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

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.)

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).

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.

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

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).