This sexy Tauren is my bank alt. He is one of the primary keys to my ability to make my horde-side professions somewhat profitable. But the other equally important component to that profitability is my having chosen complimentary professions that can help each other out. For my horde characters, it breaks out like this:
- shadow priest is a tailor/herbalist
- mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
- shaman is a miner/jewelcrafter
- druid is a skinner/leatherworker
- SO has an enchanter and an inscriptionist
Alliance-side is similarly aligned:
- druid is an enchanter/skinner
- mage is an alchemist/herbalist (elixir mastery for the flask procs)
- shadow priest is an inscriptionist/herbalist
- SO has a leatherworker, engineer, and blacksmith
That’s right. Not only did I pick my alts’ professions with an eye on how they could feed into each other, I took my SO’s professions into consideration as well to come up with a mix that would cover most of our bases.
Each day, my alchemist transmutes an epic gem and sends it to the JC. The JC makes an icy prism daily, sending the blue quality gems back to the alchemist, along with the eternals she mines, cutting the epic gems and sending them to the bank alt. All herbs gathered go to the alchemist for making whatever flasks I need and whatever elixirs are selling well in the AH. The two maxed fisherwomen do the fishing daily (the third does it only when it’s the sewers, slowly increasing her skill), sending any usable fish to the bank alt to be held for the druid’s eventual push to 450 cooking.
Alliance side had mirrored this as well, until I faction changed the shaman and moved her over to the horde. Additionally, as I leveled the tailoring and the SO leveled the leatherworking, all excess items that were not especially saleable were funneled to the enchanter for DEing. The inscriptionist made me plenty of scrolls so no enchanting skill-up points were ever wasted.
These interwoven professions didn’t initially happen by design. But when I moved my shadow priest to her current server and started up my army of alts there, I did take what I’d learned from several years of good professions synergy with my Alliance characters and apply it. Some professions, especially enchanting, are really expensive and time consuming to level without having additional toons and their professions excess feeding into them. And since the excitement over getting to train new recipes and make fabulous new goodies has long been a driver of getting me to work on my alts, it works out very well all around.
So next time you roll an alt, and are tempted to pick two gathering professions or a repeat of an easy profession you’ve previously breezed through, take a minute to think about if you have an opportunity to make your profession leveling less painful — or more profitable — by considering it in context of your own little crafting cabal.