we only have had one expansion under our belt, but historically

- the newest profession tends to be pretty decent early on and really good into the expansion. JCing had some good stuff early in, and was a great way to make money (even just prospecting ore). People who get the early rare recipes made 20k+ gold in a few weeks. Everyones gonna want to play with inscription, so the chance for gold is good.

- stuff like BSing, leatherworking, tailoring, etc lets you leg up quickly when you hit 80 and is good for a while. Midway into the expansion the profession items tend to decay compared to new instance items.

- faction rep is important since many patterns are based off that. Assuming you MB with 5 chars, all 5 should be able to cover all profs to ensure everyone hits exalted with the various factions. Secondary alts tend to take much, much longer to rep up and are better suites for gathering profs or just transmute type profs.

- always have mining on someone, preferably someone with an epic mount who is always grouped with your main, mining tends to be a huge money maker since it feeds so many professions. note that inscription feeds heavily off herbalism now.

- currently in 2.4.3 the fastest/best gear you can get for a new char is season 2 welfare gear, followed by kara/badge gear (its much easier running kara and heroics with s2 welfare gear than instance blues). This will probably not hold true when wotlk releases, since the "season 5" gear will be level 80 and only for good arena players, and there will probably not be an epic set of "welfare gear" until season 6 rolls around. With lake wintergrasp it may or may not be multibox friendly, dunno. So how MBers are gonna gear up so we can do heroics and participate in 10 mans is up in the air. I've seen a bunch of Lake gear, and I assume there will be new battleground honor gear, but we don't know how much will be tied to arena ratings like s4 gear is.