My department manager at work– who is in my guild– is really awesome at professions. He has pretty much every profession ever spread across his alts, he sends billions of stacks of raw materials to a central bank so they can all share them, and he’ll have something leveled to 300 by the time his toon is level 22. Seriously. He just rocks those professions.

Me… not so much.

Now, I DO have a love affair with herbalism/alchemy. I love it. I love having buffed and long-lasting potions/flasks (though I miss when flasks lasted four hours /pout), I know herbs like the back of my hand, and I’ve never felt that this was a difficult profession combo to level.

Everything else though… yeah.

Lunapike was leatherworking/skinning until I got bogged down in the 150-range of leatherworking and dropped it for herbalism and turned her into a pure farming machine. The same exact thing happened to Tamaryn, my druid, except I never picked up a second profession. Eventually I dropped it for mining but got tired of running around Arathi Highlands looking for nodes. Recently I was inspired to make another attempt at leveling leatherworking but I’m stuck again, around 190-ish. I don’t know why it’s such a big stumbling block. It just IS. I’m not going to spend five billion gold on Heavy Leather and I don’t feel like going out and farming it when there are more fun things I could be doing with my time, you know?

Althalor was doing pretty good with Enchanting for a while. Then I started to fail again. I think he’s sitting at 155 or so. At level 60. u_u

I am off to a good start with Tawbree, though. She’s tailoring/enchanting and I think I’m actually managing to keep up thus far. 154 Enchanting/135 Tailoring — not bad for a level 36 character. I think a lot of it is because my leveling strategy with her is “Queue up for LFG, then sit around in Stormwind working on professions until I get a group, rinse and repeat.” And I get a lot of ‘chanting mats doing nothing but instances. Of course, I’ve probably jinxed myself now… hrmm.

A lot of other people say that you shouldn’t worry about professions until later or what-have-you. I dunno, I kind of like them. I think they could be much better implemented/integrated, but they add a fun aspect to the game. And I’m really jealous of people like my department manager who has one of EVERYTHING. Gawsh.

—

I apologize I haven’t been writing much in the blog lately. I’ve been doing a lot of non-WoW things lately– mostly writing and drawing. I think my art may actually be improving (instead of stagnating) for the first time in years, so that’s got me excited. Speaking of art, I’ve opened up commissions for things-that-aren’t-just-avatars, so if you always wanted a cutesy Pikestyle full-bodied portrait of your character, head on over to the Commissions Page for info.

And yes, it’s February and I’m still working on my NaNoWriMo novel. (In the middle of the editing/rewriting stage at this point.)