Leveling a profession from 1 to 100 in The War Within looks intimidating because the mats cost real gold and Knowledge Points feel scarce. But the cheapest path is rarely "craft whatever the trainer shows you." It's a sequence: bank your free Knowledge first, craft the right low-quality items in bulk, and only spend gold on the gaps. Here is exactly how to do that without bleeding your wallet.

Knowledge Points are the real currency, not gold

Every War Within profession runs on Knowledge Points (KP), and the cheapest leveling path is the one that maximizes free KP before you craft a single bar of leveling junk. KP raises the quality ceiling of your crafts, and quality is what gives big skill ticks. A grey-quality craft might give you 1 skill point; a 3-star version of the same recipe can give 5.

Before you grind, collect these one-time free sources:

  • Profession Master quests in Dornogal and across the four zones — each treatise turn-in and intro questline hands you KP and recipes.
  • Weekly Treatises, crafted by scribes (Inscription) — buy one per profession per week off the Auction House, usually for a few hundred gold, for a guaranteed +1 KP.
  • Hidden Profession Masters and gathering nodes that drop one-time KP items (e.g. rare herbs, "Bismuth" deposits, and treasure chests scattered through Isle of Dorn, The Ringing Deeps, Hallowfall and Azj-Kahet).
  • Artisan's Acuity from disenchanting/quality crafting, spent on specialization-tree unlocks.

Banking these first means your leveling crafts hit higher quality on the first attempt, so you need fewer of them. That is the single biggest cost saver in the whole process.

Gathering professions: nearly free, just slow

Mining, Herbalism, and Skinning cost almost nothing to max — the "mats" are the world itself. The cheapest route is to fly a single zone loop while doing your KP treasure hunt anyway:

  • Herbalism: Mycobloom is the backbone herb. Loop the open fields of Isle of Dorn and Hallowfall. Each gather gives skill until ~50, then you need higher-tier nodes (Arathor's Spear, Luredrop) which require a bit of skill to harvest cleanly.
  • Mining: Bismuth and Aqirite are your early ores. The Ringing Deeps is wall-to-wall mining. Crystallized ore variants give bonus skill and KP.
  • Skinning: Free skill from any leveling or world-quest mob you kill. It maxes passively if you're questing at all.

If you only want gathering to fund crafting, this is the cheapest combo in the game: zero mat outlay, and you sell the surplus.

Crafting professions: craft the cheapest mat-efficient recipe in bulk

For Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Tailoring, Engineering, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy and Inscription, the trap is crafting the flashy recipe the trainer highlights. Those eat rare mats. Instead:

  • Find the recipe with the lowest mat cost per skill point — usually a basic intermediate (a bar, a bolt of cloth, a basic ring, a single combat potion).
  • Craft it at the lowest viable quality early, because low-skill recipes still tick reliably from green to yellow on the skill-up color scale.
  • Switch recipes the moment your current one goes grey (zero skill chance). Don't over-craft a dead recipe "to use up mats."

Concrete example: an early Alchemist mass-crafting basic Tempered Potions from Mycobloom maxes far cheaper than someone chasing 3-star phials. A Jewelcrafter cutting basic raw rings and panning Crystallized ore for free gems can hit 100 for almost nothing. A Blacksmith should smelt their own bars (free if mining) rather than buying them at AH markup.

The genuinely cheapest single combo

If your goal is "max profession skill for the least gold, full stop," pair a gathering profession with its matched crafter so you never buy mats:

  • Mining + Jewelcrafting or Mining + Blacksmithing — you supply your own ore.
  • Herbalism + Alchemy or Herbalism + Inscription — you supply your own herbs, and Inscription lets you make your own weekly treatises for free.
  • Skinning + Leatherworking — leather is the only mat, and it drops from mobs you'd kill anyway.

Self-supplied mats turn a 10,000+ gold leveling bill into a few hundred gold of vendor reagents plus your time.

When to just buy the mats — or skip the grind entirely

Cheapest in gold is not always cheapest in time. Be honest about which you're short on:

  • If you have one farming character and three alts that each want a maxed profession, gathering your own mats four times over is brutal. Buying a single bulk stack of the cheapest intermediate mat off the AH and power-crafting in one sitting is often the smarter trade.
  • If you're maxing a profession purely to craft your own raid consumables or gear, do the math: sometimes buying the finished crafted item is cheaper than maxing the profession plus mats. Profession leveling only "pays back" if you'll use it repeatedly.

And the time-for-money reality: if you mainly want the output — a full set of crafted gear, a stack of phials before raid night, or your KP unlocks done — and you don't actually enjoy the gathering loop, that's exactly the moment a profession leveling or crafting-mat carry earns its keep. Buying the gold or the mats to skip a tedious farm is a sensible time-for-money trade when your play hours are limited. If you genuinely like flying the herb loop and watching the skill bar climb, just play it out — it's one of the cheapest forms of progress in the game.

The efficient order of operations

  • Pick a gathering + crafting pair that share mats.
  • Do every Profession Master quest and grab all one-time KP treasures in your gathering loop.
  • Buy or craft a weekly Treatise for the free KP tick.
  • Mass-craft the cheapest mat-per-point recipe, swapping the instant it goes grey.
  • Only buy mats for the specific gap recipes where self-gathering is impractical.

Follow that sequence and a fresh profession reaches max for the price of vendor reagents and an afternoon — no premium mats required.