Going one gathering profession and one crafting profession is the biggest newbie trap I see people fall into in WoW, let’s talk about what you should do in stead!

We are optimizing for gold

Today I’ll talk about profession choice from my perspective as a goldmaker. In goldmaking it is in general quite important to optimize for fun, as otherwise you’ll quit and make zero gold. That being said I have some quite strong opinions on what is optimal for goldmaking, and that’s what we will focus on today.

Gathering

Gathering is good, if you like farming. Personally I hate it, so I could never do it. That being said on pure gold per hour crafting will almost always beat it, barring some niches like farming bloodvine in Zul’Gurub on a rogue or similar strategies that can explode past other strats for a short period. If you do gathering I think mining+herbalism is by far the best combo. You will have to swap between track herbs and track minerals. You’ll have to keybind both and click between them, as well as use an addon that adds nodes to the minimap so you can swap at a reasonable time. There may be different routes that are optimal for each, but you will run across nodes for the other one almost everywhere so having both is the best approach. Skinning is not a good combination with either as killing mobs takes you away from roaming around.

Why I think the newbie combos suck

The typical newbie combo is to pair a crafting profession with the gathering profession that feeds it. Mining + blacksmithing or herbalism + alchemy or skinning + leatherworking. In general I think these combinations are bad, as they lead to less efficient farming. Combining herbalism+mining let’s you farm significantly faster if you want to farm, which is a massive advantage. Skinning + leatherworking is fine as skinning can’t really be efficiently combined with anything, but there’s no real advantage either, at least not economically speaking.

Your materials are worth their price

The key economic principle about this is opportunity cost. Materials you have farmed are of course free, but they still have value. You can choose to sell them at the current price. That means any crafting you do has to be profitable even if you bought the materials, or you would have been better off just selling the materials and buying the finished item. This is why I think the double gathering setup is the way if you like farming.

Double crafting, my preferred setup

Double crafting is my preferred setup and if possible I want to get every profession in the game leveled up. A 20-60 minute crafting session can often max out all of the reasonably profitable recipes for a profession for a period of a couple of days, you can then move all the items to a dedicated AH character to post them. You save an ungodly amount of time by just buying materials on the AH and prioritizing crafts that are profitable at AH prices, and there are usually many of them.

Which combos should you choose?

If you only have one character I would go alchemy + engineering. Both professions can craft extremely in demand consumables. Sapper charges from engineering is an incredible goldmaker at max level as at least in classic almost everyone was running engineering as the damage is huge. Alchemy has access to a vast number of different consumables, some of which have harder to acquire recipes. I made a fortune with this in classic WoW and unless they completely neuter the consumables it will remain great.

But what if you’re going hard on leveling multiple characters?

Well then you can consider a slightly different combination. There are two pairs of professions that have a small bit of synergy: enchanting + tailoring and blacksmithing + engineering. The first pair is for enchanting shuffles. There are several tailoring recipes that can generate nice profits by crafting items en masse and disenchanting them. Being able to do that on one character is nice. For engineering and blacksmithing the synergy is simply that they use a lot of the same materials. This let’s you do one big batch of purchases and saves you a bit of time when restocking. Alchemy and leatherworking don’t really have synergies with anything and can be combined on the last character. As for what to put on your main I expect engineering to be the go-to unless Blizzard destroys the profession, but even if everyone has it the consumables sell like hot cakes.