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I have one profession (leathercrafting) that I haven't done a damn thing with in a long time and is sitting at a measly skill level of 135. It'd be pretty easy to achieve that level with a new profession, so I'm wondering what professions people think are useful for a hunter.

Other profession is skinning, maxed out, so levelling leathercrafting may be worth it from that point-of-view, of course.

any of the non gathering profs. come out with the same benefit I believe, but with LW you can make your own gear. Also you get to give your bracer agi instead of crit so that's always nice.

EDIT: for some reason the forum is making me constantly double post....

I've been disillusioned with crafting this expansion, as they'd gone back to the BC model of making crafting mats BoP, which locked out us solo crafters. Maybe when I finish unlocking the molten front vendors, I'll decide to finally finish leveling up LWing.

My hunter is an engineer/alchemist. She is my main so i figure she has the right to be lazy and make my alts get mats for her

I like engi, mostly for the headgear. Bio-optic killshades are just awesome, imo. But you have to be engi to use most the stuff.. >.>

And here's some questions for you to answer first..

Are you in a good guild?

Do you raid?

Do you have gold already?

Do you want to be self-sufficient?

All those answers will effect what is best for you.

Strictly for raiding, the best will likely be BS/JC once the epic gems come out.

But for solo self sufficiency, Eng+mining or Skinning/LW are good combos. Or even Alch/Herb. In general for solo, you want to pair professions that support each other. For raiding it's all about the dps benefit.

Any of the non-gathering professions give about the same dps boost, but the epic gems always help more.

Finally, you need to pick ones that you enjoy, or at least tolerate. I personally hate inscription, as it's a pain to deal with selling in the AH. But other folks find it fun.

Choice is yours...

I love Engineering for all the quality-of-life improvements. Parachute cloak, rocket belt, portable mailbox, Jeeves-bot, all the teleporters...whenever I'm on my Shaman (herb/alchemy) and want to pop over to Northrend or Outland for some reason, I'm always grumbling.

The problem is that it's not great for making money. Scopes have been about the only thing that have sold this expansion, and it's not a real high-profit sale. Not sure if the new gun or the Woodchucker will be any more profitable...I'm guessing the Woodchucker will sell, but the materials cost is higher, so who knows what the profit margin will be.

Personally I kind of like herbalist / inscription; I get a haste boost in combat (also sweet for tames - made all the difference for my BE on Terrorpene, as she was too lazy to pick up fire resist gear), my own shoulder enchants, and don't have to pay through the nose every time I want a new glyph (granted, it's not cheap to skill up, but no prof is - and once you know the recipe you can make the money back with your own overpriced glyphs...)

I was curious in which one's you actually enjoy doing. I have a hard time finishing up a profession (other than the easy ones of mining, skinning and herbing) I just don't find them enjoyable. I've attempted Leather working and tailoring. Never gotten very far with them before I got bored.

What professions do you find fun to actually do... thinking more along the line of engineering or archeology? Or is everything just boring

Well for me at least, easier progression = more fun, so inscription is nice because you're not worrying about finding rare nodes - rather your rare bits have a small chance to be included when you gather regular herbs. And no chaos orbs to bother with (well at least in re: the trainer recipes - have ventured beyond this yet)

Alchemy is similar - you do have to be somewhat more selective about which herbs go to which recipes, but at least as of wotlk when I was doing it semi-regularly on my troll shammy, there are no titanium/pyrite/etc type - just special lotuses that worked like inscription rares e.g. small chance to be included with normal gathering.

Leatherworking I personally tend to avoid on my hunters unless I have a rogue or feral dr00d on hand to receive them - if you're just making leather for yourself, a hunter, then the armor points become (largely) wasted.

Engineering - this one is fun for hunter (build your own gun!) but as you are looking out for rare nodes, it can feel like it drags on a bit. The cata recipes don't seem over-dependent on this but I remember this being rather a bear in TBC and WOTLK...

Worba wrote:Leatherworking I personally tend to avoid on my hunters unless I have a rogue or feral dr00d on hand to receive them - if you're just making leather for yourself, a hunter, then the armor points become (largely) wasted.

Not sure what you meant here. Leatherworkers make both leather and mail armor.

GormanGhaste wrote:

Worba wrote:Leatherworking I personally tend to avoid on my hunters unless I have a rogue or feral dr00d on hand to receive them - if you're just making leather for yourself, a hunter, then the armor points become (largely) wasted.

Not sure what you meant here. Leatherworkers make both leather and mail armor.

Yes but regardless, hunters don't need armor points so much. They're nice, sure, and ofc we need stats like anyone else, but factoring in all of the aspects of this item including armor points, a hunter isn't going to get as much use out of leather as a bear, or as much use out of chainmail as an enhancement shaman. It's like the difference between a rich person who drives his Maserati on weekends and only takes it above 80 when he thinks there isn't a cop around, and a racecar driver who's constantly pushing it into the red.

I'm not saying leatherworking is "useless" for a hunter - not at all. I'm just saying that if you're a hunter and want to get the maximum possible (personal) benefit from a profession, you should be looking at the fact that a chunk of the overall product is devoted to a feature that's really just a secondary need for your class.

o.o I'm not sure why you say that leatherworking is less useful. There's some decent dps boosters for your wrists/feet, and the epic gear you can craft at the end is on par with our first cata tier set. I didn't mind doing leatherworking, however, the grind from about 500 to 525 was BRUTAL. You need so many leathers, and volatiles, and all you can make is pvp gear, and only about 2 recipes at a time give you skill points for 5 points.

That said though, if you LIKE leveling the gathering professions, you could always do skinning and herbalism. The crit from skinning, and the small heal + haste from herbalism isn't all that bad. The only issue with that is you then lose out on the profession only gear upgrades you could be getting from a crafting profession.

CrystalKitten wrote:o.o I'm not sure why you say that leatherworking is less useful. There's some decent dps boosters for your wrists/feet, and the epic gear you can craft at the end is on par with our first cata tier set.

Again, stats are great, we all need them, but a component of crafted armor is the armor points itself - most non-melee classes don't pay much attention to this (which is as it should be), but the fact remains that part of your output as a leatherworker / chainmailworker is devoted to something you don't use very much.

Not saying leatherworking is a "bad" choice for a hunter, never have - but when you compare vs say an engineering gun...

Crafted chainmail...
Stats - YEP
Armor - not so much

Crafted gun...
Stats - YEP
Ranged DPS - YEP

Etc.

If you really want LW, I'd have 2 characters and level them side by side (that's how I often do it actually);

Hunter: engineering, leatherworking. All production skills, so no worries about stopping to gather stuff.

Druid (feral / bear): skinning, mining. Just focuses on gathering, so no worries about skilling up a trade prof, and being a dr00d he gets around fast, has stealth for the deep cave / hard-to-reach nodes, as well as the underwater form for submerged nodes.

Bear gets maximum use out of the LW recipes, so you get to see that skill fully realized, and ofc yes hunter gets the nice armor too... and engineering means the hunter gets the nice firearms and such.

Ultimately though, it just comes down to whatever makes you squee.

Well, hunters should be wearing mail because of the armor proficiency that gives you 5% more agi, not because of the armor value. Before 50 it's not an issue but afterwards it becomes more an more of a loss.

LW is a royal pain to level unless you have lots of gold, 500% moreso without skinning side-by-side. The wrist enchants are extremely sexy though, since the +50 enchant might be hard to come by if you're not in a larger guild. The cheap leg armor is really nice too.

BS/JC is nice but the BS is not as big a deal if you're rocking epic socketed gear, where you'll have the red sockets available np. JC is still topnotch. Engineering is great with the tinkers but there's little money from it, whereas BS/JC sees returns pretty quick from their ginormous cost. Again though, unless you have tons of gold it sucks leveling these without mining.

Enchanting is nice money right now and not too hard to level (esp if you do LW/BS/JC/CC and save up all the junk you make to DE much later) Its bonus is that you'll never not see the DE button in dungeons and don't need a gathering prof to get the most of it before you hit 525.

Alchemy is ok, but I still find using the miniflask pretty annoying, but it's cheap to level and has great perks and a nice socketed 359 agi trinket. Inscription is ok, mostly for people too lazy to do deepholm dailies. Clothcraft actually has the best cloak enchant for hunters, but... IT JUST SEEMS REALLY SILLY.

I did LW/Ench on my second hunter (who is alone on a server) and I don't regret it. My LW keeps wrist/leg enchants cheap and I make tons of money with scrolls to buy gems and whatever else I need.

Yeah... being able to craft agility mail boots vs buying them for 50,000,000 gold is a HUGE win on top of the bracer ench. and the cheap leg ench. We don't wear mail as stated by another poster for armour, we wear it for 5%+ agility, which IS something we use.

Nothing wrong with being eng/lw either, though, if you want to argue for engineering.

We do wear mail for armor if we're playing pvp, though. My armor reduces damage taken by 36%, enough to make a difference, and resilience adds a further 35% damage reduction as well. This keeps me alive long enough to kill the opponent or get out of the situation, hopefully.

Fafnir wrote:Well, hunters should be wearing mail because of the armor proficiency that gives you 5% more agi, not because of the armor value. Before 50 it's not an issue but afterwards it becomes more an more of a loss.

^
This.