The way professions work is that you get to pick two. You can dump one and pick up another if you want, but you can only have two active. There are basically 2 types: Ones that craft stuff and ones that gather stuff. If you are playing alone, you would probably go with 2 skills that complement each other as well as your character. For example, a Paladin would likely go Blacksmithing and Mining so they can gather materials for making weapons and armor they can use. Blacksmithing would be kinda useless to a mage aside from making money, so they are more likely to go Tailoring. Of course, you don't have to do any of this, you can go to the Auction House, and most of the best stuff are drops.

Crafting Professions
Enchanting - Upgrade gear
Alchemy - potions and stuff
Blacksmithing - Make mail armor and weapons
Engineering - Make gadgets
Leatherworking - make leather armor, quivers, etc
Tailoring - make cloth armor, bags, etc
Cooking - food (this profession needs some love, it sucks)

Fishing - sorry Cyn... this one is just about as useless as it is in FFXI
Herb Gathering - support for Enchanting, Alchemy, and maybe cooking (not sure... cooking sucks)
Mining - gather for Blacksmithing and Engineering
Skinning - gather leather off animals you kill. yes, you can kill the harmless deer and skin them. PETA loves this I'm sure.


Within a guild, it works best to just have one Tailor, Leatherworker, Blacksmith, and Engineer. Most players in the guild can just be material gatherers and pass materials on to the group's crafter. That way, the crafter skills up faster, and the non crafters have more gathering options.

NOTE: Herb gathering and Mining do NOT work well together. They both put a marker on the map so it is easy to spot a gathering spot (think of mining points in ffxi), but you can only have one or the other active at a time. I'd recommend people who are gatherers and not crafters take Skinning and either Mining or Herbalism.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

Actually professional works as primary and secondary.

Everyone can have as many secondary as they want and those are: First aid, fishing, and cooking. Everything else is consider primary. Each char can only have 2 primary at one time.

Fishing and cooking go hand to hand since you can catch fish to make food. Cooking is useful for anyone but mage since you can make stats food/drink to reduce downtime after fight. If you are a mage, you can just summon your food and water so there's really no need for it.

We are planning on Tailoring + enchanting and mining + engineering for our 2 toons.

:|

My bad. Sorry if I post anything out of date. It used to work that you spend skill points, so you had to choose between crafting skills, gathering skills, weapon skills, and the like. In short, it sucked. Cooking and Fishing need a lot of love; they are all but useless.

Tailoring works off of drops from humanoids, so if you do that, it's nice that you don't need something like skinning.

My plan is for Smithing + Mining, but, I'd gladly go Skinning + Mining if someone else is willing to be a dedicated Smith.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

Is crafting cooler than the mega-lame crafting system on FFXI?

im doing Mining and Engineering both suck so dont bother and let me be the only one doing it ><

_________________
Kasdaye Regnar

lol

Tradeskill is a lot better in WoW than FFXI (this is from someone who has 96 in alchemy and husband with 60s in smithing, goldsmithing, + 90s in cooking on mule in FFXI). We are tradeskill junkies since EQ days.

I'd say though, during the short time I played in the first stress test, I didn't think tradeskill is bad at all. Of course this could change with whatever the modification they are making with the new patches and when the retail actually comes out.

I do tradeskills because I like it. It's not just for the potential money is out there but also it's cool when you see people wear/use the items you made.

Right now I'm a Level 93 Blacksmith and Level 107 Miner.

Blacksmithing is pretty cool, but its gotten hard to level because when you first start you can level just buy turning a single copper bar into the same piece of armor over and over again and turn it into profit even, and you get a skill up every time. At about level 60+ you start needing like 10-20 copper bars per synth, and thats a lot of mining. ; ;

Well, in short, no, it's much the same. But, crafting is not a grind. When you gather the stuff you need and all that, the skillups come pretty easily. Most of the stuff you make is useable at the level it's made, but not really the best stuff out there for the level.

The stuff you kill or mine to use for crafting pretty much falls in line with your character's level. That is, you pretty much get the drops you need thru natural leveling. Low level ore and herb gathering points spawn in the low level zones, so apprentice level crafters can gather the stuff they need as they pass by it in the low level zones.

You can buy all the supplies you like on the Auction House, of course. Stuff gets to be pretty expensive there compared to gathering or making it yourself. There are also some enforces level restrictions along the way. So, you can't just make a mule character and have them max out a craft.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

It's been my impression that the majority of MMORPG crafters are Amish gamers.

I don't get it

Because Amish makes stuff?

Maybe I'll ask K later lol.

Ket, shouldn't you be working with Tin by now?

Probably your crafting skill is a bit ahead of your character level. That makes it difficult to skill up and gather the stuff yourself.

If you want to skill up, you just make stuff that appears orange on your list. That will skill you up pretty much 100% of the time. Yellow gives skill ups often, Green occasionally, Gray never.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

According to my mining level, I should be working on Silver now, haha.

I've seen the occasional Tin, which occasionally spawns Silver, but they're rare to see, which probably means I'm kinda in the wrong place.

And yeah, I know orange = 100% skill up. But when it needs like 20 Bars to synth it, I usualy do the Yellow Synths (like 50% skill up) that only need 6-8 bars.

I've dabbled with alot of the crafts. Fishing is good if you go hunter (you can catch the fish u feed your pet) and supports cooking. Alchemy and Herbalism take up 2 primarys and that's a good skill for mages. Tailoring and enchanting go somewhat hand in hand (you can create something with tailoring - disenchant it for supplies -- then enchant something else) Enchanting is going to be freakishly expensive tho. I will probably be making several toons (utilizing different skills)

Cyntari

_________________

Don't fix me -- I'm not broken!
Yarr's love slave.

After the new patch, Alchemy is not worth doing anymore. The effects won't stack and it cost a lot more for some of the components than before.

Cooking is a 2ndary skill so you can still have 2 more if you want. As for mules, unfortunately, you'll have to level those mules as well before you can train them in tradeskills. WoW tries to avoid 1 person master everything so you actually need those points you earned through getting xp to train your skills/unlock the cap etc.

Well the other toons won't be mules necessarily. I've played a couple of different classes and enjoyed some and not others. I will probably take my time leveling some different classes in retail too.

Cyn

_________________

Don't fix me -- I'm not broken!
Yarr's love slave.

The amount of space you get in the bank is actually pretty good. I haven't had space issues. When I was playing Diablo 2, I had like 10 accounts full of mules. As long as you don't keep every single thing you find, you shouldn't need too many mules.

Most of the people I play with run several characters. Everybody runs a main character, but it's good to have characters of different levels and play thru the different areas of the game.

The thing I'm trying to figure out really is do we wanna act like a guild and have a lot of gatherers supporting a few crafters, or should we all try to be as self sufficient as possible? Either way works fine for me, but I don't really want to do all the gathering just to have the smith quit on me.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

Skinning/Leathercrafting...

102 skinning 52 leathercrafting for teh win

I normally just raise skills by myself in the past. I don't like the idea that you supply someone and have that person raise the skill etc. Or someone else support me and I just do the combine. Gathering material is part of the tradeskill to me. However, as a guild, the way I like it to work is guildie always get the final product either free or at a discounted price when they provide the material (depends on the difficulty to make the item - skill lvl etc or the value of the item). I've seen in the past when I basically give the products to guildie for free and only ended up finding it was turn around and sold in AH for a profit. Those people will go to my blist pretty much immediately unless they have a very good reason why do they take advantage of my skill.

i got mining to 174 and engy to 147 pretty fast can make alot of stuff but the crafting side is now requiring me to gether and hold items like bronze bars and silver bars for later use, and ive not found any iron points yet so mining has come to a halt anyhow im not gonna be doing much more on mage now till retail as im hoping/expecting them to reset everything, still looking for conf on this ><

_________________
Kasdaye Regnar

Yes, they have said that beta characters will be wiped. I've heard that the closed Beta people may get a special thing kinda like the collector's edition people get.

Iron Mining is mid 20's areas. Don't know what level you are, but maybe you've out-crafted your character's level. That's actually pretty easy to do in this game if you focus on crafting at all.

Btw, I used to be a pure combat, ignore crafting kind of person. SWG changed that for me when I became our guild Armorsmith. SWG has by far the best crafting system I've seen. The skill of the artisan and the quality of the materials used has a huge effect on the final product. I literally spent all my time hunting down the best materials to make the best armor possible... and for it I had a reputation as one of the top 2 or 3 Armorsmiths on the server and more business and money than I could deal with. Great crafting system. Too bad, again, no content. Later in the game they added a couple quested and/or dropped schematics, but I was already gone, for the most part. I'm glad to see that WoW has quests and drops for recipes.

_________________
WoW: Dmi of Alleria
FFXI: 75 PLD - 38 WAR - 35 BLM - 26 RDM - 18 SMN

~60 in mining and smithing.

Whoring myself out for Malachite and light leather so that I can make my uber G. Axe <.<

_________________
Dark is banned from ever touching my computer again.

have several crystal ores from mining your welcome to them as im playing horde for now till release.

_________________
Kasdaye Regnar

Woah, you guys are really playin the beta to the extreme! Your characters will be wiped pretty soon. It will probably be a good idea just to try as many races/classes/professions as you can rather then maxing them out atm.

_________________