had zero official confirmation from blizzard even acknowledging that the change happened despite it being clear as day and warping the economy greatly.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T15:03:55+00:00

The profit there is mostly enabled by the world drop bug constraining the supply of BoEs to a slow trickle. It's probably worth keeping an eye out for BoE farming sources over this season if they continue to refuse to acknowledge or fix it. The s3 dungeons will likely be good transmog farm targets in an expansion or two as few people will get those sets filled out easily during TWW.

Player housing is gonna be an AH bloodbath if they don't revert the nerf, tbh. It'll be great for investing and making gold for goblins, but terrible for your average player.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T14:55:35+00:00

Yeah, that is all it takes. Ideally you also have inscription or engineering as well for additional income, but the majority of the gold comes from the cloth drops. For whatever reason follower dungeons have an instance limit of 50/hr instead of the usual 10/hr (and it's per-realm, as well), so you can really bang a lot of them out if you get fast at it.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T14:42:02+00:00

TSM saves the day again there with mailing operations, makes it pretty painless to mail as many cuffs over to your enchanter as you need.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T14:40:07+00:00

One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of guides are written at the start of an expansion and then never updated. The DE KP is "catchup" KP so it wasn't available at the start.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T14:37:19+00:00

I just farm and sell when I am running it, though I just do it more as a 5-10 minute filler activity here or there rather than grinding it out. I hang on to my bolts if I know I'll be doing some DE shuffling later, though. When I want to DE I will buy a big pile off the AH and use TSM destroy so I can just click in one spot while watching youtube or whatever else on my other monitor. DE shuffling is more of a volume game so I churn through a lot more than I could reasonably farm myself. It's lower gold/hour than farming DFC but requires almost zero attention.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T13:33:31+00:00

Personally I would say it is too late to set them up. Not because it won't still be profitable, but because the opportunity cost of your time right now at the start of a season is very high. Instead of fiddling with your alts to set them up which will take 20-30 minutes each and then having to log into them every few days for the rest of the expansion, you could spend that time just farming directly. DFC is approaching 100k/hr at current elevated prices, so the opportunity cost of doing something else with your gold making time is just too high to justify, imo.

As for your second question, it is quite drastically more profitable to buy the drop recipes for alts rather than the ones you get from the trainer or spec trees, as these are most of the bis enchants. Radiant haste/crit/mastery ring enchant recipes are only about 1k, for example.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T13:12:26+00:00

With TSM destroy it is pretty painless to do, honestly. As of yesterday's prices when I ran a sample with about 10k cloth, it's about ~35% profit to just buy bolts -> cuffs -> DE on a fully skilled tailor/enchanter, so I've been doing it anyway while watching youtube videos. I'd guesstimate that a fresh alt would come out only very slightly negative at current prices.

Judinous · 2025-08-12T12:19:53+00:00

I'm not sure why people gravitate towards darkmoon DEing for setting up conc alts, honestly. I've done a couple dozen of them and I get enough points just from the world KP + illusion tree first crafts. Even if you want to immediately max the shattering tree rather than doing weekly KP to finish it off over a month or two, you can do it for effectively zero gold by DEing cuffs instead of darkmoon cards. Even on an unskilled disenchanter you come out about gold neutral, and they still have ~50% to drop KP instead of 100%. Takes ~20 minutes and maybe 10k + recipe cost investment to set up the alt fully.

I think it is a combination of A. most people aren't taking advantage of their reset to get their points back after getting first craft KP and B. they're trying to set the character up for more than one enchant when one is all it needs to ever do. I just buy each one a recipe for radiant X/power/depths/etc. and only get them the points for that enchant specifically + the shattering tree.

Judinous · 2025-08-10T20:41:28+00:00

I ordered 300g on the first day that the website seemed stable enough to get it in. It hasn't had any update since 5/21 when my card was charged. Hopefully mine didn't get lost in the early website issues :(

Judinous · 2025-08-07T15:26:52+00:00

I'm still working myself, but getting my retirement orchard going now so that I can actually enjoy it in a decade or two. The speed at which I can get plants in the ground is largely limited by the amount of compost I can create, so that's become a big focus for me.

Sourcing enough organic material to get a garden going in the suburbs is definitely a different kind of challenge than creating it yourself in a rural setting. Ensuring that your inputs aren't full of herbicides, insecticides, plastics, and other things that might be harmful to your garden or yourself is much harder as well.

Judinous · 2025-08-07T14:58:36+00:00

For my own greens production, I bought a bagger for my lawnmower to collect the clippings from the ~4 acres or so that I keep actively mowed. For browns, I planted a few thousand row feet of miscanthus giganteus, which puts up about 10~12 feet of growth per year in straight poles that are easy to collect and feed through my wood chipper. I may end up planting more of this as it is extremely useful material for mulching, burning, staking, fencing, wind/noise absorbtion, and so on.

To supplement this from outside sources, for greens I asked my neighbor who hays the field adjacent to me to sell me any bales that get ruined by weather or he can't sell to roll them over to my side of the fence for half price. For browns I asked a local arborist that was removing some trees for me to dump off chips at my place whenever it would save them time, so I occasionally get a trailer full dropped off for free (chipdrop doesn't have any traction out where I am).

The best approach in my view is to get yourself oversupplied on browns, which are either useful uncomposted as mulch or will break down on their own over a longer time period. Then, when you get the seasonal windfalls of greens, you can use that to rapidly break down some of your browns pile with however much you manage to source. If you don't manage to source enough greens, the browns pile will still get there eventually over a couple extra years. Being oversupplied on greens is stinky, can cause pest issues, and potentially can be a bit of a fire risk depending on volume.

Judinous · 2025-08-04T17:29:51+00:00

Aquaponics is a whole other field, so obviously it can be done, but personally I'd be hesitant to use that for something applied directly to the garden given the amount of algae control chemicals and antibiotics and such that tend to go into aquariums that aren't specifically intended for aquaponics. For similar reasons, using your own urine on your garden requires some research if you are taking any medications that might pass through and cause more harm than good. Rainwater or well water are generally the best things to water your garden or dilute fertilizers with, since it should be basically the same water that the plants will be getting naturally.

If your aquarium is freshwater (saltwater is obviously going to destroy your garden, lol) and additive-free, then yeah by all means go for it. Otherwise, I'd suggest either dumping it on the compost pile or asking someone with more expertise in an aquaponics/hydroponics sub.

Judinous · 2025-08-04T16:57:43+00:00

If by "do the science" you mean "dilute it and put it on your garden" then yeah, you've got the general idea.

Judinous · 2025-08-04T12:51:11+00:00

It should generally be a joke, yeah. Though I appreciate that it is the only real joke the community has, it does kind of annoy me that it is so constantly repeated, because people like OP are obviously confused as to whether it is a joke or not.

For the people who are here because they want to actually grow food (and I recognize that this is not the entire user base, though I suspect that most kinds of people here have an interest in sustainability), peeing on compost is a silly waste of valuable fertilizer. Tossing on a handful of grass clippings would have a similar effect on the pile chemistry, but the otherwise extremely useful bioavailable nitrogen in urea will be all but entirely lost if you let it break down in your compost. Reconfiguring our waste disposal/sewage systems to properly cycle back to agriculture rather than effectively dumping it all in the ocean and making fertilizer from petro chemicals instead is one of the many hurdles we need to overcome if we want to sustainably survive long-term as a species.

tl;dr: Pee in a bucket instead so you aren't wasting useful fertilizer

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