Useful Trade Skills for the Solo PaladinFollow

Any ideas?

I'm not looking to make tons of cash through these, but I DO want to make stuff that would be actually useful for me in day-to-day play.

One of the most popular profession combinations is mining and engineering. This is, in fact, what my paladin has. However, its usefulness depends on your play style. For example, one of the reasons so many paladins go engineering is to get a ranged attack. But I don’t like using explosives. They are area effect, so not the easiest thing for single pulling. And it takes too long to gather materials to make enough stacks of them to use for every pull. So explosives are not a substitute for a gun or a bow. Another drawback is that a lot of the items you make, such as the cool looking goggles, are cloth items. Once I started finding metal helms I just couldn’t justify giving up that much armor so off came the goggles.

On the plus side, you can make a lot of fun toys. Exploding sheep, target dummies and later on a helm for breathing under water and even a shrink ray. So if you like toys such as these, or you enjoy blowing things up, you may very well like this profession. And though most items require the buyer to also be an engineer, you can still make some money selling guns and ammo and such. Plus selling the bars you make from mining can make you some good coin.

Another option is herbalism and alchemy. You can gather herbs and use them to make healing potions, manna potions, potions to buff your stats and even give you some hit point regeneration. These can be useful even when your level 60. Be prepared to use a lot of bag space with these professions, but they can help you stay alive. Plus, like mining, you can sell herbs in the auction house for some decent coin. Some potions also sell fairly well.

If you like to make your own weapon and armor, you could take up mining and smithing. If you don’t get a lot of green item drops you can keep yourself equipped with your own skill, as long as you keep it high enough to make level appropriate items. But keep in mind that there will always be better mob drop items. But the way I look at it is that mobs can drop all kinds of great items, but if I never get my hands on them it doesn’t really mater.

If you should decide that you would rather just make money and buy everything you need from the auction house, you could take up two gathering professions. Its not as satisfying as making things, or at least I don’t think so, but it’s the best money maker. Either take skinning and mining or skinning and herbalism. The reason for that combination is that both mining and herbalism use the mini map to show you where resources are but you can only have one active at a time. Switching between two of them becomes a pain very quickly.

You could also take a gathering skill and also enchanting. Enchanting is a great skill. It allows you to add things like stats and damage to armor and weapons. However, it’s extremely expensive at low level. It can suck your bank account dry. And you’re unlikely to make any money from it until your skill is very high. If you are interested in enchanting, I would suggest you take two gathering professions and once you feel you have enough money in the bank you could drop one of your gathering professions and take up enchanting.

Don’t forget about fishing, cooking and first aid. If you have any interest in these you can take all three in addition to your two main professions. I always learn all three. They’ve come in handy even with my healing characters. But some people don’t like to mess with them.

Best of luck.