New Characters

You have to pick two gathering professions until you hit 40 in order to pay for your mount. You may also continue gathering professions past this in order to gain gold which will be required for flying mount in outlands which will also be a fair cost to you. The daily quest will however give you a reliable way of gainning gold at 70 so you might wish to instead at 40 pick a crafting profession. Enchanting and Engineering are extremely expensive professions and should be avoided by new players. The main 3 gathering professions are mining/herb/skinning. Skinning and Mining require you to devote one bag space to a tool (mining pick/skinning knife). Skinning is considered to take up the least bank space and is the easiest to level. Skinning also gives a few more advantages by making monster respawn faster and "Clearing the death" from the area you are leveling up in. Herb and mining are quite easy to level but you must make sure to use your mini-map to find the herbs/nodes while questing. Mining requires that you find a new node every time to gain one skill point practically (smelting can increase your skill points greatly but only in some ranges). Herbs are more common then nodes and faster because you gain many herbs in one use where as the miner must use the node many times. Herbs would be considered the most bag space requiring profession. Some quest require a miner to complete. Some quest require you to be a herbalist. Thats pretty much everything I can tell you about gathering professions in order for you to pick 2 of those 3. Check AH prices if you want to get an idea of how much you can expect to be selling things for. All races will have a shipment quest at level 10 to perform however most people will miss this quest if they follow the guide. You must learn your skills at that time and I would suggest that you take the time after arriving at your first town (generally lvl 6) to learn the skills you wish to have as you will be close to the city.

Leather working, tailoring, and blacksmithing crafted armor is generally easier to replace then it is to craft. Because of that reason, I would not suggest taking any of those professions for crafting your armor. However, when you hit 70 and are able to craft some items that are fantastic and last quite a while you may reconsider. Remember what you are looking for and that in PvP the crafted items have no resilience and in PvE they are replaced after clearing a few raid locations. The patterns that are going to be payed well for in leather working, tailoring and blacksmithing are rare or hard to get patterns. Those require guild progression to certain raid areas or have exalted faction requirements for the pattern. Which leads us to the next major problem to face you... How many mains?