First Aid

Overview

First Aid is a secondary profession, so it never takes one of your two main profession slots. It converts the cloth that drops from humanoids into bandages that heal a large chunk of health over a few seconds, with no mana cost and only a short debuff before you can use another. For classes without self-healing it is the difference between eating after every fight and chaining pulls, and for everyone it is a free emergency button in dungeons and PvP.

Anti-venoms round out the toolkit by curing poisons, which helps in a handful of dungeons and against certain world mobs. At 300 skill the best bandages heal for well over two thousand health, which still matters in raids for melee and tanks once the healers are out of mana.

Leveling tips

• Keep every piece of cloth you loot while questing. Linen, wool, silk, mageweave and runecloth line up neatly with the bandage tiers, so you rarely need to buy anything if you level First Aid alongside your character.
• Bandages only gain skill while they are orange or yellow, so make the next tier as soon as your trainer or manual allows instead of burning cloth on grey recipes.
• The Expert book and the two silk/mageweave manuals are sold by the same vendors in Stromgarde and Brackenwall Village. Buy all three in one trip when you reach 150.
• The Artisan quest (Triage) needs skill 225 and character level 35. You treat wounded soldiers in a timed event, so read the order carefully before you start.
• If cloth is scarce, check the auction house early in a realm’s life: tailors often undercut each other on wool and silk once they out-level them.

Making gold

First Aid is not a money-maker by itself. Its value is saving the gold you would otherwise spend on food and potions. Surplus runecloth is usually worth more sold to tailors or turned in for reputation than burned on bandages once you are capped.