A career move

I've had herbalism and alchemy on my main (rogue) for almost a year now. She was my very first toon and I happened to read somewhere that herbalism/alchemy was a good money-maker, so I went with it. In hindsight, skinning/LW may have been more useful as a rogue but alchemy actually worked out quite well for me. I never made much money with selling potions and elixirs, but once I learned epic gem transmutes I was making good money off of those. Plus with mixology my flasks lasted 2 hours and doubled the AP bonus, giving me an edge in raids as well.

The problem was herbalism. Besides being able to pick a couple frost lotus here and there for my flasks and maybe using lifebloom in dire situations, it was practically useless! I don't pvp a lot so I didn't really need that extra survivability, and as time went by I hardly ever went herb-gathering. Why bother when you can get cheap stacks of herbs at the auction house?

For a while now I've been thinking about switching herbalism out for a more "hardcore" profession. Looking through the armory, anyone who belongs in a serious raid progression guild seems to have 2 crafting professions since they give much more useful bonuses. Enchanting, JC, BS, LW, tailoring all seemed to be popular choices. For a rogue, though, the most common choices were enchanting/LW or LW/JC.

I actually wanted to start JC, since I could cut my own transmuted epic gems and sell them for even more profit. But my pally alt was already at 400 JC so I didn't feel like sinking another 2k gold into that profession. So I went with enchanting. I picked my last herb about a week ago and dropped herbalism altogether, and began levelling enchanting.

The amazing part is how easy (and how expensive) it is to level a profession when you have lots of gold. I basically cleaned out the AH of all the enchanting mats that were available, as well as any cheap green items I could disenchant for mats. When the AH was empty I farmed low-level instances for shards and did easy quests for items to DE. The next day I'd buy out every single dust and shard up for auction and farm some more instances.

So after about a week my enchanting is at 420. I've put about 5k gold into power-levelling it, and now I have +40 attack power on each of my rings! And I'm actually making a small amount of gold from selling enchantment scrolls too. I don't know if I'll ever recover my 5k gold but hey, now I can apply for a hardcore raiding guild without being laughed at for having a gathering profession.

My new goal is to get that mechano-hog, although everyone keeps telling me to save my money for cataclysm. I'll have to level my alchemy by buying all the herbs I need, which I imagine will be quite costly. Sigh. Time to go level an herbalism alt...