An Ode to Treants

For top arena players, I believe there is only one profession that can actually help: enchanting.  Since you can enchant your rings with +8 to stats you gain an “advantage” over other players.  As far as I know, all other professions are replaced with PvP gear.  Blacksmithing’s armor and weapon are replaced, leatherworking’s items are replaced and you can get the leg kits from other players, and jewelcrafting is replaced by BT-level gems (this one I may be wrong in).

However, since I’m nowhere near a full PvP set, and I don’t have much gold sitting in the bank, I’m not ready to pick up enchanting just for the minor upgrade.

I have been leveling up with mining and skinning.  At level 58 I was ready to hit outlands, but my mining was only at 275.  Knowing it would be painful to pass by outland nodes and not be able to mine, I decided to raise my skill to 300.  Four to five hours later I had it… but man was that a brutal few hours.  I vowed to never again let my professions slip while leveling a toon.  That’s probably an easy promise to keep since I have absolutely zero plans of ever leveling a toon from level 1 again.

Now I am level 62 (right as the cusp of leveling to 63).  My mining is maxed out at 375.  The problem is skinning seems to be rather worthless.  I don’t see any money coming from it.  I had the goal of dinging 70 and purchasing my epic flight form (pre quest) immediately, but I just don’t see skinning as helping that cause.  Vindisiel, on the other hand, has mining & herbing and is rolling in dough.  He thinks that herbalism makes more than mining.

So, what do I do?  Do I drop skinning and go back to the starting areas to level herbalism?  The nice part is I have an epic ground mount so it wouldn’t be terribly bad, but I feel like I’ve already wasted enough time on professions and I just need to focus on 70!  I’d hate to jeopardize reaching level 70 next weekend and getting some arena points before the Tuesday reset.  On the other hand, I have 7 long levels to go… that’s probably around 70 hours of play time where I will be using my professions and selling stuff on the AH.  Skinning, being rather worthless, could cost me 1-2k gold that I could have made if I was herbing.

I haven’t quite decided what to do yet, but I’m guessing I’ll drop skinning tonight and pick up herbalism.  I have about 1k gold right now (if Robvanwinkle pays me back the 500g I loaned him) so I think if I get my herbalism up I have a chance at dinging level 70 with the gold to pay for epic flight form.

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As a side note, my old main Jugz has her epic flying mount.  I didn’t get it for months after leveling 70.  Instead I leveled my blacksmithing and engineering up so that I could have nice epics and raid.  I don’t regret this by any means since this is before the time when PvP gear was extremely easy to get.  I saved up the 5k gold by farming marks of sargeras and fel armaments.  I actually enjoyed the farming (mainly because I had nothing else to do on Jugz) but when I finally got the epic mount it was kind of a let down.  Since I didn’t have any gathering skills, and it’s not a PvP server where you can chase people down, there really wasn’t a point to it.  I do, however, think Simoncowell will have some fun in epic flight form and with two gathering skills it will be worthwhile (plus the ganking factor!)