Quote Originally Posted by Multibocks View Post
What does skinning on your whole team do for you? Besides the lame crit buff.
Agree. The bonuses for gathering professions are all really weak compared to the bonuses that come from actual crafting professions. And for me, leather has always been the lowest profit out of those gathering professions. I wouldn't call it "free crit" since you're blowing a tradeskill slot that could be used for a powerful bonus.

Now that there's going to be AOE looting, I don't think there's a reason to need tailoring on your main. Just use mouse passing or IWT and let a slave deal with it since you only need to loot one mob to get everything.

You'll probably want an alchemist for those Spirits of Harmony/Motes of Harmony since it looks like those can drop off just about any elemental mob. Those are used to transmute no cooldown Living Steel, via Riddle of Steel.

The Spirit of Harmony looks to be the new "all-in-one" elemental, and if it stays BoP you're going to need crafters that can use them.

I'm always a fan of Blacksmithing for the nice weapons and shields they usually get to craft, but I also have 3 plate classes on my team which makes it even harder to ignore.

All of my teams always have an enchanter for DEing dungeon drops and quest rewards along the way. Especially since MoP allows the enchanter to transmute mats between dusts, essences and shards and back again. You can even transmute the epic crystal out of normal mats once a day.

Engineering is a pretty lackluster profession in most people's eyes. Most people use it for PvP for the extra burst from the rockets and such, it's not really a PvE profession. At least not for a boxer. I think repair bots are overrated with the introduction of LFG and subsequently the ability to instantly port in and out of dungeons at will for repairs, selling, restocking. And out in the wilderness {lol, we do that anymore?} there's the Traveler's Tundra Mammoth and the Grand Expedition Yak. Granted, I have engineering on one of my slaves and I did love it in Wrath for the extra AOE from bombs and the Mote Extractors in BC and Wrath, but I didn't use it for anything in Cata and it doesn't look like there's much to use it for in MoP either. It's a real whore to level for such little utility.

While leveling, use whatever you want, keeping in mind the stuff you might need later and the bonus XP on herbs and ore. You're never going to keep up with your tradeskills considering the speed of leveling. You might even have a hard time of keeping gathering skills caught up to your level. The only profession I ever actually concern myself with while leveling is enchanting, since those mid-range mats are expensive. I ship off all my cloth to a tailor alt and make stuff to DE as I go. Sometimes I use a skinner and make leather stuff to DE too.

But if you're thinking max level, you'll probably want to go with as many actual crafting skills as you can for the extra bonuses and relegate at least a few of the gathering skills to a secondary group once you're done leveling via quests.