Mining / BlacksmithingFollow

Blacksmithing is pretty much useless for a hunter.
There are some somewhat decent melee weapons. But this slot is not that important for hunters and you can get several very good melee weapons at level 70.

As for professions you have to make a choice.
Either go for money making professions or go for professions which support your toon.

For new players I would always recommend to go for the money making professions (which is every gathering profession like, herbalism, mining, skinning). It is a lot easier when you have some gold to spare here and there. With gathering professions you can make a lot of money while you are leveling.

If you plan to play normal instances and small raids you can either go for gathering professions or crafting professions. While casters can get a lot of very good gear by taking up tailoring; the leatherworking set is not that good, but it is still useful for the early level 70 instances.

If you plan on doing end game content (which I currently define as Sunwell and to some extend Mount Hyjal and Black Temple) then go for professions which support your toon. As a hunter those are currently leatherworking and either alchemy or enchanting. With those professions you can get a litle edge which otherwise would not be possible:
Leatherworking offers the drums. With haste drums you can give your group 80 haste rating for 1/4th of the time (which adds a good amount of damage and is the sole reason my raid group has ~15 leatherworkers at the moment). Additionally there are some nice bop items a leatherworker can craft (but those are not the reason for taking up leatherworking, for the most items there are equally good or even better items available).
Alchemy gives you a trinket with 108 attack power (not that impressive, but ok for a trinket) and 40% more mana when using a mana potion (which is huge for some fights).
Enchanting gives you the chance to enchant your rings (and thus adding +8 to all stats). A rather small benefit, but hey every bit counts.

I always found the BoP gems to be sub-par in terms of what other professions give you. You can only have ONE extra ap gem, ONE crit gem and those would be the only real upgrades. Since you can get epic gems super easy now (with badges) you're only talking about a 2 crit rating 4 AP upgrade for being a JC as opposed to much much more benefit for enchanting. Now the new 2.4 sunwell BoP drops are really nice, but again I'd much rather have the alc trinket, drums, or ring enchants over a neck piece 2 crit and 4 AP any day.

I leveled JC on my paladin not for the BoP stuff, but to be the guild JC. I have nearly every pattern in the game (save the sunwell stuff b/c I quit the T6 guild to play my hunter) and if I had to do it over again I'd never level JC. There's way too much stuff in JC that is BoE and so very little good craftable BoP stuff, when you're comparing it to other professions.

Just a comment, if you do take up Enchanting, +weapon damage to rings will overall give YOU more personal DPS than +stats.

However, +stats would give better utility. (IE: Larger mana pool, larger health pool, more Sprit, lawl?) Also, the 8 Agility is very lovely for a Survival Hunter.

As for enchanting vs JCing, look at the pattern. It drops off of Sunwell trash. I don't know about your server, but there's not many Sunwell guilds on mine. So after all of their JCers get this pattern, these guilds may start to sell them. Of course, this is assuming they drop.

Taking a profession because something in the future might maybe possibly have a chance to drop is just stupid. With enchanting, you are guaranteed to have your end-game enchants. (Because rep-grinding is hard, amirite?)

Edited, Jun 15th 2008 5:53pm by Zeromatter

I dunno about that. I'm leveling a lowby Paladin (26th at present) and I'm finding the stone statues to be fantastic healing on a 2 minute cool down. Basically a second potion. With Hunters playing ranged that might be different for leveling Hunters, I guess.

But aside from the healing stones that are three slots you can fill early with JS, 2x Ring and Neck, and 2 more later on with 2x Trinket (although it might be that only a single JC crafted Trinket is practical). My Paladin is wearing 2 rings and a neck I made myself and I've got plenty of cash from my Hunter main to buy whatever I want on the AH, it's just that the crafted pieces are better than what I've seen on the AH. That's not at all the experience I had with LW, where I was able to craft a lot of LW items for myself while leveling but if I had had unlimited funds I could have almost always have bought better gear off of the AH.

You forgot LW..... :P
If i had the money reserve, I'd be a LW+alch, sadly i dont so i'm LW+herb at the moment.


Though I have started to level a rogue who will be a skinner/herb to provide for my lw+alch in the future ^^