With the amount of BRD I plan to do, not being able to mine the dark iron ore will be a hard pill to swallow. Accordingly, I'm quite interested in this topic.

My schematic plan for mining is as follows. For each dungeon:
1. Mine everything in the dungeon.
2. When I out-level the dungeon (character level), go back to a capital city and get skillups off smelting. (Perhaps even buy ore to do this.)
3. If the next dungeon has ore, do some mining circuits out in the world to get to the minimum level to mine that ore.

I'd love to know how much of #3 is likely to be necessary.

The other gathering professions are lower priority for me. As I don't see them being nearly as relevant at end-game if I'm going to spend most of my time running dungeons with my team. The primary consideration I'm using is whether gathering in dungeons makes more gold per hour than the team of 5 pulling the next pack. I suspect mining dark iron does, but the other professions don't have in-dungeon gathering that passes this test.

Herbalism:
This one seems less valuable (in dungeons) at end-game, and harder to maintain while leveling in dungeons. I'm tempted to try for 120 by level 27 for gravemoss in SM graveyard and stop keeping it maintained after that.

Skinning:
While it's the easiest of the bunch to keep leveled, my impression is that it will slow down the party pretty significantly. Is the gold per hour worth it at high level? Can a team of 5 do better in terms of gold/hour just pulling the next pack than stopping for 2-4 seconds to skin a mob?

(This reddit post cites 60g/hour at level 60 for time spent skinning: https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/...hile_leveling/.)

I'd change my mind if I saw highly valuable skinning opportunities in end-game dungeons. (I know about the Beast in UBRS, but I'm looking at 5-mans in particular.) My instinct is that it would be great in Sunken Temple (green dragon scale), but this is still lower gold/hour than end-game dungeons.

Thoughts? How many hours of out-of-instance mining might be necessary to keep mining up-to-par? Do any/all gathering professions outpace the gold/hour of grinding mobs and bosses with a team of 5? What gold/hour do you expect to make just clearing dungeons with a team without any gathering profs?