If you have a constant toon, then what trade skills should they have?

[Owltoid]

I'm currently leveing up my pally tank. Although I have a 74 warrior, I don't really see myself taking a different tank than the pally which makes him a "constant" toon. As such, I have decided that I should make sure the pally has enchanting for d/e. Since other toons may be swapped in/out, the pally will always be part of my 5-box team (in the forseable future) and therefore should be the one with that skill.

Which two skills would you choose for your "constant" toon?

Mining - I'm debating getting mining on my pally since often there are nodes inside the instances.
Skinning - many times there are skinnable creatures in the instance but I'm not sure that type of leather ever sells for much
Herbalism - could be very good, though I'm not sure if it would be better than mining
Blacksmithing - this could be good for the tanks gear, but it has no use for the rest of the group
Jewelcrafting - the JC doesn't need to be in the instance to cut the gem so I can have any member be the JC
Tailoring - similar to BS and has no need to be in the instance group
Inscription - similar to BS

Although many of the crafting progressions aren't good for a "constant" toon, it would probably increase chances to get rare recipes/plans.

[Raigirin]

I wouldn't pick skinning, since it can be mapped to a shortcut :)
so one of your other characters can have it.

But it is a tricky choice,
I guess you have to decide if you want a profession that will benefit your Pally as a tank,
or a gathering profession.

Correct me if I'm wrong,
but I believe that using cartographer on all the characters in your team will allow you to share information between them,
when new nodes are mined/gathered.
So in that respect, with a bit of patience, all nodes would eventually show up on you main's screen.

[Spook]

If you really want Enchanting, then Mining is as good as any. Either that or Herbalism make sense.

However, since you're considering mining (a good choice IMHO), why not engineering instead of enchanting? If nothing else, a thrown stick of dnyamite would be worthwhile to pull with when your Avenger's Shield is on cooldown.

Skinning would be my last choice, as its easy to do on an alt.

[puppychow]

JC is currently the most OP profession in WOTLK, while that may change in the future it is far and away better than any other profession right now. You get a daily quest which lets you make dragon eyes (sells for 150-400g), you get 3 JC-only gems with much better stats than blue gems AND are prismatic, which is huge -- you can socket them anywhere and they will match any color. For tanks especially this is great, since you can do 3 +def gems while still gearing up and hit the def cap without any issues. There is also a great starting tanking trinket.

Enchanting is an ok profession. The self-enchants are mediocore, it takes an insane amount of money to level enchanting from 400+, and there are so many enchanters (and no current "rare" recipes) that you will rarely make any money beyond DEing stuff. Blue items can be vendored for almost as much as shards sell for (sometimes more), and green BOEs can be DE'd by anyone.

For a prot pally I would suggest a combo of either JC/mining (+50 sta buff is nice), JC/BS (2 extra sockets, goes well with JC), or maybe JC/alchemy (4 hour flasks). Its likely when patch 3.1 hits another prof will become the flavor-of-the-month, especially as epic gems are brought back into the game. Currently however pretty much all the top raiders are converting one of their professions to jewelcrafting, and for good reason.

btw i have every prof (except engineering) covered on my team, it makes it really nice. never have to ask someone else to craft something and i can herb/mine/etc as I fly around.

[Owltoid]

For some their constant player may be a healer, or a DPS. Mine happens to be a tank. Although I may swap out moonkins for an ele shaman, or a priest for a resto shaman, I don't see myself replacing my tank with my 5-man. Since I don't want to "waste" any drops, it made sense to me to do enchanting on my pally since he'll always be there. Although JC is an OP profession, I was asking more along the lines of the type of profession(s) that you'd absolutely want to have on every 5-man run. Every toon having JC would be nice for the daily, but a JC doesn't need to be in the instance since everything can be cut outside.

[elsegundo]

mining and herbalism.

have cartographer Gatherer addon with nodes.

#showtooltip
/castsequence find herbs, find minerals

enjoy spamming that every 5 seconds while you walk, ride, run, swim, etc.

plus you also get a HoT and more stamina from both professions. however, i do drool at crit rating.

[nomenquis]

This might sound insane at first, but consider tailoring.
The amount of additional cloth is _really_ huge. And if you have tailoring on an alt you'll constantly have to look if cloth dropped on that screen.
Mining / skinning / herbing is stuff you do once in a while, so these can easily be done on an alt, but for the cloth drops you basically want to loot / look at every mob.

kind regards

[valkry]

Jc/BS...awesome gems and more gems.

[Stealthy]

I would definitely take mining as one profession - mining nodes will not only yield cobalt/saronite/titanium ore, but crystalized earth/shadow/water/fire and occasional gems as well. The +50 stam is great, especially for a tank, and the ability to smelt titansteel once per day is handy.

Other than that, I'd look at BS for the ability to socket wrist and gloves (which stack with enchants) over JC, since 5 rare gems > 3 prismatic gems (even if prismatics offer a bit more flexibility in where you slot them). BS will also let you socket belts for everyone in your party, and your alt druids might like Titansteel Guardian ('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=41384') along with the Prison Manifest ('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=37889') (BoE drop)... and of course there is the tanking gear that you can craft.

JC's ability as a money maker is dwindling as more JC's max out their recipes and then will only be able to change their tokens into dragon's eyes instead. And since the patch, dragon's eye's also drop from these - Ice Prism ('http://www.wowhead.com/?item=44943') (they also give 3 rare gems) - soon I would expect the price of the eyes to drop well below 100G...

Cheers,
S.

[valkry]

Get mining on your alt imo. Then your JC can prospect the ores for rare gems.

[Hachoo]

For those saying JC/BS for the extra gem slots - I was weighing in between JC/BS and JC/Mining on my tank and I chose to stick with JC/mining.

Besides the fact that mining makes more money and the ore is useful for JC also, the extra 2 gem slots for BS seem better than they are. yes, they're fairly flexible, but if you compare them to the +50 stam you get from mining they're not that great. Blue stam gems are +24 stam each, thats +48 stam for both slots, whereas you get +50 stam for mining. True you could use some other gems in the BS gem slots but for a tank I just don't think the benefit is that much greater.

Now, once epic gems are highly available maybe things will change but for right now I would take mining on a tank over BS.

[Owltoid]

Heh, I guess it's my fault for not asking the question clearly. Everyone is talking about what professions a tank should have, or what professions make the most money because of daily quests, etc. Forget that my constant player is a tank (it could have been DPS or a healer) and pretend that your alts can do all that daily stuff. Also pretend that you're not worried about maximising gear for that one player since everyones constant player may be different.

I'm asking which professions do you need when stuck inside a 5-man instance? Enchanting is good for the drops that noone needs. It would suck to have to vendor drops all the time because the alt that is the enchanter is not in the group. What else? There are mining nodes inside the instance that would be tough to pass up (if an alt is the miner and they're not there right now then you missed an easy node). Similar situations on skinning and herbaslism. Missing rare reciples/plans could happen if the constant player does not have those professions.

[Niley]

You dont get 50 stam from mining, its just hp increase, it doesn't scale like stam.

JC/some other crafting proffesion(be it lw/ench/bs etc) is best if Youre raiding on Your main.

[succulent]

My raiding main (mage) is a chanter/tailor, tho if I were to level her now I'd do chanting/JC. That's probably the overall best combo for self buffs and general utility, and they're both great for making stuff to auction.

I always take gathering skills on slave toons -- they aren't really all that useful in an instance/raid if you're not multiboxing, and I find enough mining/herb nodes without having the scanner on my main (though I'm sure I miss them when flying around).

[Hachoo]

You dont get 50 stam from mining, its just hp increase, it doesn't scale like stam.

JC/some other crafting proffesion(be it lw/ench/bs etc) is best if Youre raiding on Your main.I'm pretty sure the patch notes stated that all mining benefits of hp were changing to +stam instead, but since I'm at work I can't go check right now. Even still, +500 hp is more or less just as good as 48 stam (maybe slightly worse but mining will make a shatload more money then BS).

Also to the OP, why does it matter whether you're stuck inside of a 5 man instance or not? That is irrelevant. You want the professions that will benefit your character most which means - better stats and/or making money. Most of our answers are relating to that.

[Owltoid]

Would you be ok having a 5-man team where nobody in the group had enchanting so you vendor everything that you can't use? It was along those lines since there are tons and tons of threads/posts about which profession makes the most gold, is best for tanking, etc.

[Hachoo]

I'd be ok with anything, all I really want is each character to perform the best they can perform. The only other consideration besides that is money and honestly you can make so much money via dailies or any other various professions you may have on your characters, you shouldn't really consider the professions of your main character based off things like being able to DE stuff or mine nodes in instances IMO. Sure having enchanting to DE stuff is good but up until you're at 450 enchanting it won't make you very much money since you'll be using mats to level instead of vendoring the items.

But, refer to my first point anyway about how money is easy to make anyway.

[Owltoid]

Yeah, good point. I'm not at the step where gold is flowing in, but I'm sure I'll be there in a month or two

[puppychow]

Check your server, on many you can vendor instance BOP drops for more than they will DE into. And really, unless you plan on running 10 instances a day for a long time its not going to make much of a difference. What does make a HUGE difference when you start out is whether you wipe or not, and the better geared your tank is the less you will wipe. And that goes back to the original issue of a tank with JC/mining or JC/BS is great.

In WOTLK you can make 1000g/hour just running around doing quests (even dailies), money is really not an issue especially since there is no new 5k -mount type of moneysink. There is the mammoth tundra, but I have ~30k gold and haven't bothered to buy one. I think you are focusing too much on "omgomgomg I need to spec my profs so I can make tons of cash!!" instead of figuring out what will help your character the most. In TBC some profs were insanely better than others, and all the recipes were instance drops or faction based, so it made a big difference what you chose on your main vs alts. In WOTLK it doesn't matter as much, the profs are mostly balanced (with JC on top and engineering on bottom) and each gives unique buffs that are nice perks but not must-haves like drums or self-only enchants/gems in TBC.

fwiw I have 3 miners and I haven't xmuted a titanium in over 2 weeks (could prob make 20g/each if I advertised on trade, but who cares) and I haven't sold a dragons eye in over a month on my JC, I just do the daily every day and get new recipes. All the prof recipes are faction-rep based, and there are a few rare world BOE drop JC recipes, plus alchemy "discovers" new recipes once every 4 days.

[valkry]

My choices are the same whether you are a tank or not. JC/BS, awesome gems (and epic gems in the future) and more gems. If you are a tank you can get hp, you can get AP, Str, Agi, Spell power, crit, hit, whatever.

The reason why 3 prismatic gems are awesome, apart form being awesome gems, is because it basically allows you to gem the rest of your gear how you want and you will still make your meta gem work.

[HPB]

Since I have leveled up the gathering proffessions on my teams (alts only, leaving the tank with no professions), I decided to approach my pally tank from a different perspective. What two professions are a pain to level, but will always be handy in an instance (since the pally will be my tank for all my teams) ?

Enchanting is necessary for instance runs for DE purposes. That was an easy decision for me. I already had one enchanter, but I didn't feel it was a waste to level another up, since the tank would always be in my instances. Engineering was my second choice for two reasons: i don't have any engineers and repair bots would be nice. The bombs for locked doors, mote extractor and tanking helmet sealed the deal.

While engineering/enchanting is an odd combination, knowing that both will be useful for all of my teams and that I won't have to level them up again means that having that combination makes sense to me.

(I have 2 Enchanters, 2 Skinners, 2 Herbalists, 2 Miners, 2 Tailors, 1 Jewelcrafter, 1 Alchemist, 1 Leatherworker and 1 Inscriptionist now.)

[Owltoid]

Hmm, I never considered engineering! How many locked doors do you encounter? The repair bot would be extremely nice, especially when learning a new heroic (I'm sure I'm going to wipe tons with my first few 5 boxing heroic instances).

[Hachoo]

I have yet to have found a single need for lock picking in WotLK FWIW - have seen no chests, have found no lockboxes, and have not encountered any doors that couldn't be opened just by talking to someone near them...

I entertained the idea of engineering as well but after reviewing it decided against it - it really provides nothing essential - I hardly ever have to repair anymore - maybe after 5 instances and I have plenty of time to do that when I'm selling stuff in a city somewhere, and engineering really doesn't provide anything useful to make your character perform better.

Honestly for sheer performance as said before your best bet is BS/JC or if you're a tank you could use mining/JC (since the 500hp from mining is greatly useful for a tank and will make some good money).

JC also happens to be the best money making profession there is right now on top of being the best for character performance, especially for a fresh 80. My DK tank is in mostly epics and I'm still using 2 JC trinkets because they provide something like 110 stam each plus dodge, etc.

[Bigfish]

Only thing I've found locked in Northrend or Froststeel Lockboxes.

[puppychow]

almost every experienced heroic multiboxer will tell you the tank should be JC/mining or JC/BS. There are a lot of good reasons why in other threads, enchanting is a waste and insanely expensive to level. As a starting tank the benefits of the JC-only trinket and 3 prismatic epic gems is unbelievable.

Eng is good for the helm, but once you get a better helm, well then eng is fairly worthless. Whereas until at least the next major content patch JC will always be great no matter what gear you get. Mining is great for the +50 sta boost, BS is perhaps slightly better (scales better with gear, 2 extra sockets) but insanely expensive to level and there are no BOP self-only BS enhancements other than the 2 extra prismatic sockets (+48 stam basically, same as mining, or +32 defense).