Enchanting?????Follow

Im kind of a noob, so be patient with me. My noob friend of mine and I started playing like a week ago and he's a blacksmith/miner and I am an enchanter, what would be a good second profession for me, because it seems that nothing really goes well with enchanting. We are both alliance humans, he is a warrior I am a Paladin.... Some general advice would highly be appreciated;)

Well, as a paladin, engineering is probably the most useful profession you will find. The things you make will help cover a lot of the paladin's major lacks - crowd control, AoE, range... But you will need a lot of help from your friend in the form of materials, since you are not a miner as well.

As an enchanter, the most common other profession is tailoring - the mats (cloth) are available by killing mobs so you don't need a gathering profession to support it, and the green and better items you make can be disenchanted for mats for your enchanting (and for skillups at low levels). Unfortunately, as a paladin, there isn't much else useful for you in tailoring, and you might be able to talk your buddy into giving you all the green items he makes to skill up for your disenchanting if you keep good enchants on his stuff too.

But I think in your case, I'd go with skinning. You're going to be killing an awful lot of animals between the two of you, and you're going to need some sort of income to support your enchanting (money sink!) - it would be a shame to leave all that free gold (okay, copper) laying around in the form of unskinned corpses! And your friend will need a few pieces of leather from time to time for his smithing as well - gives you something to trade for all those items you'll be disenchanting.

Edited: oh, and pay close attention to Thermalnoise's point #2!

Edited, Nov 17th 2006 at 12:29pm PST by fledarmus

If you don't see the benefit of fishing, that only means that you haven't done alot of fishing. The majority of the fish you catch in general will tend to be junk fish that you can cook to eat, I would suggest using these fish to level up your cooking skill.

The minority of the fish you will catch are the money makers and are generally used in alchemy, with the exception of certain fish like the deviate fish (which can be fished up in the oases in the barrens)that give certain bonuses that may prove useful in certain niches of game play.

The fish that you will want to sell in order to get rich from fishing are the oily blackmouth, firefin snapper, and the stonescale eel (which is the king of all the fish - try and get this sucker).

If you want to learn more about fishing, there are numerous threads and guides throuout this site that will give valuable information. If you want to learn more about fishing for stonescale eels, I would suggest my thread located in the trade forums titled fishing for stonescale eels.

As far as DE'ing your loot, there are also numerous threads and guides out there talking about that, I would specifically like to draw your attention to this thread in the trade forums titled How to make lots of money with DE (guide). This guide will teach you the best way to buy cheap materials for DE'ing for profit or for use in enchanting.

As far as a second profession goes, anything will work fine. I would suggest starting with a gathering prof such as mining or skinning, mining preferably so you can sell or give ores to your friend when he's busy crafting and doesn't have the time to go farm them himself. Later on it would be a good idea to ditch mining for a more lucrative gathering prof such as herbalism.

At a high level, or once you are rich then I would suggest ditching the gathering prof for a second crafting prof such as tailoring, or preferably alchemy. Alchemy seems to have the most recipes for which the mats cost less than the pots that you can make, so you won't have to worry about gathering them, you can buy whats available on the AH for a resonable price and sell the pot for a profit.

Coupled with enchanting, which early on has a huge money sink to it, but later on has the most recipes that you can charge an arm and a leg for and everyone can use, you'll be able to buy your lvl 40 mount, your lvl 60 mount, and your lvl 70 mount (once TBC is out).

The claim that you won't make money from enchanting until you are 300 is just silly. Without touching on the idea of AH-gaming (which is handled in other posts elsewhere), there's the simple matter of DEing as a safety-net for your routine AH sales.

Let's say that you get four green (or even blue) drops that you don't need one day. You put them all up on the AH for what seem like reasonable prices (you DO have auctioneer, right?)

The next day, you log in to find that 2 of them sold. Now, most people have to make the choice between selling those two that are left to a vendor or re-listing them for yet more deposit money. In some cases, re-listing is worth it, becuase the margin is large. In many cases, however, you are MUCH better off disenchanting the two items that are left and selling the components. That's just money in the bank. What I typically do is I save up the dust type mats until I have a full stack of 20, then I sell the stacks. Everything else I sell in units of 1 only (never 2) because many formulae require only one or two, so people aren't looking to buy a full stack at any given time, and they will scan the prices in order from lowest to highest, so it's best to not be later in the list due to having 2 up in a stack. So why do I put up the dust in stacks? Because people buy it for enchanting skill-ups.

When you do this, those "lost" deposits are recovered for the items that don't sell, plus a little profit (which selling them to a vendor typically won't give you). It essentially makes the AH a little bit more profitable for what you already use it for, which is a HUGE benefit for taking a skill that you never have to train up unless you WANT to (which you probably do).

In my opinion it is never too early to have a bank character. I would drop enchanting on the paladin and create a new character to serve as an enchanter/disenchanter and bank alt. (You will need to be level 5, but doesn't take long) The character should be female, attractive, and scantily clad. (I'm joking about the last part, but it does seem to be a common bank alt trait)

In response to the original question, I would recommend engineering and skinning (more fun toys) or herbalism and skinning (more income) for a starting pally. My pally alt is an engineer/miner but you already have mining covered. You could also go for herbalism/alchemy as mentioned previously. Fishing can be boring, but provides a decent/excellent source of income depending on your server.

I have suggestions and tips in the link in my signature.

If you like enchanting, just keep it! Surely, it IS gonna help you and your friend out along the way. You might not be making that much money of course, since you'll be dissing the greens and blues the both of you don't need.

Tailoring sounds like an option, since it pretty much stands on his own, and you can DE the items you make, but I'd rather go for skinning or herbalism, for the money. Herbalism might also be usefull later on, as you can farm your own potion maths, might you have made some more friend or found a guild with an alchemist among them.