[Lifeblood], I choose you!

Another Blog Azeroth Shared Topic, this time from Ama of Specced for Drama:

What is your favorite profession and why?

With the exception of First Aid, which I take with all my characters, the secondary professions are things that only one character — my primary raider, Kamalia — needs to do. I find Fishing to be quite relaxing, but I’d rather spend my alts’ playtime doing other things. I enjoy Archaeology, but looking for the Fossilized Raptor with Ketura has me feeling a bit overdosed on it. After Ketura gets her mount, Kamalia will probably be the only character with whom I continue to do Archaeology.

I used to list the primary professions of all my toons on my Characters page. Later, I decided to list both primary professions of my Tauren, to show that I’ve tried them all, and only list the non-gathering primary professions of my other characters.

Kamalia’s professions are Skinning and Leatherworking. I chose those on BTH’s advice and I keep them because I like the bracer embossing. To be quite honest, though, I almost never used Kamalia’s LW in LK after I maxed it out, and I haven’t yet maxed it out for Cataclysm content. It’s high enough for me to do my bracer embossing, and that’s really as high as I need it to be. I suppose I could drop the Skinning and pick up some other profession that would be more beneficial for raiding because the bracer emboss that’s most useful for me requires Volatile Water, and I Fish that up by the gallon — but I don’t care enough about min-maxing my character for raiding to bother.

I prefer my characters to be more modestly dressed than many low level armor items allow, so I have a Tailor on each server to provide them with shirts. I enjoy being able to make my own RP wardrobe essentials such as the Simple Kilt, Blue Overalls, and assorted Dresses. Because I also like all my characters to have a level-relevant Bandage Spec, this causes a certain amount of conflict of interest for cloth distribution and I tend to hoard silk and mageweave.

My favorite profession, though, is Herbalism.

All of my cloth-wearing characters and both of my Druids are Herbalists. The Druids do it because Herbing in flight form is the most fun to be had from any gathering profession. The clothies do it because the Lifeblood heal is the most amazing thing ever for characters with low melee survivability and no innate healing capacity — even after the size of the heal was nerfed in 4.0.1. Lifeblood has saved my hiney on more occasions than I can count when questing with my menagerie of Mages and tag-along Warlock. My Priests take it, too, because it’s nice to be able to get a free heal in a desperate situation. At Cataclysm skill levels, Herbalists get the ability to disguise themselves as an herb, which is pretty hilarious because I don’t think I’ve ever seen the graphic actually be Peacebloom itself.
Selling the herbs I collect just while I’m out questing, doing only enough farming to make sure I get complete stacks of whatever herbs are in my current zone, also provides a steady, reliable source of income. Mining is good for this, too, of course, but Lifeblood for my Mages really wins the day.