New to Level 80? Trade Skills and the Holy Paladin (Part 6)

Trade Skills and Leveling:

 If you are already 80 and just finding out about trade skills. I am sorry you are finding out now, the best advice is to pick them up and level them as you level your character. What is the best trade skill to pick up? There is no wrong answer here, take up whatever interest you or is cool to you. Yes, there are certain skills that will benefit certain classes more than others, and if you want more details on those just do a quick Google search and you will have an idea of what’s best for you. You can only have two main skills at a time, but you can level and maintain all of the secondary skills at the same time. The secondary skills are First Aid, Cooking, and Fishing.


Some professions will need you to do some farming for mats. What this means is you need to go kill lots and lots of creature X (aka farming) that drops the material Y (aka mat) you need to create an item and level your skill up. Most of the time you can get everything you need to level your skill as you level your character. If you are already 80, you will most likely hit the AH for the materials needed to level the first 200 levels and move very fast (current max level is 450). You will sometimes hit a wall when your skill gets into the 300 range. This is the Burning Crusade era of materials; they are rarely farmed and sold and sometimes hard to come by. So if you want to level up and not pay a ton you should go get the materials yourself. On that note if you want to make some gold you can sell your extra mats or even farm them to sell to other players for a profit.

There are two kinds of professions, crafting and gathering. Usually you need a gathering skill to gather the materials you will need to craft something. For example if you want to be a leatherworker, you should probably be a skinner so you can get the mats you need to craft the gear. If you decide to take two crafting professions, plan on having a friend/guild mate that can help you gather materials or have a stock pile of gold so you can purchase the materials you need. Some people have made second characters specifically to gather supplies for their main characters crafting.

For Holy Pallys the best main skills right now (this is debatable) are Jewelcrafting and Blacksmithing, mainly because of the bonuses they offer. Jewelcrafting allows you to create jewelcrafter only gems that give you amazing stats like +34 to Int, they can only be used by the creator and you can only have 3 equipped at one time. Blacksmiths at level 400 gain the ability to add sockets to wrists and gloves, giving you an increased stat boost from the gems you put in.

The math: In the holy light paladin build it is simple

3 Jewelcrafter only gems = +34int/gem * 3 = 102int – 60int (what you would normally get from +20 epics) = a gain of 42 int

2 Blacksmiths Sockets = +40int if you socket epic gems

You gain 82 int from these two professions which will equate to about 1230 mana. Your MP5 and crit are also affected by your int so those stats will get a buff as well. In addition to that, jewelcrafting and blacksmithing can be very profitable professions; you can help fund lots of endeavors thru these two skills.

weezing the ju-uice!

Leveling both of these professions is not cheap nor is it fast. Make it a goal to work on professions every now and then when you need a change of pace or have some down time. There are a lot of guides out on how to level them up effectively for the least amount of gold as possible. If your goal is to raid as a Holy Paladin, you will want these professions.  You want to squeeze every bit of juice out of your gear!