best money making trade skillFollow

Okay i wanted to know what u think is the best trade skill to make money : here is my opinion

Alchamy is by far the best money-making skill ever. At Expert lvl u can make healing potions, sold approximativly 12s each in the AH ! when u pick a bruisweed plant (like all plant, u get 1-3, so normally 2, and u need 2 different plants to create one potions) u can say, oh ive just gained 12s !
afterwards, the greater healing potions are sold 20s each, and Superior healing potions 1.6g each !
so with alchemy i made tons of gold, so if u have a trade skill that can give the same amount of money just tell me. but right now, i advise all new players, whatever the class or race, to chose herbalism and alchemy as trade skills

For dedicated money making disenchanting is godlike (if you have a good idea of how the economy works).
For as you level/quest definitely Mining & skinning combo.

*Note: Said enchanter alt was level 11 for 4.5 months ;P

I started the toon 9/5/2006. I broke 1000G on 11/20/2006. At the time there were no level restrictions on disenchanting items. When TBC came in I quickly levelled to 25 and got my enchanting level to 225, so I could DE anything to L64. So far this toon has made over 10,000G and spent most of it on buying mounts for guildies and alts. This toon was designed to be a money-maker. I really see little reason to level it any further than 300 enchanting (so that anything in the game can be DE'd), just as I saw little need to level it beyond 11 pre-TBC.

I hate to admit this because all of the other Jewel crafters are mysteriously silent. In all honesty, jewel crafting has been the best money making profession I've ever seen. Admittedly there was an enormous investment involved in leveling up JC and getting a significant array of rare recipes, but at this point with the majority of rare cuts, I make somewhere between 500 and 1200 gold/day just buying adamantite ore, prospecting, and then cutting all of the gems I get into whatever happens to be selling for the most that day. It takes about 30 minutes of work a day just buying the ore, prospecting, checking the ah, and checking everything, but the green gems you cut and sell cover most of your deposit costs if you have a bad day sales-wise, and the rare gems are just profit machines. The only problem with JC as a money maker is that prospecting is a gamble. There are days where I'll get 3 rare gems from one stack and days where I'll get none from 6 stacks. It still works out to be a profit in the end though.

-Mont

And wasting time and money gathering cloth so you can make lots of useless items that sell for less than the cloth saves you what? Same for leatherworking. Same for blacksmithing. Same for engineering. Same for gemcrafting. Crafting professions are losers, not savers. I'm not saying that the crafting skills are useless, just that they won't save you a copper and will cost you plenty.

For every successful crafter, there are 50 unsuccessful ones. Being successful in a craft REQUIRES finding a niche. You obviously have, in the riding crop.

I'm discounting the headbands - I buy those all the time for prices well below my normal 50% profit margin for DEing. If you can make those and sell them for a profit, you can make even more profit disenchanting them. Just remember that the profit comes from disenchanting, not leatherworking.

No offense, but this is just ignorance. A level 10 character can easily make 1,000G in less than 4.5 months with absolutely no help from any other toons, level 70 or otherwise. At level 10, you can skill up enchanting to level 150, which enables you to disenchant items up to level 45. So, you can DE and sell mats up to and including Dream Dust, Greater Nether Essence, and Large Radiant Shard. Now, you're going to try to tell me someone can't make 1,000G selling those enchanting mats in less than 4.5 months?

And this is why I got excited when I saw http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=24210&locale=enUS;source=live drop off of a Shattered Rumbler in Nagrand. Threw it up on AH for 300G (which was about in the middle to low end of other blue designs), will see if it sold when I get home.

genfreak, is that you?

I've tried the Disenchanting route myself, and began to make a hefty bit of cash, however I noticed that with my server's economy, the dusts were in general offsetting my profit margins negatively. In addition, I had to keep track of hundreds of transactions, remember what I bought the item for so I would sell the disenchanted mats at a resonable markup.

Right now I have a lvl36 Hunter with Mining and Skinning that feeds a bank alt materials to post on the AH. I have about 250G on my bank alt, which I think is a comfortable ammount for my level. I really only have to spend half an hour a day on my bank alt in order to collect all my mail and post all my auctions.

On my old server, my lvl57 Warrior had switched from double gathering to herbalism and alchemy after lvl40. While grinding up to lvl40 he had skinning and mining, and mannaged to farm up enough mats to sell on the AH and earn enough gold to buy his mount (back when the mount was the high ticket item), his riding training, his lvl40 training, and a full set of plate.

A little bit after hitting lvl40, as i mentioned earlier, he switched to herbalism and alchemy, ground them up to 300 in conjunction with his fishing skill. He was making a substantial ammount of gold fishing up stonescales, and converting them to oils and selling them on the AH. Eventually he also started to transmute arcanite bars, despite the slow proc times, and sell on the AH for a fair markup versus the price of the thorium bars and arcane crystals that he needed for mats. Unfortunately a guildmate needed arcanite bars for a quest, and I offered to help him reach his goal.

I think that as Mike said earlier, any trade skill can make you a heap of money if you find a niche and stick with it as long as you can make money with it. I do however believe that double gathering coupled with fishing is by far the best way of making gold, because there is no startup capitol to invest in order to produce your wares. Granted Disenchanting can make you alot of gold, probably the most out of any other profession, however if the market shifts too drastically, you're out your startup capitol until the market swings back into your favor.

People will underbid you, others will underbid them, and yet others will underbid them until there's no point in selling them on the AH until everyone else thinks so too and stops posting their auctions. Eventually the price will stabalize only to continue through the cycle again. My bank alt doesn't have the capacity to hold his stock of mats while still recieving goods from the main in the mail.

I've always loved the gathering skills for pure money making potential what every your level (no mats, pure profit). At 70 however, I have enough daily quests to actually replace my herbalism for money making. I can even get 2 mana pots a day from a simple skettis daily so I won't have to buy too many herbs.

I made a switch and leveled tailoring to 360 over the last 2 days and sent the tons of greens to my enchanter to disenchant. In the future it will be interesting to see if I can turn more profit making greens and disenchanting them, than just selling the cloth. This is just kind of a fun question since my reason for leveling Tailoring was actually to make my Primal Mooncloth set, not to make money.

In answer to the OP, the classic gathering professions mining, herbalism, skinning, fishing, and also disenchanting can all bring in the cash. It is probably going to vary by server which works the best. In my opinion, the other crafting professions are best left for when you are confident in your ability to comfortably fund them.

Skinning is great but mainly if you sell light leather :D I've seen it sell for almost 2G a stack when medium sold for barely 35s. Heavy and rugged aren't very often above 2G.

At lvl 58 i still go to Duskwood to skin wolves when there is little or no light leather on the market. The rest of my leather just gets dumped at whatever price is lowest that day. The money maker is sometimes low lvl stuff indeed!! I took tailoring and i'm sure i make more profit selling 10 lvl 15 items than 10 lvl 45 items!