Professions Revamp in BFA

The short version:

Professions in Battle for Azeroth are going to be reworked in the following way: You'll have a separate skill level for each expansion's content, going up to 100. The great part of this is that if you've been neglecting your professions while leveling up (or just found it hard to keep up without farming or buying materials on the auction house,) you'll get a soft reset each time you go to a new continent. The perhaps less good part is that you won't be getting skill levels that are useful for old content by doing new content.

In Legion, with few exceptions for "prestige" items like mounts and such, skill level was sort of irrelevant - you had a quest chain to learn most recipes, and you could easily take, say, your Demon Hunter, and get them skilled up from 1 entirely in Broken Isles content.

Being able to effectively mine, gather herbs, or skin at a low skill level, as well as having recipes that skilled you up quickly and effectively, made professions much less of a pain in Legion. On the flip side, because none of it was skill-based, it did mean that you would need to perform quest tasks to fill out your recipe list, and some recipes were hidden behind infuriatingly rare drop rates (I still haven't gotten by Broken Isles teleporter recipe.)

I'm curious to see how BFA handles skill levels in its future content. Presumably we'll see a Wrath-era recipe that previously required a skill of 400 will now require 25, as Wrath's profession range was originally 375-450 (or maybe 350-450, as I think they started having a catch-up overlap in Wrath.)

What this means is that you might not be able to get all your BFA recipes without crafting anything, but the fact that we're effectively all starting at Kul Tiras/Zandalar skill 1 means that new alts and old mains are going to be on even footing going in.

Catching up on professions has been a huge issue with the game since they started releasing expansions. They've done some interesting experiments to try to fix this issue - personally, teleporter notwithstanding, I've liked the way it's been handled in Legion. But this is a pretty radical redesign. It makes me think of the way that Cataclsym saw a serious rework of talent points before Mists just threw out the old system and implemented the new one.

I suspect that in the long run, professions are going to feel more or less the same, but this should make it less of a pain for your Mag'har Rogue to work on her alchemy skill while leveling up through Pandaria.