A beginner's guide to WoW's gathering professions

As soon as your character hits level 5, it's time to pick up a profession -- or two or three! Each character you have can take two primary professions -- herbalism, mining, skinning, alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, leatherworking, tailoring, jewelcrafting, or inscription -- as well as however many secondary professions -- cooking, fishing, first aid, and archaeology -- they want. Primary professions are typically categorized as "gathering" professions -- herbalism, mining, and skinning -- that allow you to collect materials and "crafting" professions -- alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, leather working, tailoring, jewel crafting, and inscription -- that allow you to create items.

When choosing a primary profession, it's good to pick two that work well together: say, a crafting skill that uses the items you collect with a gathering skill. This means herbalism is typically paired with alchemy or inscription; mining is typically paired with blacksmithing, jewelcrafting, or engineering; skinning is usually paired with leatherworking; and enchanting and tailoring can be paired with anything (though often players will pair them together and use goods created by tailoring to level their enchanting). But if you aren't terribly interested in crafting or just want to give your character a leg up with money-making, you could pick up a pair of gathering professions and take whatever you gather while you're leveling to sell wow accounts to crafters on the auction house. As to secondary professions, since you're not limited on the number you can take, you can really grab as many as interest you.

Not sure where to start with all these choices? We'll walk you through it.

Whatever profession you take, you'll start with a skill level of 1, which you increase up to 600 as you level up and use the skill. Apprentice skill (which you can train at level 5) covers skill levels 1-75, journeyman (level 10) covers skill levels up to 150, expert (level 20) covers skill levels up to 225, artisan (level 35) covers skill levels up to 300, master (level 50) covers skill levels up to 375, grand master (level 65) covers skill levels up to 450, illustrious (level 75) covers skill levels up to 525, and zen master (level 80) covers skill levels up to 600. To train in each skill level, you need to buy wow gold be both the right character level and have a certain amount of skill. Further, to harvest higher level materials or craft higher level items, you'll need a higher skill level -- in short, this means you'll probably want to work on advancing your professions while you level up.

But just which professions should you choose? There are good reasons to pick all of them, which can make picking the right profession for your new character a challenge. Today we're going to walk you through WoW's professions, explaining what they do and why you might want to take them. There's a lot of world of warcraft accounts ground to cover, so today we'll start by talking the game's three gathering professions: herbalism, mining, and skinning.