Thoughts on the road to professions

First things first, yes, I know it's not yet Saturday. I couldn't help myself. I'll try to be more restrained in the future. ;-) NO Promises. (In my defense, I have an action-packed weekend ahead of me and may not find time to play. So I had to come and progress SneekyPeach a bit further while I could.)

Plus, this weeks post will be a two parter. The first part today, the second tomorrow.

Now, onto the meat of the first post. In my opening blog, I mentioned the consideration of Engineering for SneekyPeach's profession. I did a lot of reading on Professions in the past week - Learned a lot in the process - and made my choice; though it wasn't was I originally believed I'd be interested in.

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I always knew I wanted to dive into mining. That was always going to occupy one of my two profession slots.

Mining is the single most useful gathering profession in the game. It fuels Engineering, Blacksmiths and Jewel Crafting, and, as a gathering profession, can fuel both your own crafting profession as well as your bankroll through the Auction House, I find having at least one gathering profession a very wise idea. The only consideration left was what to pair with it.

Right off the bat I crossed Herbalism and skinning from my list.

Many people advocate taking two gathering professions, especially as a youngster. It is an excellent idea if you are interested in acquiring items from many different crafted professions. After all, when you have no crafting profession to use up your finds, the money from Auctioning your raw minerals, herbs and skins is great and you can use your payment to buy what you like. Crafting players are rewarded with many bind on pick up items and special perks of leveling their professions. It is a toss up. For me, I knew I wanted the diversity of a crafting profession.

I crossed leather work and blacksmith off the list straight away as well. A mage cannot wear leather and has no need for the mail armor or bullets made through the blacksmith profession. If I was going to craft (and I am!) I was going to choose something that would benefit me directly.

I looked into Alchemy. Having my own healing potions, especially for a squishy mage, would be very helpful. In the end I decided it was not a viable option, especially without herbalism to fund it. The same was true of Inscription. The opportunity to produce your own glyphs was an appealing prospect, but would be very expensive without herbalism.

I looked into enchanting, but it seemed very expensive. Perhaps I am not understanding the profession correctly, but I believe you have to enchant and disenchant items around the world. It might have been a good idea, seeing I would be finding lots of leather and mail armor and many weapons I would not be permitted to use. In the end, I determined I would rather sell those unusable items to gather money for things like mounts, pets, training and flight paths.

I strongly considered tailoring. As a mage, this was one of the few crafting professions that would have impacted my life in a direct manor. It seems that tailoring is tailor-made for a mage. (har har har, how many people are closing their browser windows now?) I can only wear cloth and tailors, for the most part, make cloth armor. A big plus in the tailoring side was the idea, If I chose tailoring with my mining, I would be free to sell all of my mineral finds. I decided, after a lot of though, to cross tailoring off my list. Its downfall -- you need to either farm for your cloth or buy it from the auction house. That could get mighty pricey, especially since I am also going to level my first aid. With a crafting profession and a secondary profession both using the same cloth, I worried I would be outgrowing the area's where the cloth needed is naturally found, leaving me to purchase more than I'd like.

Which leaves me with engineering and jewel crafting. Interestingly enough, and not at all planed this way, both are both fueled by mining, which is both convenient -- Both of my options will be fueled with my chosen gathering profession, and unhelpful-- neither option has a clear pro or con in the gathering department, making my choice harder.

Reading into Engineering, I found you can make all sorts of fun items -- robot chickens as pets being my favorite, many useful ranged attack bombs, and your own mounts. The item I found would benefit me most would be the goggles, head armor available to me much sooner than I would organically find. Jewel crafting would give me the opportunity to craft my own rings, necklaces and trinkets, again, much sooner than I would organically find. I did a lot of reading up on how long it would take me to reach a level where my crafts would help me, as well as what my end goal crafts would provide me. In the end, Jewel crafting won out.

So SneeyPeach is now a Miner/Jewel Crafter, with a secondary skills in cooking, fishing and first aid, or would be after I got her trained up. Tune in tomorrow (Saturday, my original blogging day) for my write up on the experience in receiving my crafting training. Trust me, it was quite the trip!