How difficult do you find it to be a completionist when it comes to WoW’s professions?

Oh, Dark Iron Ore. How you make me cry. First of all, I gathered ancient crafting mats to learn to smelt you. Now, I gather an insane amount of you because it takes 8 pieces of ore to make a bar. Most of the patterns I have yet to craft need at least 16 bars. The Molten Core and Blackrock Depths Tuesday reset run yields close to 60 pieces of ore. My head hurts trying to figure out how many weeks of running this duo it will take to make everything this character knows. And she doesn’t know ALL the Dark Iron patterns. My Horde Blacksmith knows many of the others.

Professions frustrate me. This character — a level 80 and used only for my guild’s Legacy raids — can learn quite a few Cataclysm recipes. If I wanted to, I could hop on a flying mount and search Mount Hyjal, Uldum, and Twilight Highlands for ore. She got a quest off a mob in Burning Steppes which, when completed, rewards a weapon from vanilla WoW. The kicker is that she has to learn Legion Blacksmithing to accept the quest. Given the specific use for this character, she’s never going to see New Dalaran unless someone summons or teleports her there.

Essentially, she makes older expansion gear for transmog. I hadn’t paid a whole lot of attention to how much mail gear for my hunter main is created by both Blacksmiths and Leatherworkers. There’s one set I remember having back in Burning Crusade, but you needed leather off the basilisks along the rim of Zangarmarsh. My Leatherworker isn’t high enough to learn those patterns. I just maxed out vanilla Blacksmithing on this character so I can begin the accumulation of Dark Iron to make mail armor first. Sigh. That’s going to take a while.

We just concluded another week of the Darkmoon Faire. I wish there was a way to apply profession levels from there to a specific expansion. With vanilla leveled, I’d like to apply the levels to Burning Crusade, but doing the Faire profession quest applies the level to Cataclysm. She’s not going to go into Cataclysm, so I don’t take her to the Faire.

It all comes from a desire to be as close to a completionist on professions as I can be and that stems from wanting all.the.gear — all of it — for transmog. I have a bunch of questions for you today. First of all, are you a completionist — even with professions like Alchemy or Enchanting where there’s no transmog involved? How does wanting crafted gear affect your profession leveling? Does each expansion having a separate leveling requirement make it easy for you? If you could change one thing to make leveling older professions easier, what would it be?