One Month In, AKA: the pain of crafting.

So Cata has been out a month. Patch 4.06 is on the PTR. There have been waves and waves of hot fixes.
What do you people think of the expansion so far?

I'm fairly happy with it. The biggest issue for me right now is what a pain in the ass it is to level Leatherworking. Its crazy expensive, material intensive.

The material breakdown is Savage Leather Scraps < Savage Leather < Heavy Savage Leather, with it taking 5 of the smaller to make the larger.  Heavy cannot be skinned from anything so it take 5 mobs skinned to get one.  The last pattern that uses regularr savage turns green at  490, so your last 35 points all take Heavy.

A few mobs outside of instances will occasionally drop 2, but most skins give a single Savage. So on average lets say it take 5 creatures skinned to get one,  From 500-525 it take a minimum of 8 Heavy Savage to make anything orange, at 510 its 10. Plus any patterns that will skill you up from 510-525 cost 10 Heavy Savage as well. The current price for HSL on the AH is 200g. so that's 2000g for a nominally useful pvp pattern. Each piece takes 10 HSL and 10 volatile to craft. So that's about 2400g to craft. plus they stay orange for only 5 points. Amoritazing the cost of the patterns over those 5 points and that's about 3k per items which will give you 2 skill ups, so 1.5k per point. You can possible sell them for a few hundred gold if lucky, so make that 1400g per point x15 or 21k to go from 510-525.

Lets compare that to Alchemy which I maxxed out on my lv 78 warlock. You can get to 500 making potions and elixirs which take 2 herbs and a vial. Herbs cost about 10g ea, or if you have an herbalist each node, which doesn't need to be killed, yields on average 3 herbs with volatile life thrown in to boot. Now above 500 you will need to make flasks, which take 30 herbs and life so that's 300 g per flask, but as opposed to the LW items flasks you can sell for a profit! At 505 you can start learning transmutes, Where you can take 3 green gems plus 3 herbs, and make another useful item, a blue gem! granted at current prices, this might be a slight loss of 50g  or so, but still better than 1400. lets say you go from 505 to 525 on transmutes.  At a net cost of 50g per point that gasp! 1000g!  20k less than LW, and unlike leather workers alchemists are always in demand for flasks and potions, and  they have transmutes which will always turn a profit as well.

Jewelcrafting is somewhere in between. I haven't maxed it out on my DK yet, but there is not really a reason to. The 525 patterns are not as good as rep items in most cases. 500 is all you need to make your JC chimaera's eyes. The only road block on JC is doing the dailies to get the patterns/eyes. That and the high cost of the common gems used for the dailies.  But ore is plentiful and not that expensive.

I haven't tried Blacksmithing, Engineering, or Tailoring , in cata yet, so I don't know where they rank.  Enchanting was somewhere in below LW as skill ups were only costing me around 400g ea with the scrolls selling for about 25g ea  and a net cost of 375 per point.