Profession choice

Hi all,

which profession for a tankadin focused on gear not income?

Personally, after much thought I think I've settled on my own professions: engineering and alchemy. However, alchemy is more about operational costs than gear.

In case anyone else is deliberating the choice, here are my thoughts on the alternatives and I'm sure the wise old tankadins who reside in these forums will post a few thoughts. I'd like opinions on jewelcrafting particularly.

You can review the highlights below to assist your thinking.

The profession choices are listed below with their highlights.


Engineering
- Rocket launcher stam trinket (if you're going to buy the Darkmoon Vengeance card though, you could consider this rocket stam only useful as a secondary stam trinket or for some pulls, and thus becomes situational rather than always-equipped)
- Tankatronic head piece (roughly equiv to T5 I believe). This is the main reason I personally chose this prof.
- Teleporter to A52/Everlook (goblin engineering 'home base')
- Earn a good income by gathering motes from those swirly clouds
- Can open locked treasure chests

Alchemy
- Trinket is brilliant for healers because of +40% benefit to potions, but a tank will probably never use it
- However, the mad alchemists' pot is 1/3 the cost of normal pots so is a good way of reducing your operational costs
- Earn a good income from making potions/elixirs etc

Enchanting
- +4 to all stats on your rings
- Can disenchant your old gear (less depressing than vendoring)
- Can farm low level instances for good disenchant profit
- Make your own wizard oil for threat
- Bloody expensive (in opportunity cost at least) to level up, however you can apparently stop at 275 to be a disenchanter of outland L70 blues
- Can earn a good income

Leatherworking
- Not a good choice, only benefit is the +5% haste drums of war

Blacksmithing
- Not a good choice, there's one epic tanking BOP armour and the weapons do not have spell damage
- Good for retribution, but they should see Cromfel's site not this one

Jewelcrafting
- No sustainable tank benefits
- BOP jewels are good, I believe, haven't analysed them though
- Blue trinkets are temporarily good but will get replaced quickly (perhaps the high stam / spell damage blue would be useful in a threat setup)
- Stone statues only useful for levelling to L60
- Can be a good income earner if you don't waste money buying recipes

Tailor
- Dur, bad choice

Mining / Skinning / Herbalism
- Great choices for income. I used skin/herb while levelling up. A good decision. Drop them at L65 or so before you hit Auch or Mana Tombs as there are some recipes drops in those instances.
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Mining and JC for max money. Engi/Enchant for raid purposes although the Helm tops out eventually. In the server's I've been around mining is oversaturated. Good luck trying to get ores in the nagrand caves. They're swarming with rogues.
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RICMRUNE - Paladin (Windrunner)

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Windrunner&n=Ricmrune

I chose Jewelcrafting and Enchanting. Thankfully I have a couple of rare patterns for both and earn a decent income.
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I went with enchanting and Engineering.

I'm broke a lot. Enchanting market on a small server can rapidly get taken up, and as rapidly as I've been getting upgrades lately I rarely have the spare mats to sell(rarely have them to use on my own gear even). It is convenient though to be able to do most enchants myself, and the ring enchants are good.

Engineering is incredible for the helm. Being in a guild that until recently has struggled to pull together Kara raids, I'm not likely to see gear this good for quite a long time. And the gyrocopter is just plain fun.

Mining and jewelcrafting seems to be quite a nice combination. I've spent LOTS of gold on new JC designs, but on the other hand I've also earned lots of gold with cutting gems and prospecting. If I didn't enjoy buying new designs so much, I would already have my epic flying mount.

A gold making tip: Get the design for braided eternium chain and craft a lot of those. Then disenchant them. Easy way to get large prismatic shards at half the price. I don't have that design yet. :/ It used to be always in AH, but now it has completely disappeared when people started talking about this tip.

I went with Enchanting/Mining, but stopped leveling mining a long time ago. I fully intend on leveling Inscription when WotLK comes out, so I saw no point in leveling a profession all the way to 375, just to drop it soon after.

I may go back and level mining up from the 140 it is sitting at just simply to dust the fel iron/adamantite for gems, but I have a lot of gearing to do, so I would imagine that I will be spending lots of time in instances rather then farming ore.

Mining/Engineering here. Just started collecting motes, but many primals are saturated in the market, so the money isn't that great yet. Mining is somewhat saturated as well.

But I see prices dropping on jewels, but not on enchant materials or LW items or flasks. If I was starting over, alchemy would be the one.

I even see prices dropping on things like Bracers of the Green Fortress. As WoLTK approaches, and the economies mature on many servers, prices in most professions are going to drop, as chars are leveled, skills are maxed, and demand drops.

The thing to wait for is WoTLK.. and gathering. The money is gonna be in providing the new ores and skins, and also providing the mats for inscription.
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Engineering/Enchanter here. The hat's awesome for a very long time, and enchanting rings helps make up for lousy tankadin itemization.
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I was eng/mining. Eng has way overtaken mining in terms of money per hour now, so I'm going with eng/enchanting instead. I don't plan on using enchanting for anything more than a way to dis things and possibly do the ring enchants. Enchanting made more sense as it's a key component of being able to do solo runs for profit and its benefits scale.

Right now I'm running a few friends through lowbie instances, so finding bop blues and appropriate level greens isn't so hard for me. I'm sure that'll change eventually, but hopefully not so much. In the meantime, engineering pays the bills. Plus, engineering has a nice combo with cogspinner goggles and enchanting that makes a small profit.

I have slightly updated my original post to say engineering is a good income earner, JC can be good.

Otherwise I've seen no errors or contradictions pointed out so far. Perhaps this post will become useful for others in the future looking at the decision.
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Not sure how much of a help the top level one is, but i know JC has the Healing statues that were of much help in lvling my last paladin.
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Give a man an answer, and he'll ask another question tomorrow. Tell him to read the goddamn stickies and he might start thinking for himself.

Keep in mind that if done right, and with liberal use of auctioneer and enchantrix add-ons, Enchanting IS a gathering profession.

Typical play time will start on doing a new AH scan, run enchantrix to look for 60% profit on gear to DE. Buy a bunch of gear, DE it all, and resell the mats at over 60% profit that I bought the items for.

It was so profitable, I dropped mining (which I rarely did) and took up engineering instead (which is sitting at 175 atm, got a long ways to go). So far no money issues at all.