Advertisement

Insider Trader: Bags for the pros

Insider Trader is your weekly inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Need more bag space? It's a completely rhetorical question for most WoW players. Blizzard's tight rein on player bag space is a perfect example of what I only somewhat jokingly refer to as WoW's "relentless tuning." And nobody feels the pinch quite so strongly as professions addicts -- crafters whose bags are full of little bits of this and that for making, well, even more of this and that.

Specialty bags to the rescue! Crafters have access to a whole host of beefier bags designed especially for holding crafting materials. These player-made bags do have some drawbacks. You can only carry one at a time on your person, and since they only hold profession-related items, they do cut down on the space you have for general inventory. You'll undoubtedly catch yourself snarling at the banker when tussling with the specifics of what items will and won't go into these bags -- but for all their prissy limitations, you'll come across some sweet surprises, too.

No discussion of specialty bags would be complete without a mention of player-made ammo bags and soul shard bags for warlocks, too. We'll include details on those containers at the end of this article.



Bags for the pros

Enchanting
Enchanting bags, made by tailors, come in 16-, 20-, 24- and 28-slot sizes. They hold enchanting dusts, essences, shards and crystals as well as enchanting rods and enchanting formulae. They will not hold elemental essences, wands, vials or oils.

Herbalism
Herbalism bags, also made by tailors, offer 12-, 20- and 24-slot sizes. Frustratingly, they do not hold vials. They'll hold a Blood Scythe, Night Dragon's Breath, Packet of Tharlendris Seeds, Morrowgrain, Whipper Root Tuber, Enriched Lasher Root and druid reagent seeds. They will not hold Evergreen Pouch, Heart of the Wild, Un'Goro Soil or Glowcap. And here's a nice bonus you'll appreciate: When you harvest an herb, it goes directly to your herbalism bag and not into one of your general inventory bags!

Engineering
Engineering toolboxes hold 20 or 24 items, including explosives (except mines), engineering trinkets, parts, blasting powders, Fused Wiring, engineering tools (but not mining picks or hammers), Membership Cards and many other things created using the engineering skill. They will not hold things used in engineering such as ore, motes, gems and cloth.

Jewelcrafting
Jewelcrafting pouches have 20 or 24 slots. As you would expect, they hold all sorts of gems -- and surprisingly, mage mana gems, too!

Mining
Miners can choose from 20- or 28-slot sacks. These containers do not hold gems or motes.

And finally, let's look at some specialty bags for ranged ammunition and warlocks.

Ammo bags
Stow your ammunition in a quiver (for arrows) or bandolier for bullets. Check with your friendly neighborhood leatherworker for a player-made pouch or quiver. And remember, if you store your equipped ammo in an ammo bag, you get a bonus to your rate of fire (10% for the smallest ammo pouch) -- and that equals higher ranged DPS!

Soul bags for warlocks
Shard bags give warlocks a consolidated place to store shards. These tailored bags automatically route shards as you create them, so you won't find shards scattered throughout the rest of your inventory. You'll see the number of shards inside a soul bag listed on the bag's icon on your container toolbar -- another handy advantage to helping you keep track of your shards. Soul bags unfortunately do not store healthstones or spellstones.

Insider Trader's Lisa Poisso is a freelance writer, when she's not obsessively culling her inventory and bag space.