Monday 19 January 2009

My Professions: A Conundrum

I've been thinking a bit about the professions I've chosen, for my various toons, and come to the conclusion that somewhere along the way I may have made some bad calls.

My totally awesome level 80 paladin is a Jewelcrafter, which is my favourite profession (decent to stupendous profit margins, and really great for customising gear). This I am happy with. Awesome BOP gems and trinkets, and I can collect and customise spec/purpose-specific stuff for all my different roles, so that's nifty too. Damn but I love JC, it's been maxed for a month or so now and will stay that way. That being said, Paladin JCs seem to be pretty ubiquitous: out of the 4 level 80 paladins in my guild/on my friends list, 3 are JCs.

My almost-neglected first-to-70 hunter, whom I dusted off last week and got up to 72 is a Leatherworker. Which is fine and dandy, except I'm not overly excited about Bracer enchants and cheap BOP leg enchants, and can easily get everything I want by sending the mats to Toresh, my personal LWing bi-atch (well if you're not going to blog then you've got to have something to do, might as well make me some pretty stuff). So I'm not entirely sure if it's worth leveling LWing. Initially, while leveling as my first toon, being able to make my gear as I leveled was totally awesome (although admittedly I did kind of stockpile my skinning mats and then burst-leveled LW, making a whole bunch of gear 20 levels too low in the process), but since my current gear won't be replaced frequently (probably not until the PvP blues at 78, and then again with crafted epics at 80)

My druid is Engineering. I have very little idea of how this happened, but he's got 2 sets of BC goggles, which cost me quite a bit to get. Unlike some people I'm not really a big fan of engineering, I tend to always forget about the little gadgets. Of course the portable mailbox, repair bot and vendor will be nice, but one big thing that Engineers can make that is pretty much wasted on druids is ammunition, which would make the profession much better suited to say, a hunter. I could just send the ammo over, but this could lead to certain conflicts of times when mailboxes (for the LWing hunter) aren't handy, and there's the fact that the hunter will probably be well ahead on the leveling curve. And it lacks a certain... elegance ("I'm a nature-loving druid who turns into a bear, my raison d'etre is to provide ammo for my hunter to pew-pew stuff, mostly animals").
Additionally, giving my love of different roles and specs, my druid would benefit a lot more from the ease-of-customisation offered by the bracer and leg enchants available to a LW. And there don't appear to be any Feral engineering goggles in WotLK (or so I hear). Hmmm...

My Death Knight has picked up Inscription, which is a neat profession, even if most of the glyphs are just filling up my bank. Will probably be very useful to support Ephylia's frequent respecs (atm I'm just sticking with my Holy PvP glyphs) and the shoulder enchants will save me grinding Sons of Hodir on yet another toon (I'm currently too lazy to grind it on my main, using PvP Inscriptions instead, since Ephy is too young to have access to the BC stuff).
But one thing I didn't realise that Scribes had access to is the enchantment-specific off-hand. Now a DK isn't really the type to walk around with a puny off-hand, not when she could be wielding a bad-ass zweihander or another axe. And out of all my high-level characters the one who would actually benefit from these offhands would be my (mostly) Restoration/Balance druid. And a DK engineer would look pretty spiffy with some goggles.

And then there's options of just going all out gathering. Since most of the good crafted stuff is now BOE, and equipping fresh 80s, while supporting their enchants, gems and respecs can be quite expensive, this might be a good option. But who would be the best double-gatherer? The Hunter has a pet to fend off random mobs near nodes, as does the DK (if Unholy). The druid has flightform, which is great for quickly jumping between nodes that are close together and getting the edge on other farmers. The paladin has Crusader Aura, but I've already said that she's staying as JC.

So ideally I guess my hunter would be an engineer, my druid would have inscription and the DK be a double gatherer (farming leather to support the crafted gear for hunter/druid). But would I be willing to go through the time, effort and expenditure of leveling these a second time? And would I be willing to also drop and level up the relevant gathering professions (an extremely tedious process, except for skinning). Probably not. If Blizzard gave me the opportunity to swap around professions for dollars I'd actually take them up on it (within reason).
Hmmm...
I guess that I'll just keep gathering and stockpiling mats until I level my current professions out of boredom and for the sake of completeness.

Have you guys got any advice to give me? How are your own professions going, are you happy with the choices you made?

I know my readers are an extremely quiet lot, even my guildies, but c'mon, break down those communication blocks and comment or something.


(Yes, it's a long, quiet, boring day at work, but then most of this was written at home ;)).

1 comment:

  1. Hello there, I just stumbled across this post from a link on Resto4Life, got me thinking about my own profession choices...

    My Druid is really the only character I actively play at the moment, thus its the only one to have maxed out professions. Pretty much all the other professions I have have become irrelevant until I get around to levelling some alts... if ever.

    Druid (80) - Skinning / Leatherwork
    Very happy with this choice, bracer enchants are great for all specs. I made use of the Overcast pvp set to get me going with a Resto set which I recently switched to after being a long term Feral. And of course I now use the 2 BoE Epics. Yes i could have bought them, but quite satisfying to have made them myself.

    Mage (71) - Mining / Jewelcrafting
    This choice was largely based on the fact that I wanted to try out JC when TBC came out and I also happened to have started a Draenei Mage. But its served me pretty well, being able to make my own gems has saved me a bit of cash in the past. Have been doing the JC daily with her if for nothing other than selling Dragon's Eyes for a tidy sum, think she might hit 72 just from doing that and the cooking daily :)

    Hunter (70) Herbalism / Alchemy
    My Rogue was on another server at the time of choosing the profs for my hunter. Now they are on the same server I'm seriously thinking of swapping alchemy for mining to give me the dual gathering ability you mentioned, but like yourself I'm not sure if I can face levelling it... Thorium veins are a Pain IIRC. Although as this is the one I'm thinking to level next it might be a good opportunity as I level through Northrend.

    Rogue (70) - Alchemy / Inscription
    Origninally had Herbalism, but dropped it in order to pick up the new profession. I maxed it out as far as poss pre-wrath but have yet to take it any further and thus havent really benefitted from it. Again I'm yet to have any benefit from alchemy as its not high enough to support my Druids raiding needs. Need to get my Hunter levelling ASAP I think to support my rogues profs...

    Paladin (70) Engineering / Enchanting
    I recently (pre-wrath) dropped mining to level enchanting, mainly to allow me to disenchant all the random greens I can never be bothered to try and sell. Much easier to sell enchanting mats or save them for my own enchants. But I have recently discovered there is a nice profit to be made from selling enchanted vellums from my rogue even tho im still only doing TBC enchants. As for engineering, I never bothered levelling it past 300 mainly because the character was all but retired... I probably never will!

    Would I make any changes other than getting my hunter mining... probably not, I have already made the adjustments I felt would make each character as useful as possible.

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