Wednesday, November 4, 2009

One man army... or trade union?

So after hitting 80 I toyed around with what trade skills my shamans should have. My paladin was already a miner/JC and I had found it very profitable and of great benefit with the prismatic gems.

I had a think about it and realized I had two paths to go down:
  • Min/Max: I could take all the same tradeskills simple for their added benefits. I think at the moment the best combination would be JC/Blacksmith. This would give you 3x Prismatic Gems as well as 2 additional gem slots for epic gems.
  • Self-sufficient: Cover all tradeskills to have access to all cooldowns and special items as well as more utility.
While min/maxing would be insanely expensive if skilling up simple using the auction house, I did have access to a miner so if I wanted to farm the materials I could have. I did some calculations and worked out I would need something to the tune of 4000 thorium ore alone which sort of blew my mind.

I decided to leave it for awhile and I did a bit of PvP and Heroics. I leveled Enchanting and Inscription on Slatza - who always seems to get the best of all the drops - I figured if I ever had to just take my tank and one shaman specced Resto with me somewhere it would most likely be Slatza. After doing a whole bunch of old world instances and filling up my bags I realized that giving one of my characters Engineering would give me access to Jeeves - a 1 hour cooldown repair and reagent bot.

On another note - I had started to get into playing the auction house quite heavily, you may notice alot of my other blogs I read are about the wow economy and people blogging about hitting the gold cap. With access to every tradeskill I could easily play many markets at once and buy raw materials to convert cheaply into enchanting materials or resale.

So I worked out who was going to get what tradeskill:

Slatters - JC / Mining
Slatza - Enchanting / Inscription
Slatzb - Engineering / Blacksmith
Slatzc - Leatherworking/ Skinning
Slatzd - Tailor / Alchemy

 So far I have completed JC/Mining/Inscription/Enchanting/Engineering all to 450. My next focus is going to be to finish up Blacksmith and then probably Tailoring and Alchemy. I think I'll leave Skinning to last because its going to be the most time consuming and I have a few days off coming up soon where I can sit and AoE some low level mobs.

I'm curious as to which path other boxers take and why?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just reading your post makes me feel bad about not having done my tradeskilling shores :-) My plan is to get enchanting up first for the sharding, then get JC/Mining on the tank.. after that I'm not sure.

Bobby said...

My first team I did the "cover all bases" but it was irritating trying to cover gathering professions with two mini maps to watch etc. So, I'm doing my 3rd team and following the path of my 2nd.

Enchanting/Tailor
Enchanting/Alchemy
Enchanting/Inscription
Enchanting/Jewelcrafting
Enchanting/Leatherworking

I've debated on picking up Blacksmithing, but I can't simply give up the enchanting option becuase being able to DE all your soulbound stuff is just too nice imho. (And got me the realm first max enchanter) I'll likely just level a DK to 65 and do the BS thing on him/her.