As you most likely understand now, you can have two primary professions. In addition to those two you can learn fishing, cooking and first aid. So in total you can have up to five professions; two primary and three secondary.
Quote:
Is it ever a good idea to start w/ something like skinning and mining to just build up money - and maybe swap over to actually skills later on, when you are more established? I ask this from the standpoint of someone just starting - I'll be broke.
The short answer:
Yes.
The extremely long winded answer:
Yes. In fact, it’s sometimes your best option. The best example of switching skills would be taking up tailoring and skinning instead of tailoring and enchanting. Enchanting will eat your bank account alive during the majority of the skilling up process. So it’s not a bad idea to take something like skinning to earn some extra coin to support your tailoring. And then, when you are higher level and have easier access to money, drop skinning and take up enchanting. Just FYI, tailoring is a very good support skill for enchanting.
Some people, especially those who don’t enjoy crafting, take up two gathering professions just for the money. They then use that money to buy equipment instead of making it themselves. This can be a very good strategy for someone just starting out on a server. I just started another character on a different server for those times when my home server is having technical difficulties. I took skinning and herbalism as my two professions. The extra income has come in very handy.
If you do decide to take two gathering professions, I would suggest either skinning and mining or skinning and herbalism. Both mining and herbalism provide you with a tracking system on your mini map. But you can only have one such tracking ability up at a time. So if you take both mining and herbalism you’ll have to keep switching between the two types of tracking and that becomes a pain very quickly.
If you plan to drop one of your gather skills later on and take up a production profession, I’d suggest choosing that profession’s gathering companion as one of your original professions. In other words, if you plan to be a blacksmith later on, I’d suggest taking skinning and mining to start with and later on you can drop skinning and you’ll already have your mining skill at a high level. That may be common sense, but sometimes common sense goes out the window when you’re trying to figure out a new system.
And finally, don’t worry about taking up a gathering profession at later levels. Though its easiest to level skills as you level it won’t be a problem, assuming your willing to take some time out of your leveling to raise your skill. What generally holds people back from raising their gathering professions is their inability to survive in areas that hold the higher level resources. For example, a level 10 character, technically speaking, could have a skill of 200 in skinning. But realistically there’s very little chance of that happening. The level 10 character couldn’t survive in a level 40 zone long enough to raise his skill, much less kill the level 40 animals in order to skin them. But if you’re a level 40 character and you want to switch to skinning, all you have to do is go to a low level area and start killing and skinning animals. As your skill goes up you just keep killing and skinning higher and higher level animals until your back up to level 40 animals.
FYI: Production professions have a character level cap on them. If I remember correctly, you have to be level 5 to train in a profession and take it to a skill of 75. You have to be level 10 to take it to 150 skill. You have to be level 20 to take it to 225 skill. And you have to be level 35 to take your skill to 300. Gathering skills, however, have no such limits. But as I mentioned earlier, they don’t really need them.
Best of luck and welcome to Azeroth.