Profession planning

When I decided to level Ideale, I tossed skinning and picked up engineering because I heard it was a good profession for a hunter. Something about goblin jumper cables and feign death working very well together, and being able to make scopes and ammo.

I think it would be an excellent profession, if I had kept it up and if I used guns (although I may have to train guns on Ideale finally, because Hemet's Elekk Gun is pretty nice... I love my bows, though, so I might splurge for a nice one on the Auction House). The problem is, though, aside from the goggles, which are very nice, I probably won't be able to make anything horribly useful with engineering based on my interests. Most of the engineering schematics are very useful for PVE and for raiding especially, and that's also where most of the useful gun and scope schematics drop. I refuse to farm Karazhan for a BOP scope recipe, sorry.

If I had laid out my goals and done a little research on vendor-available recipes ahead of time, I would have trained Ideale in jewelcrafting. In fact, since my engineering is only to 126, I really should retrain her. Especially since the only schematic I bothered with was the Mechanical Squirrel, and I've mostly abandoned moving mini-pets on the neutral Auction House for now. There are many very nice jewelcrafting recipes available from the Outland factions (I have yet to see a schematic) and it is a profession in high demand on the realm.

Which leads me to dilemma numero dos: I trained Kresha in jewelcrafting on a whim and leveled it to 75 using extra copper and lowbie jewels I had banked, meaning that I will have wasted that time and money as well as the materials. Ouch. But with Kresha as my casual alt until I get Ideale to 70 and Ahami, my current main alt, to Outland, she's not going to be in any position to get the high-end jewelcrafting recipes any time in the near future, which are BOP. And again, I haven't invested anything but materials and time into the profession — I won't be losing any recipes I had to farm or buy.

So, advice to anyone just starting out: If you are rolling several characters on a realm and do not want to take double gathering (and really, this is what I should have done at least to level 40), plan your professions carefully. Decide what you will mostly be spending your time on: PVE, PVP, rep grinding, economics, or something else. Decide which of your characters you will be leveling first and do some research on the recipes available at high levels and where you can get them, which crafts make more money, etc.

Fortunately, because I am lazy with my professions, it will be pretty easy and not prohibitively expensive to switch Ideale to jewelcrafting, especially if I pick up skinning on Kresha and do some double-gathering until she's in her 40s. That could pay for the retraining and also for buying some low-end mats on the auction house if I'm feeling too lazy to farm them myself. But considering I still need to do a couple of rounds in Thousand Needles to up my mining (I could do iron in the Badlands, but it makes me sad to pass all of the mithril veins and not be able to mine them ... I said I was lazy with professions), I can pick up a decent chunk of copper there, and I still have a lot of bronze banked.

Really, I need to learn to plan better.