I would say definitely for your 1st char. Mining lets you buy better gear off the AH = faster levelling. It will also help you afford a mount.

Play around with leatherworking when you make a 2nd+ char imo.

If you do it right you should be able to make enough money to sustain yourself with skin/lw. Just don't buy mats unless you have a good reason, and get auctioneer so you can make informed decisions on what to craft when you're leveling lw. In my experience quivers/ammo pouches, shoulderpads, and armor kits sold the best but once again, server dependent.

Basically what imsa said. Leatherworking and other crafting professions are worthless. Just get rich off gathering professions

If you all are hordeside, once WotLK comes out, feel free to transfer to Mal'Ganis. GREAT economy = no problem getting epic land/flyer mounts, and we have the top US guild in the world. (8th in the world overall.. or 5th. I forget.)

I must agree with having 2 gathering profs for a first toon. Mining/skinning is really the better choice. Why? Mines are plentiful, and when you mine them, you don't just get ore. Yes, engineers need those stones, solid, coarse, etc. Especially twink engineers. Which new ones get made all the time. And twinks usually spend money pretty freely to level things fast. Like engineering, which they all have. And need stones for. Which brings me back to my first point.

So take mining/skinning, and then drop them once you have your **** paid for, or once you hit 70. You'll be able to power level any other profession quickly once you get that high. (Think I did herbalism 0-300 in something like 2-3 hours. But that was at 70 with an epic ground mount.)

I still wouldnt drop them, they are good when you are doing random crap and see a mine.

**** me, I'm about to get back into wow.

Dont do it!

Why didn't I burn these cds already? Whatever, I'll play it for a month and be done with the urge...I hope.

So true. I would never play WoW without people I knew. Being stuck with random pug's when doing instances, playing every BG with randoms, not able to get some quick help for a quest when you need it etc etc. It would suck beyond.

That's what guilds are supposed to be for.

I had a great guild once. Thinking about it makes me sad. And this is going to sound crazy nerdy/stalkery, but I miss our GM's voice on vent from raids. He sounded like an ultra-soothing airline pilot.

meh, you can play casually. i lvl'ed up about once every 2 weeks & had the game for a few years til the expansion came out (ended up in early lvl 50s). i had a couple friends who played (a bit hardcore), but i purposely never joined a guild which minimized building any social bonds in the game, so that probably helped. definitely go skinning/mining or skinning/herbing unless you want to be broke. you'll need 100g at lvl40 to get your mount. i sold my skins to the store & undersold my rocks i mined on the AH, and had about 150g at lvl 40. i also had friends w/ lots of gold, so that helped too.

edit: and make sure to log off at a inn, so you get the double experience (this is crucial for casual players)

This was a huge failure when I tried to kick the habit at first. Hopefully I do better at it this time.

The closer I get to 70, the more I'm starting to play. I just hit lvl 64 yesterday, played for about 6ish hours, gained over 400k experience points, and am getting so close to my epic ground mount.

I tried getting a group together for Blood Furnace in Hellfire. We killed the 1st boss, one person left, our leader went AFK, and then we didn't know what to do. We all left the group, regrouped, 2 other people left, tried getting more people, they got mad, then everything went to hell and we ended up giving up and I never finished it!!!

Then I went to Terrokar Forest and I wasn't even there for 5 minutes and I got killed twice by different lvl 70 hordes. I just /sit and let them kill me.

I can't wait to hit 70, get my gladiator gear, and start killing every horde I see.

I just read this at worldofwarcraft.com for the new hero class with the new expansion:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/wrath.../bardclass.xml

Apparently, you use controls like guitar hero and your character rocks out on a guitar to kill the enemies.

Funny thing is someone went from 1-70 in around 24 hours of game time.

I never really understood it, but some people were saying that WoW begins when you hit 70. I'm starting to get that feeling.

April Foolios! Mang...

So i've been mostly solo leveling a Druid(lvl 35) for a month now. I've been making good progress even with casual play. Several of you mention having two gathering professions for your main. When I started out I learned herbalism and alchemy. Rigth now I am at about 132 for my herbalism rating and around 67 for alchemy. Is it possible to make a decent amount of money with the combination of herbalism and alchemy? Or would you guys recommend dropping alchemy and picking up another gathering profession?

Hey, it's all part of the fun!!! haha Yeah I know it was a joke.

I was really hoping today for a new spell/ability: "fireballs out of the arse" , but no dice.

Like most of the crafting professions, most of the stuff you make from alchemy you will not be able to sell for a profit unless you have a really good source of herbs for high demand items. Unless you are in a big guild and your services are needed frequently for raid items, I would just drop alchemy and pick up another gathering prof.

I havent played WOW at all in about six months, but here's the main thing I did as an Miner to get the money for my epic flying mount, which I had about two weeks after turning 70 and starting with about 150g.

Engineers need hardened adamantite to level, like at least one bar per level.
1 Bar of Hardened Adamantite = 10 Bars of Normal Adamantite.

After prospecting came out in BC, the price of ores on the AH went way up, but for some reason people still insist on selling bars, and they are usually relatively cheap, EXCEPT for the hardened adamantite which has relatively few uses but is still very important for engineers. On my server (Shadowsong) a stack of adamantite bars generally sold on the AH for 30-35g, and one hardened adamantite bar sold for 25-35g. , which means a potential profit of 40g just for buying one stack of normal and making it into two hardened bars, which takes all of about 30s of travel to the nearest forge and back.

There were a few other people trying to compete with me at this, but within a few days of doing it (and fishing) I had about 2500g, so I could buy out all their cheaper auctions and basically control the sale of hardened adamantite 100% and set market prices.

Another easy way, once you get auctioneer, is to keep an eye on motes and primals. There are lots of disparities between the prices of a particular mote and its corresponding primal, especially fire and earth, so if you notice the motes are going too cheap, buy'em, combine 'em into primals, sell for a decent profit. If its the other way around, miners can break down fire and earth primals. IIRC, the main primal I made money on this way was primal life, because tons of new 64ish players coming through the mushroom area would just dump a bunch of motes of life on the AH at really cheap prices to empty their bags.

Fishing IMO is the biggest money maker in the game. If you spend the time to get your fishing skill to max and know where to fish, you can make ****loads of gold but its pretty boring. I went over exactly where to do all of this stuff in a post in an earlier thread, so if anyone really wants to know, hit the search function.

I've got 2 epic flying mounts (6000g each) and around 7k more gold in the bank mostly from just buying ore and prospecting and selling cut gems. I generally spend around 15 minutes a night buying ore, prospecting, and selling gems.

Just bot, you can make a few thousand gold a week while you sleep.

And you can get perma-banned!