Profession: Herb and Alchemy or Skinning and Leatherworking?Follow

i would go skinning and leather working as then you don't need to keep changing the tracking type (find flowers and find humanoids)and it helps the class as the best thing we can wear is leather. Also to level skinning up you need to kill things like bears which will give you XP as long as you keep the skinning level about the right level for you to skin beasts that are your level.

Had you asked this in the Trade forums you would have recieved many, many replies. All offering different advice from taking 2 gathering skills until Lv 70 to recomendations for all the Crafting skills out there.

Let me ask you 2 questions.

How far do you expect to go in WoW?

How fast will it take to get there?

If your goal is end game 25 man raids and your gonna bust a gut getting there, then I'd go with 2 gathering skills till 70 then see what your guild needs.

If your gonna take your time and enjoy the ride, crafting your own gear is a real joy and a big part of the game (for those who like that sort of thing) I have all the crafting Proffs on my characters and I love it.

Having said all that I would say take Alchemy and Herbs, at lvl 68 you get flight form and you can fly around picking herbs, also you get to specialize which is a cash spinner as well.

Here's my experience.

I was skinner - LW.
I went that path for the drums. They are nice but I eventually realized that when I respecced healer, it was far too annoying to go farm the mats to make them, and anyway, I always forget to spam them in combat so they are not that useful.

The best armor you can make is very good, but to craft it you will need Nethers, and to get Nethers you will need to run Heroics, or Kara. If you do that, chances are that like me you will obtain better gear before you can even craft what you intended to make.

As for money making, skinning isn't great, and lw isn't much better. But check your server economy, it might be different.

So I decided to go with herbalism - alchemy.
Picking up herbs in your elite flight form without having to fight anything is just too great. I recommend herbalism to every druid just for that. As for alchemy, there is always a very high demand for potions, elixirs and flasks as they are consumables.

My suggestion would be to take herbalism and skinning for maximum money making during your leveling to 70. Then you can decide which one to drop and what path to go. Both LW and Alchemy are extremely easy to level.

I didn't follow any guide. Leveling LW to 375 in a few days resulted in about 500 gold profit (had everything I made disenchanted, and sold the armor patches). Leveling Alchemy to 375 cost me around 300 gold, but I did it in about 5 hours so I could have made it a bit cheaper if I had been patient.

When you're lv 70 and sitting on a pile of gold because you leveled with gathering professions, it's not that big of a deal anyway ;)

This is absolutely right. Also this is why I chose Alchemy/Herb. If you are running instances on your way to 70 you will find plenty of gear that will work just as good as the LW pieces you will be able to make.



Well, with a macro you can set up healing and mana potions that shift you out of form, use potion, then shift back with the blink of an eye. There are also potions like, fortitude, mongoose, defense, and such that are extremely useful and are used once every 30 min.

I agree that two gathering professions can get extremely boring so for the reasons i stated above Alchemy/Herb is the way to go for me.

If you have any illusions about skinning/LW combo as a money maker, forget it. I also found that the concept of "making my own armor" while theoretically cool, was, in practice completely unpractical. Usually the type of leather you'll be able to skin (and the mobs you'll be able to farm for leather) will allow you to make armor that't about 10+ lvls below what you might want to equip. At lvl 62, my dwarf hunter can make mostly low 50's armor. So if you're thought is that you'll save money on armor with LW, that's also a fantasy.

On the other hand, I have found that the Alch/herb combo works very well for producing moderately useful stuff as well as making money. The herb market on my server is really healthy - 10G for a stack of briarthorn!?! and there are a handful of potions/elixers that you can make at relatively low lvls that sell well all the time. Minor invisibility and free action potions are hot sellers with the BG crowd. Put a few of those on during the weekend and you have gauranteed profits. I went this route with my druid and at lvl 29 he's already sitting on about 90G. I had to work a lot harder with my skinning/LW toon to get that kind of money.

The best thing to do is level with money makers untill you reach 70. Then, you farm for some time the ores and what not for the gold. Then you drop both professions and pick 2 money sinkers. Then you make alts with gathering professions, level up then, and supply your main with the mats and some gold.
Then the xpack come and you are screwed again.

money makers:
skin, mine and herb. Any combination of this, depending on the server, will give you plenty of gold.

money sinkers:
enchant: the bop enchants to ring are great. Illusion dust are your enemy, since they are quite expensive to get at this time.

engineer: the bop googles are huge for dps, almost as good as t6, according to emmerald list. Bombs and what not are nice too, but you can't use them while shapeshifted (as far as i know, at least). You will spend loads of gold to up this profession, though.

lw: great combos and bonus, nice equipment, but usefull only up to t5. after that, it becomes pretty outdated.

alchemy: not really good, but at least you will always have potions, I suppose. bops aren't so good to feral druids. maybe to resto or boomkins, but I'm not sure.

In my opinion, if you plan on going Feral at endgame then level Leatherworking and Skinning, simply because you won't be able to use potions in forms. But if you're going to be resto, then I'd recommend herbalism/alchemy.

Note even late endgame! Other than the drums you have the Primalstrike set.

Compare [wowitem=29525]Primalstrike Vest[/wowitem] to [wowitem=33204]Shadowprowler's Chestguard[/wowitem] (BOE crafted & mats similar) or [wowitem=33579]Vestments of Hibernation[/wowitem] (Badge of Justice reward)



Compare [wowitem=29527]Primalstrike Bracers[/wowitem] to [wowitem=33881]Vindicator's Dragonhide Bracers[/wowitem] (PvP reward) or [wowitem=33540]Master Assassin Wristwraps[/wowitem] (Badge of Justice reward)



Compare [wowitem=29526]Primalstrike Belt[/wowitem] to [wowitem=33879]Vindicator's Dragonhide Belt[/wowitem] (PvP reward) or [wowitem=33583]Waistguard of the Great Beast[/wowitem]


All of these are far easier and cheaper to obtain than leveling LW to 375. That leaves the drums which are nice, but both alchemy & herbalism will make you more gold and be of more continuous use to you.