Professions

A big decision for your character is what profession to choose. All professions can be broken down into 3 categories. Gathering Professions, Armor Professions, and finally Accessory Professions. The exception to this in Engineering, which has elements of all three, but does none of them especially well.

Each category has it's positives and negatives, and I wanted to talk to you about how to choose based on your play style and which professions produce the most for your time from a gold standpoint.

Lets start off by breaking down each category.

Gathering professions are skinning, herbalism and mining. They offer a set bonus dependent on skill level and allow you to pick up (essentially) gold from the ground. While personally I find flying around to be painfully boring, if you out questing in the wilds often this might be the choice for you. Skinning requires dead mobs, so it is something you must consider if you choose it. Between mining and herbalism, both seem to be selling for about the same amount stack wise in the auction house. As herbs are more plentiful in the wild, between the two I would probably recommend herbalism. Profit potential, 300-600 gold per gathering profession per hour. (this guy claims 1000 gold an hour with both mining and herbalism: Link)

Armor professions are your Leatherworking, Tailoring, and Blacksmithing. These allow you to put extra stat adjusting items on your gear, and allow you to craft gear. However as no level 80 gear is BOP anymore, there is no real point to these professions. They dont give you any stat adjustments that another profession wouldn't give you, and they dont allow you to wear gear that another profession wouldn't. Any items you could craft with an armor profession, you can take the raw materials and find someone else in your guild to make for little to no extra cost. So from a money making standpoint, and for character developement, they are pretty much a waste of a profession choice. (should you decide to go this route I recommend looking at producing twink gear on a regular basis)

Finally there are the Accessories Professions Category. These include Inscription, Jewelcrafting, Alchemy, and Enchanting. Alchemy is interesting in that it can be profitable and the self buffs from potions and flasks are greater due to mixology. The downside is that the other accesory profession buffs dont expire. One you socket a gem or put those shoulder enchants on they dont dissappear in an hour, or if you die. The profitability of Alchemy is also highly dependent on the raiding community of your server, so your mileage may vary.

Jewelcrafting offers profit in prospecting, cutting gems, and probably the best profession for making stat allocations with it's in built buff to your character. The special Jewelcrafter only gems allow jewelcrafters to allocate hit, or any other stat they want far better then any other profession in the game. So as you progress in the game, jewelcrafting is wonderful for allowing you to equip that new piece of gear even if it doesn't have as much of X stat as the old piece did.

Currently Jewelcrafting is a bit low on the profit scale, on top of this cut gems dont stack, which is a real pain. The fact that the number of pieces of gear in northrend with gem slots is proportionetly less then back in outland, makes the future looks dim. There is one positive yet to come, should new content be hard like the dev's have promissed, people will need to do more min maxing, increasing the need for anything that can give them a better chance. Epic gems have yet to be introduced, because of this there may be lots of profit in the future.

Inscription is gold at the moment, and so far I haven't seen a sizable decrease in business despite the release of dual specs. There have been 58 new recipes introducd with the most recent patch and the shoulder enchants which allow you to skip having to get exalted with the Son's of Hodir are worth their weight in gold alone. So all in all, Iscription is good for making gold. The downside is what the future holds. While Jewelcrafting has epic gems to look forward to, I can't see them releasing yet more inscription glyphs before the next expansion. After the next expansion, I am still at a loss as to how the profession could be changed, its not ike they can continue to release more and more powerful glyphs, so who can tell where this is going.

Finally Enchanting. Enchanting is still one of the most annoying professions to make gold from. It is very possible, through disenchanting, to make gold, and there is the ability to place enchants on scrolls to sell on the auction house. But wow... it is a pain, each scroll must be individually made, and there is no way to look at the tooltip unless you have one in inventory. This prevents you from checking how many you have in inventory, and to see if they are currently profitable (sales prices seem to fluctuate wildly). The pluses are of course the ring enchants, and the ability to disenchant your soul bound gear, which is rather nice. Personally despite having a level 450 enchanter, I usually don't bother because of the very large investment in capital per scroll and pains of maintaining stock and getting my hands on enough gear to disenchant for enchanting mats. There is money here, there is also more work here, so take from this what you will.

I hope this give you a better idea on how the different profesions breakdown and perhaps gives you an idea as to what you may want to pursue. Personally if your not level 80 recommend the two gathering professions (herb and mining), which you should use to pay for your epic mount flying training, dual spec, etc, and then save enough gold to powerlevel 2 of the accessories professions. After that go kill the auction house and proceed to rob it blind. This is Miy saying may your gold flow like the blood of your enemies and for the horde.