The Only Professions to Get While Leveling

For those of you interested in rapidly leveling up your toons, while adding a little gold to your bank, there are really only two professions to get while leveling. As you might expect, both are gathering professions. The materials that you gather should generally be mailed immediately to your auction house alt and sold so that you have more than enough gold for mounts, riding training, buff food, scrolls, potions, etc.

Skinning

Skinning is a great gathering profession to pick up simply because it is so quick and easy to level. Simply hit the mouse one extra time to skin the beast that you just had to kill for some random quest anyway. The mail all that leather to your alt to sell. It does also give you a bonus to your critical strike rating, but that's not going to make a huge difference to you while leveling.

Herbalism

This one requires you to go a little more out of your way than skinning, but it's still easy enough to keep the tracker up and stop by and grab the herbs that you see. Plus, as you level it, it will give you a healing ability than can help immensely while leveling.

So why not mining, you ask. I think mining is a great gathering profession to have, but I wouldn't bother with it until you've got at least one or two characters to 80, and here's why - Thorium.

With the massive increases to leveling speed today, chances are pretty good that you'll never see any of the zones that contain a decent amount of Thorium. Winterspring, Silithius, the Plaguelands - most toons hit 58 and head for Outland before visiting any of those places - so it'll require you to go signfiicantly out of your way and spend a lot of time traveling around in places in order to get it leveled to 300. So, I'd skip it and come back later.

Once you start getting toons to 80, you can then start to pick up crafting professions on those toons, which will be much easier to quickly level with all that gold you made from your gathering professions while leveling.

Some of the professions that are particularly helpful to pick up on your first 80 for your leveling lowbies:

Enchanting - not so much for creating enchants for your leveling toons, but to disenchant all of those BoE greens which you pick up while questing. The mats tend to sell more easily on the auction house than the greens themselves.

Tailoring - bags baby. All your alts should be kept stocked with at least a full set of Netherweave bags. Plus, these become a great source of income with Netherweave cloth after your other toons start questing in Outland.

Alchemy - keep your lowbies stocked with pots and also for transmutes later on.

Jewelcrafting (thanks to Fish for pointing out that I initially forgot this) - Jewelcrafting can be a huge benefit while leveling alts. Keeping your alts well gemmed vastly increases the benefit from their gear and makes it serve much longer before you'll need an upgrade. Plus, the crafted rings and necklaces from jewelcrafting are far superior to what you typically find from drops along the way. And lastly, particularly when paired with a transmute spec'd alchemist, this can be an enormous money maker. Prospect blue gems from Saronite, transmute to epic gems, cut and sell. Rinse and repeat.

Also, I always recommend picking up both cooking and first aid (unless you're a healer - can still come in handy then, but not as needed). Cooking is fabulous for creating various buff food that will make leveling faster for you (more on this in a later post). First aid obviously helps with up time.

In terms of a leveling update, I wasn't playing much last week because I had the family in Disney for the week. Had a pretty productive weekend though. I was able to get my hunter to 66 and my paladin to 36. I also did a series of pug chain heroics on my resto druid that was an absolute blast and tanked my first successful heroic on my death knight - and Gundrak no less.