I went over this a while ago, but I keep on seeing one of the most common questions all over the various forums I watch: what professions should a hunter take? The answer is deceptively complex.
First, identify what it is that you want. If you’re going for pure DPS, you’ll want to pick one way, but if you’re looking for money, you’ll want to pick one of the other paths.
DPS Performance
Picking professions for DPS is relatively straightforward. All gathering tradeskills have very small bonuses, and all crafting skills (other than engineering) have very large ones, which will be going up in patch 3.2. None of the “freebie” skills (cooking, first aid, fishing) have a direct, non replaceable influence on your DPS. Please note that for DPS purposes, I’m not going to count the ability to farm and craft your own consumables as a benefit. You could spend the same time doing dailies and just buy the same end product for less time usually.
You can min/max a little bit when it comes to non-gathering professions, however in patch 3.2, they will all add up to just about the same bonus. The best you can do is choose something with good flexibility and synergy.
- Blacksmithing gives you two extra gem slots.
- Alchemy magnifies the effects of your flask, as well as allows you cheaper consumables through doubling the duration of flasks.
- Jewelcrafting gets 3 better gems.
- Enchanting allows your to enchant your rings.
- Leatherworking allows you an improved bracer enchant, as well as cheaper leg enchants.
- Inscription gives you a better shoulder enchant, and allows you to skip the dreaded and expensive sons of hodir grind.
- Tailoring gets a cloak enchant and more cloth drops
- Engineering gets Rilgon cussin’.
As raiding hunters, you will get more DPS from agility than you do AP 
normally. You might get even more from armor penetration. Thus, the professions that are flexible enough for us to choose what we gain will produce better results for us. Those are alchemy and jewelcrafting. Alchemy increases the effect of the ArP or AP consumables, and jewelcrafting allows ArP or agility gems.
Also, the synergy between blacksmithing and jewelcrafting allows some exponential DPS increase when they’re paired. To the right, you’ll see a screenshot I took from www.femaledwarf.com showing the various paper-doll DPS numbers I got by switching between professions. I included a data point with BSing and JCing at the end so you could see- if you simply added up the bonuses from smithing and jewelcrafting, you’d get about 47 less DPS than I predicted here. If I were stacking armor penetration and had best in slot armor pen gear with the appropriate build, this would be even more significant. Please note- this is based on my gurrent gear and will not reflect the results you see on your character, however the relative weight of the professions are correct.
TL;DR: take jewelcrafting and blacksmithing.
Performance and Money
I’m independantly wealthy, so this is not a factor for me, however there are a lot of people still doing dailies to pay for raiding consumables. If you want to balance your performance with money, you have a few options. You can take a gathering profession and deal with the reduced PvE performance boost, or you can take two crafting professions that have a monetary advantage.
- Herbalism gives you a self heal. Next to useless, but allows you to herb in Freya’s room as well as make more money when farming.
- Mining gives you stamina. Also, next to useless, however you can pick up a fair bit of cash farming with this, and you can mine some very profitable nodes in Ulduar.
- Skinning gives you a little crit. Least useless, but still half as good as a real professional bonus, and skinning makes the least money of all the gathering professions.
You can elect to pick a crafting profession that saves you money, or one that can make you money.
- Enchanting can be very lucrative, even if you don’t raid with your enchanter. You can sell twink enchants, regular enchant scrolls, and you can disenchant things for a profit. If you raid with your enchanter, you can also get rare enchanting recipes and sell those theoretically for more than the easily trainable recipes.
- Jewelcrafting can be profitable, but it usually needs enchanting. Most people use JCing to prospect saronite, cut and sell the valuable gems, and craft the green gems into items that can be disenchanted. You can possibly save yourself money here by not having to pay market rate for your gems, but that depends on your economy. [edit: there are also JC only dailies that can make you some cash- thanks Zeherah!]
- Alchemy is rarely profitable unless you can get herbs lower than AH prices to sell flasks, however it has a built in reduction of expenses- your flasks last twice as long. Also, you can use very cheap crazy alchemist potions instead of mana potions when you need to pop a consumable- they give back health and mana, and also provide a random buff.
- Blacksmithing is not profitable unless you can get cheap eternals to make belt buckles and sell them at a profit, and there is no cost reduction built in.
- Inscription’s cost reduction is mostly in being able to avoid the expensive or long sons of hodir grind, however if you are willing to grind glyphs and herbs, you can make a profit.
- Leatherworking saves you on your leg enchants, but is rarely inherently profitable itself. At least not obviously or easily.
- Tailoring generates more cloth drops per mob, however not many people got rich with a maxed out tailor. You can make bags and sell cooldowns.
Awww. Aren’t you just going to tell the cookie makers what to bake?.. errr.. take!?
There’s a TL;DR in the middle- JCing and BSing :)
One comment on professions making money, JC will also make you some extra money if you do the daily quest and sell the dragons eyes from it. On my server the dragons eyes run for 90-110g apiece, and the daily takes very little effort.
One minor flexibility leatherworking offers is the +60 resistance fur linings for bracers (eg http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=57694).
If your raid requires resistance for certain hardmodes, these are the most efficient way (ie least gimping way) to get it.
And like many other people I realized that inscription is THE moneymaking profession. I can snatch a stack of herbs for 10g on weekends but pay never more than 20g and only the rare ink I get from this stack sells for about 20g.
This makes all the glyphs I craft cost 40s (the parchment) and they always sell for more than 20 times that price.
Hehe… giggled at the engineering remark…
Heh, I don’t mean to bait Rilgon, it just kinda happens. Honestly, engineers got the short end of the stick, and I can’t see why. Maybe there’s some rule that the fun you have playing with your products times the money you can make selling them times the amount they increase your PvE performance is equal to a constant. Like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. And then, since Engineering is really really fun, those other two factors have to be lowered artificially to “balance” things.
This is of course stupid, because I have as much fun playing with the flasks and belt buckles I make as Rilgon has with his parachutes and gnomish X-Rays.
I don’t even have Gnomish X-Ray Goggles because I’m Goblin. :P
I disagree with you about Inscription. To me, it’s the best money making profession out there. You might have talked me into picking up JC tho :)
I grind glyphs and darkmoon cards too, but it’s situational. The people who make a lot of money with it are typically one of a few on their server willing to manage the kind of inventory needed to run a successful glyph business. On my server, there are people who apparently log in every half hour, cancel all their glyphs, and relist them all.
Engineering is getting some nice buffs. The cloak enchants are actually better than the Enchanting ones (albeit by a VERY small margin). Potion injectors have a 25% bonus for Engineers, which is great if you’re like me and still blowing pot cooldowns on Mana. They also seem do not know what they’re doing with the belt enchant, but it could turn out to be useful.
Plus, all the amazing-but-useless-for-raiding stuff is getting even more amazing. Jeeves and an Auction House in Dalaran? Yes please.
I believe it’s that useless-for-raiding-but-fun-everywhere-else stuff that’s been costing you your PvE performance, actually ;)
Interesting article! Thanks for posting.
I recently switched to blacksmithing after reading this, getting rid of herbalism and keeping enchanting. Not as good as the BS/JC combo, but I simply didn’t want to farm/pay for both. Still, BS and Enchanting are pretty darn good. +40 agi (extra gem slots) and +80 ap (ring enchants) just from professions is no joke. Good post. Really made me think.
Yeah, min/maxing that last 0.01% is not worth the 2000+ G it would cost you to switch. Plus, enchanting is like a gathering profession- you can DE quest rewards and unwanted drops.
I’d have agreed with you about leatherworking not making any money till a few weeks ago. With access to some Ulduar patterns, and runed orbs being much easier to get by non-raiders, I’ve actually made some money crafting and selling i226 gear in the last few weeks.
I actually can make a fair bit of cash with LW, but I’m going to go over that in one of my economics posts.
This article should be removed or updated. It may have been accurate when it was written (maybe), but the statement that Alchemy is “rarely profitable” blows me away. I have 52000g in my bank, and most of that comes from my Alchemy transmutes. I make between 200g-800g a day (depending on procs) with two transmuters. I’d consider it the most profitable profession, probably.
I think that removing the article would be overreacting. I, too, would update the economy information, but the core points about dps will likely stand until Cata.
I’ll try to rewrite that when I get around to it.
I only mentioned removal as a possibility as the Alchemy information was so far off that it left open the possibility that other information could be wrong as well. Better to not have misleading information on the Internet, when possible. There are already tons of articles with out of date information, and many people do not realize it’s out of date and use it anyway.