Penn’s Ultimate 
Professions Guide 
 - 7/10

Guide last updated: Updated for WotLK
Review last updated: April 11, 2009
Guide suitable for: Anyone who wants to level their professions

Penn’s Ultimate Professions Guide is a profession leveling guide. Its purpose is to help you level up any profession (except the rogue-specific lockpicking skill) from 1 to 450. The guide is updated for 375-450, i.e. for Wrath of the Lich King.

Strong points

The main benefit of this guide is the maps with locations to materials. The guide doesn’t only tell you what to craft to up your skill, but it tells you where to find the materials for those items. This could be fish, ore, herbs, cloth, beasts for skinning and such.

There is a video you can check out on Penn’s site which describes the guide much better.

If I had to complain… 

• There could be more links to stuff you need to purchase from vendors, links to trainers, recipes etc, so you didn’t have to do searches on database sites.
• Some materials do not have maps, so you’ll have to look those up anyway.
• Sometimes it’s better to not collect the materials yourself but buy them from the auction house instead. For example, the guide advises you to farm for some rare drops. The problem is they’re so rare that you can’t reliable farm them! You’ll be spending hours and hours farming for those items, when you could spend some gold on the auction house instead. Experienced players like myself will understand this, but newbies may not.
• Some crafted items are learnt from world drop recipes, in other words quite rare recipes that you can’t reliably farm but have to purchase off the auction house. If there are none on your server, tough luck I guess.
• Since this is a profession leveling guide, it will not teach you everything about professions. The gold making tips for the professions are sometimes as short as one sentence for an entire profession. There is nevertheless an overview of each profession, which helps you choose.

Conclusion

The guide is decent, but it could’ve been better. Honestly, looking some things up on database sites like wowhead.com isn’t that big of a deal, and if you have some experience you’ll be able to tell which materials to purchase and which ones to farm. Still, I feel it could use some polishing.

Click here for more information on Penn’s Ultimate Professions Guide.