Which profession is best? Well, when it comes to professions, there is a short answer, and a long answer. The short answer is, they all are. All of the crafting professions will give you roughly the same bonus, and if you are not too concerned about min/maxing, whatever you take is probably fine. When talking about the gathering professions however, only really skinning gives a valuable bonus – crit. Herbalism gives a heal and mining gives you more health, and while both a good, they are very situational, and probably not worth much compared to the damage you can get from skinning.

Some people take one crafting and one gathering profession. The latter would be to compliment your crafting, as to save money and be self sufficient. Others, myself included, level up two crafting professions, but this is obviously costly, because you need the materials from somewhere. The cheapest version of these are tailoring and enchanting, where all items can be farmed without a gathering profession.

But when it comes to bonuses, if you are not too concerned about squeezing out that extra +2 spell power, just take whatever you enjoy playing with. But if you want the most out of your two professions, its a whole different matter.

The raw stats

First off, lets cover the pure stat bonuses you can get from professions:

• Alchemy: +47 spellpower
• Blacksmithing: +46 spellpower
• Engineering: -1 spellpower, -23 haste, +Hyperspeed Accelerators
• Enchanting: +46 spellpower
• Inscription: +46 spellpower.
• Jewelcrafting: +48 spellpower
• Leatherworking: +46 spellpower
• Tailoring: Lightweave Embroidery
• Skinning: +40 crit rating

Obviously, most of this is pretty tangable, and as you can see, the DPS difference between Inscription and Jewelcrafting is only ~8 DPS at the worst. You may think that engineering looks to be off to a very bad start, but as you will see, this is not quite the case!

Alchemy

Alchemy gives you access to Mixology, which increases the potency of your Flask of the Frost Wyrm to 172, as well as increasing the duration of the flask. It also gives you an Endless Mana Potion to play around with, and lets you transmute Cardinal Rubies.

Blacksmithing

Blacksmithing lets you put additional sockets on your wrists and gloves, and a cardinal ruby in each gives you 46 spellpower.

Enchanting

Gain access to a cheap +23 spellpower enchant on both of your rings.

Inscription

Instead of using your Sons of Hodir shoulder enchant, you can gain a 70 SP/15 crit shoulder enchant, which is 46 spellpower higher than the one from SOH.

Jewelcrafting

Use 3x Runed Dragon’s Eye instead of Cardinal Rubies for another 48 spellpower.

Leatherworking

Lets you enchant +76 spellpower to your wrists, instead of the basic +30 from enchanting.

Skinning

Well, 40 crit rating. Joy.

Tailoring

Tailoring comes out slightly better than the professions mentioned above, as the Lightweave Embroidery gives you a proc increasing your spellpower by 295 for 15 seconds. With a 35% chance to proc and a 60 second cooldown, you stand to gain an average of +70 spellpower, but since you lose the haste enchant on your cloak, the total benefit is somewhere along the lines of +55 spellpower.

Engineering

Obviously, I’m not biased. Scratch that, I run a blog, ofcourse I’m biased. Man, I just loooveee me some engineering. Out of all of the professions, engineering actually has the most potential. You will loose your normal glove and cloak enchant, but it gives you the Hyperspeed Accelerators and Springy Arachnoweave. The Arachnoweave almost makes up for the loss of spell power, and while you are losing 23 base haste, you gain something a lot more precious.

The Hyperspeed Accelerators gives you a 60 second cooldown, 12 sec duration, 340 haste. If you strictly divide this by 5, the average +haste comes out at 68. But we’re not “just” using it at random times. The Hyperspeed Accelerators has to be used during lunar eclipse, the only time where you actually need haste.

Adding 340 haste to your starfires is a massive bonus. At 998 haste unbuffed, with bloodlust, a speed potion, nature’s grace and these babies, I’m doing 1.1 second starfires. That is insane amounts of damage, all crits, all fast, and a huge languish tick. If you use it smart, you can have it up for every other lunar eclipse.

But, you don’t have to ever think about using this. You can make it use itself. Turn your starfire into a macro, and have it cast automaticly whenever its up, and it will start with the first lunar starfire whenever its off cooldown. It can get scewered, but you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. The macro I use is this:

#show Starfire
/use 10
/use Starfire
/run UIErrorsFrame:Clear()

The first line merely shows the visual graphics of Starfire on your button. You can change this if you like. The second one “uses” your gloves, or rather, the enchant on it, meaning that it will be used when you press the macro if it’s off cooldown. Thirdly, it casts the actual starfire, and I’ve topped off my macro with a clear command, which removes the red text spam in the top. You would probably also want to go into Sound Settings and disable Error Speech.

Aside from that, Engineering is insanely fun. Rocket Boots has saved me countless of times – or at the very least, given me some leasure – and they are very fun to use. They make you run faster than a land mount, and there is nothing better than a rocket powered moonkin. Add to that the 30 second cooldown parachute, Jeeves your portable butler, MOLL-E the mailbox, the Portable Wormhole, saronite bombs and lots of gadgets. Oh my god, I’m having a lot of fun with engineering.

My perspective

My druid has seen a lot of professions. It started as a classic Leatherworker and Skinner. In Wrath of the Lich King I swapped it to Jewelcrafting and Mining. Then I dropped the Mining and picked up Enchanting instead for a double bonus, and lately I’ve dropped Jewelcrafting for Engineering.

While Jewelcrafting is a tiny bit stronger than Enchanting, having two professions dependant on ores doesn’t seem like a good combination. I’ve planned ahead, and I guess that I will use the money I make from Enchanting to level up my engineering.

If you want two crafting professions, be ready to pay it. If money is tight, level up one of your crafting professions with it’s corrosponding gathering profession, and then drop the gathering one to pick up another crafting. You will have to supply the materials to level this – and your other crafting profession – from the auction house, or use alts to gather the materials.

Enjoy!

- QQ

I used this page as a reference for the bonuses.

So I figured, it might be a good idea to give you guys an update to what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been thinking, what I’ve been messing with.

Progression, gear, professions, money making. This is getting crazy!

Progression

We are still working on Lich King 25 heroic. After six years of World of Warcraft, this sure is one heck of a fight. We struggle with phase 2 wipes. It seems to be nothing more than defiles going bad, healers being caught in the worst kind of moments, Valkyr’s missing a stun, not taking the splash damage they are supposed to, and so on.

I’ve seen it on 10 man. I get the feeling that, once we get through phase two reliably, it should go down fairly quickly hereafter. Phase 3 is not very hard to get your head wrapped around, once people understand how to move in the Frostmourne room, and when the tanks can coordinate the spirit soaking.

I don’t fret, though. We clear the other 11 bosses in a few hours, and I’m not unaccustomed to wiping. It’s been slow over the summer as well, and as long as I’m with good company, I don’t really mind the wiping.

Halion is a difficult fight as well, but we are making great headway on him as well. The normal version died rather quickly, of course, but the heroic version sure pulls out a few teeth. However, in just some 3 hours we went from wiping at 90% to passing to phase 3 with no deaths. Now we just need to cover the last 50% of the fight.

Two bosses left and many months until the expansion. I’m in no rush.

Gear

So, I’m getting pretty close to my BIS list. Well, the ICC one, at least – we haven’t killed Halion on heroic yet, ofcourse, so I’m holding out for those items.

In our tier 10 set, both the gloves and pants has crit and hit. Most people replace the pants with the cloth pants from Festergut heroic, which has haste and hit instead. The alternative is to use the cloth gloves from Gunship, which also has haste and hit. Either way, you have two items, both of them can be used to swap out a crit tier piece for a haste piece. I had the choice of battling the clothies on the pants, or take the cloth gloves. The choice was easy when nobody wanted the gloves.

That leaves me missing one heroic token. My normal DFO could use an upgrade, but I’ll be swapping DFO with the trinket from Halion once we get him down on heroic. This leaves my belt and boots, both ilevel 277 leather boots with spirit, that will eventually be swapped out for the cloth pieces without spirit. The leather pieces are alright, but still some 20% behind the cloth pieces with both haste and crit. Last but not least, I’m gunning for the Royal Scepter from Lich King heroic when we get him down. Piece of cake!

Professions

I’ve been running with jewelcrafting and enchanting for ages now. And I was getting pretty tired of both of them. Engineering is currently the best profession for moonkins – the glove enchant is absolutely amazing. So I dropped jewelcrafting and three hours later, I had spent 5.000 gold for 450 skill points in engineering.

Besides the cool buffs, engineering is absolutely hillarious. Speeding around with rocket boots, doing flight form bombings on passing alliance players, luring lowbies to attack explosive critters. And having the wormhole generator, MOLL-E and, of course, Jeeves, makes everything a lot faster.

When it came to deciding between dropping enchanting and jewelcrafting, my choice was on the future. Both of them are equal in the bonus we gain, but if I dropped enchanting, I would end up with two professions both requiring a lot of ores and bars. Instead, my plan is to make money with enchanting and use that money to level engineering in Cataclysm. I should come out even.

Engineering is fun!

Money

In the past few months, I’ve been working on getting a little bit more cash in my bags. I’ve never really been one for making a lot of gold. For most of this expansion, I’ve hovered around 20.000 gold, not needing more, not spending more than the raid bosses cover when they die. But the allure of money is too strong, and so I started playing with the action house. I was on a steady 5.000 gold a week, if not more, and I enden up at some 60.000 gold when I dropped my jewelcrafting. This was obviously how I made most of my gold, buying gems, cutting them and relisting them.

With jewelcrafting gone, I suppose I’ve lost my income as well. Still, I couldn’t help myself from buying a lot of cheap Cardinal Rubies yesterday, and getting my guildies to cut them. That and 14 Dreadstones, 24 ametrines and a handful of Zircons. I suppose I haven’t really lost my income, I just need to ally myself with someone who can be bothered to cut that many gems.

For the first time in history, I was scammed, just the other day. Well, not so much scammed as bethefted. Well, he didn’t really steal from me, rather I gave him a lot of gold. The story is as such: I’ve been selling Titanium Powder to this guy for a long time. Many stacks of it, and I’ve given him a good discount because he has bought so much. So the other day, I had a few stacks, and asked if I should COD them to him for the usual price. A deal was struck, and I send him the powders. And 600 gold. The 600 gold I was supposed to put in as COD, not just as an extra present.

I wrote him and said “Hey dude, I made a mistake, can you return the cash?”, and he said “Sure mate, not a problem”. Thinking that my 1.200 gold would land in my mailbox soon, I didn’t really do much more. Five hours later, I write him to hear what’s up with my gold. “Deghan is ignoring you“. Well I’ll be damned!

I know, I know, this is largely my own fault. I could just have checked the mail before I sent it. But it does sadden me when people destroy a good thing just for a bit of cash. My feelings on it is that, if he really had to keep the cash and put me on ignore, then he probably needed the gold more than I do. I guess I learned my lession!

Blog?

Right. The blog is going great. Since I started Qieth’s Quips in November, I have gained a steady 1.200 new visitors each month. Current statistics show me at 9.200 visitors per month, which is quite a nice growth in just 8 months.

I am having a graphics artist freshen up the site a bit. A few people commented that the background and logo isn’t really very moonkin-y, and I figured that particular feedback was spot on. Ginny “Immamoonkin” Higerd is working on some sweet, sweet graphics, and it should be ready within a week or two.

No, sorry, no previews just yet. All I can say is that it will be very awesome, and very much moonkin!