Trade skills (am i missing one) ?

[NoobShammy]

Well I am 51 now and wont really start the grind on trade skills right now i have. My 5 elemental team is
Funk/a/e/i/o/u/master

A - Mining / herby
E - skinning (great macro for this to skin with)
I - Enchanting

This leaves me 6 more (free trade skills) in no order of importance i was considering

alchy - 1
LW - 1
engin - 1
JC - 1
inscrip - 1 (resevered slot)
??? - 1

I dont know what to fill for my last slot?? Both of the below options seem, pointless and waste of time and resources.

1. BS
2. Tailor

[Fluffy]

i beleive i saw caster BS recipies in WoTLK

[bsdll]

I am going to pick up every crafting skill, regardless of whether it's 'needed' or not. That will mean dropping one gathering skill.

Two reasons:

- Cooldown selling - transmutes will net you a bit, but you'd miss out on the cloth ones.

- Rare plan drops - if you run an instance and a rare plan drops, you want to be able to grab it - especially if you get a server-wide rare one early.

Damn blizzard for having 11 professions. I'll probably skip herbalism.

[Zub]

Damn blizzard for having 11 professions. I'll probably skip herbalism.

Herbalism is needed for inscriptions i believe.
you really want to drop the soon-to-be very needed wotlk profession?

[Kyudo]

In general I'd say take Tailoring over BS for a number of reasons:

1) Its much cheaper to level, and will continue to be pretty easy come Wrath, just craft stuff from cloth drops
2) It goes great with DE. The normal formulas mean that it's about 20-25% more profitable to craft cloth drops into DE mats than sell the cloth raw. My team just sends all their cloth to the tailor and she crafts stuff up for mass DEing once a week or so.
3) Spellthreads - The shammy who takes it will get access to epic spellthreads to improve spell dmg or +heal.

EDIT: I run mainly with either 5 shammies or 1 palla and 5 shammies:

Shammy 1: Skinning, Eng
Shammy 2: Mining, LW
Shammy 3: Tailoring, LW
Shammy 4: Ench, LW
Shammy 5: JC, LW
Pally: Eng, BS

I know I'm missing Herbalism, which is regrettable, but I have it on a couple of other random 70s.

[HPB]

Another thing to consider: Which profressions benefit you the most 'in action'.

You want your gathering skills of course, because you're playing your toons a lot and want to get as many materials free as possible.
Mine, Herb, Skin and Disenchanter are all good to have.

Leatherworking: Ideal for Shaman who are just starting out at 70 and want some gear. One issue is that all the good recipes create items that are BOP. It'd be a pain leveling leatherworking on all your toons though...

Engineering: Handy to have one with for blowing open locks and chests. Also nice to have repair bots. Highly recommended.

Jewelcrafting: Nice for cutting gems, but best items (trinkets and very nice gems) are BOP. Unless you're leveling JC on ALL your shammies you aren't seeing the full benefit of this, so might as well religate it to an alt through the mailbox. Just mail raw gems to your alt and return them cut.

Tailoring: The same as JC, best items are BOP, unless you're doing all of your shammies as tailors, might as well religate it to the mailbox.

Blacksmithing: nice to have keys, but an Engineer can use explosives for the same thing. Not necessary to have one on your team. Also the best weapons are BOP, so similar issues to JC and Tailoring.

Alchemy: No reason to have with your main group. You can have another 70 alt mail potions and transmutes to your team.

Inscription: Not sure how many of these recipes are good for in the party and how many work through the mailbox...

Anyhow, these are just some thoughts. I've been considering what to do with my team when they hit 70. I'm thinking:
Mine, Herb, Skin, DE, Engineer, LWx5

[Aradar]

My setup:

Pally - BS/Eng - I went eng for pulling prior to avenger's shield and then just kept it up resulting in a very nice helm. BS I did mainly for Rune of Warding and Ward of Shielding but have been able to get some nice pieces out of it as well and hope it will be improved in Wrath.

Resto Shaman - Ench/LW - Ench is a no brainer and LW is kind of like BS, it's always nice to know the profession that creates the type of gear you can wear especially with an expansion coming where those professions generally shine at max level before more content is released.

Ele Shaman1 - Alch/Herb, Ele Shaman2 - JC/Miner, Ele Shaman3 - Tailor/Skinner
My thought process here was more from a completionist point of view in that I wanted to be able to make and do everything myself. However, I am in the process of collecting mats to add 3 more LW which will require me to drop Herb/Miner/Skinner and with WotLK I will be dropping Tailoring for Inscription. Though it kind of sucks not being able to collect mats myself, I make enough gold to buy what I need and I don't anticipate that being much differant in WotLK though I may have to wait till 80 to level my professions. However, I have plans to start a second team that will do all my farming but I can't seem to quit playing my current team.

[Schwarz]

Alchemy: No reason to have with your main group. You can have another 70 alt mail potions and transmutes to your team.

I beg to differ all five of my toons are 375 alchemists. The +63 spelldamage trinket is pretty nice as well as getting more mana back from mana pots. Having 5 transmutes every day is really nice also. Time will only tell if there will be another money making transmute in wotlk (my bet is there will be). My orginal plan was to do leatherworking * 5 but I figured out I could be getting better gear with badges than leatherworking.

Having every profession sounds pretty cool. But what is the point? Getting a server first recipe to drop will make you alot of money if you spend alot of time in trade advertising yourself. But dailies also make you alot of money. I was able to grind out money for my epic mounts within 30 days of dinging 70 (selling ~400 large prismatics helps).

Another thing you might want to take in to consideration is the rep grind needed for various professions. I about tore my eyes out when I was trying to raise my sporegarr rep for the transmute earth to water. It took a good 3/4 hours of repeating the same quest over and over. Now if you had to do this for 4 or 5 different factions I could find myself burning out very quickly.

the way I have my professions setup is

Shaone herb/alch
shatwo skin/alch
shathree mining/alch
shafour alch/nothing
shafive enchanting/alch

I would think your team is going to be better off trying to help themselves out with bop crafted items than trying to get every recipe in the game

[HPB]

How is grinding through all the skill ups to get a BOP trinket from alchemy better than grinding through all the skillups to get several BOP armor items from leather working? 1 Trinket vs 3 pieces of Epic Armor...

[Skuggomann]

Ok protip: Havign that menny professions takes moar gold form you then it gives back.