MoP Classic First Aid Leveling Guide (1-600)

First Aid on MoP Classic runs from 1 to 600 across five cloth tiers, one per expansion, and almost every single craft raises your skill by exactly one point. This guide gives you the bracket route, the craft count computed from the MoP Classic client data at each step, and one shopping list you can fill in a single Auction House trip before you start.

Every number here is computed from the MoP Classic client data, not estimated. This profession turns out to be unusually clean: switch from the plain bandage to its Heavy version the moment the plain one turns yellow, and you never leave the guaranteed zone, from skill 1 all the way to 600. Where the commonly published route pads for RNG this profession does not actually have, the correction is called out below rather than smoothed over.

What you need

First Aid does not lean on a companion gathering profession. Cloth is looted from humanoid enemies in every zone in the game and sold on the Auction House by the stack, so there is nothing to farm specially and nothing that only drops from a boss. Nothing you craft along this route gets consumed by a later recipe either, unlike some other professions, so anything left in your bags at the end just sells or sits in your bandage stack for later.

You still need to keep training. First Aid gates behind trainer ranks the same as any other profession, and if your skill flatly refuses to move at one of the bracket boundaries below, you are not unlucky, you are untrained. Find a class trainer and pick up the next rank before you keep going.

How the craft counts work

A recipe is orange while your skill sits below its yellow threshold, and every orange craft raises your skill by one point, guaranteed. Between yellow and gray, each craft has a shrinking chance to give a point, and at gray it gives nothing at all.

First Aid's bandage line is unusually forgiving here. Every plain bandage recipe (Linen Bandage, Wool Bandage, and so on) turns yellow at almost exactly the skill where its Heavy counterpart is still fully orange. Switch from plain to Heavy right as the plain one turns yellow, and you stay in guaranteed territory the entire way from 1 to 600. The route below does exactly that: every bracket ends at, or just before, its recipe's yellow threshold. That makes the "expected crafts" column below not really an expectation, it is the real point-for-point count, verified against the client's own trivial-skill windows. We still add the standard 20 percent buffer to the buy column, because Auction House stacks come in round numbers and a little slack costs nothing.

The route

Classic, 1 to 300

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
1-40	Linen Bandage	39	47	Linen Cloth x47
40-80	Heavy Linen Bandage	40	48	Linen Cloth x96
80-115	Wool Bandage	35	42	Wool Cloth x42
115-150	Heavy Wool Bandage	35	42	Wool Cloth x84
150-180	Silk Bandage	30	36	Silk Cloth x36
180-210	Heavy Silk Bandage	30	36	Silk Cloth x72
210-240	Mageweave Bandage	30	36	Mageweave Cloth x36
240-260	Heavy Mageweave Bandage	20	24	Mageweave Cloth x48
260-290	Runecloth Bandage	30	36	Runecloth x36
290-300	Heavy Runecloth Bandage	10	12	Runecloth x24

Outland, 300 to 350

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
300-330	Netherweave Bandage	30	36	Netherweave Cloth x36
330-350	Heavy Netherweave Bandage	20	24	Netherweave Cloth x48

Northrend, 350 to 425

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
350-390	Frostweave Bandage	40	48	Frostweave Cloth x48
390-425	Heavy Frostweave Bandage	35	42	Frostweave Cloth x84

Cataclysm, 425 to 500

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
425-475	Embersilk Bandage	50	60	Embersilk Cloth x60
475-500	Heavy Embersilk Bandage	25	30	Embersilk Cloth x60

Pandaria, 500 to 600

Skill	Craft	Expected crafts	Buy (+20%)	Materials
500-550	Windwool Bandage	50	60	Windwool Cloth x60
550-600	Heavy Windwool Bandage	50	60	Windwool Cloth x180

Total shopping list

Buy this once and you can run the whole route without stopping. Quantities include the 20 percent buffer.

Material	Total	Buy (+20%)
Windwool Cloth	200	240
Linen Cloth	119	143
Frostweave Cloth	110	132
Wool Cloth	105	126
Embersilk Cloth	100	120
Silk Cloth	90	108
Netherweave Cloth	70	84
Mageweave Cloth	70	84
Runecloth	50	60

Without the buffer, this route takes 599 crafts to carry you from skill 1 to 600, one skill point per craft, cover to cover. With the buffer built into every bracket, budget for roughly 720 crafts total. Either way, nothing here goes to waste: leftover bandages still bandage.

Where this route disagrees with the usual advice

A few places, all in your favour.

Cut the Anti-Venom detour. Our own path-computation tooling, left to optimise purely for fewest reagent types, tries to route a stretch around skill 291 to 301 through Powerful Anti-Venom instead of a bandage. Its only reagent is Huge Venom Sac, a monster drop, not an Auction House cloth stack. This guide skips it entirely: Runecloth Bandage and Heavy Runecloth Bandage already carry the full 260 to 300 stretch on cloth alone, with no drop-item dependency and no lost skill-ups.

The commonly published route crafts several recipes well past the point they actually go gray. Checked against the client's own trivial-skill windows: Heavy Wool Bandage is gray at 185, but the usual guide keeps crafting it to 210. Mageweave Bandage is gray at 250, but the usual guide runs it to 300. Heavy Mageweave Bandage is gray at 275, same 300 endpoint. Frostweave Bandage is gray at 410, but the usual guide runs it to 426. Windwool Bandage is gray at 560, but the usual guide runs it to 600. A gray recipe gives zero skill on every craft, so every one of those extra crafts in the published numbers buys nothing. This route switches recipes right at the true gray point instead, which is also why its quantities run lower almost everywhere the two disagree, for example 39 Linen Cloth for the opening 1-40 stretch against the roughly 50 usually quoted.

Two different client recipes share the name "Heavy Windwool Bandage." One unlocks immediately and stays orange all the way to skill 600, which is the one this route uses for the 550-600 bracket. The other does not unlock until you are already at 600 skill and only matters beyond the leveling cap covered here. If your client shows a recipe with this name that will not train, that is why.

FAQ

Does this work on any MoP Classic realm? Yes. The route is computed from the Mists of Pandaria progression client, so it applies to Mists of Pandaria progression realms. Classic Era and retail run different recipes and different caps, and each has its own guide.

Can I skip ahead if my First Aid is already partly leveled? Yes. Find your current skill in the bracket tables above, start there, and buy only the materials from that row down. The totals are additive.

Why craft the Heavy version instead of just spamming the base bandage? Because the base bandage turns yellow well before its Heavy counterpart does. Riding the base recipe into its yellow window wastes crafts on a chance instead of a guarantee. Switching to Heavy at that exact point keeps every craft on this route fully guaranteed.

Do I need Tailoring or a gathering profession to level First Aid? No. Every cloth in the shopping list drops from humanoid enemies and sells on the Auction House as a common commodity. First Aid does not share materials with any other profession.

What happened to Anti-Venom and the other consumable recipes? Cut. Their reagents are monster drops rather than Auction House commodities, and the bandage line already covers the exact same skill ranges without needing them. See the disagreement section above.

When this guide changes

This route is computed from MoP Classic client build 5.5.4.68806. If Blizzard adjusts a recipe's trivial-skill window or changes a reagent in a content patch, the brackets shift and this page is recomputed from the new client data.