Crafting profesions. How to set priority for MOP... Part one Enchanting

There are 10 professions in WOW right now.  8 are crafting, 3 of those also serve as Gathering professions. Then there are the 2 pure gathering professions.

1. Leatherworking
2. Tailoring
3. Blacksmithing
4. Inscription
5. Engineering
6. Enchanting
7. Mining
8. Jewelcrafting

The ones that can alos gather are:

1. Mining
2. Jewlecrafting
3. Enchanting

The pure gathering Professions are:

1. Skinning
2. Herbalism

So, What to level first and why?  Answers will be similar among many players, but the why and supporting reasons for each will vary.

IMO, enchanting wins.  For me this is a simple, hands down easy decision, and here are the reasons:

1. Passive gathering while leveing, DE the quest rewards and leveling gear
2. It will not take any additional time to gather the mats really, not like running to an herb, getting in combat and then having some one swoop in and Node Ninja while you are still in combat
3. No tempting yellow dots on the mini map to distract me
4. My raiding main is an enchanter/JC, and raiding in my priority
5. Enchanting has great a great profession bonus, you get to enchant your rings
6. I have had the greatest income playing in the scrolls of enchant AH market, I know it, I like it and can make a pile of gold at it
7. I will be able to help friends (guild members)
8. It is going to be expensive to level and very big barrier to entry in the opening days of MOP, though you can gather, you can not go directly "farm" mats.
9. You can do a shuffle to "farm" mats.. farm/buy ore/skins, craft them and disenchant them for mats.... rather the ore shuffle as we know it will still exist in MOP, who knows, but there will be a shuffle.
10. DE the AH for profit... disenchant items found on the AH.
11. It is complex, and involves a lot more processes to make it work, so less competition for that reason, but the competition you do have are often smart players at the AH game.  though all in all profits are good.
12. In the Gold Per Hour assessment, it meets the 2 requirements to make it a very profitable profession.  Reasonable to high profit per sale and reasonably high volume of sales.
13. AH deposit cost are 1 silver, so no loss really in cancel posting lots of scrolls
14. Cancel post cycles are fairly quick since you are not dealing with as many items as say JC or Inscription.
15. You can play small stakes in portions of the market or large stakes across the whole maket. ex. just the 5 most profitable scrolls or the 5 highest volume scrolls or make it 20, 10 most profitable , and 10 highest volume, or every scroll you can make a profit on.
16. It defrays the costs of having to buy enchants... a pretty big cost overall if you pimp your toon for raiding.

Okay, why not enchanting... though it is my #1 Pick, it may not be yours for some/all of the reasons below:

1. It is a more difficult profession to manage...
2. It has a pretty high cost of entry to level and purchase the formulas for a full book
3. Competition can be FIERCE
4. Stiff competitors are likely AH barrons and will make it hard on you to get a foothold in the market
5. Regulare AH scans to snatch low cost mats takes time
6. Massive inventories of mats are needed to maintain crafting cycles
7. The markets are very cyclical, fairly easy to learn, hard to master
8. Massive inventories require massive capitol investment.
9. Additional storage to manage stocks of scrolls and mats can be challenging
10. You could get caught with your pants down.. with all those stocks of mats and scrolls, if the price of enchanting mats falls faster than you can unload your inventory you can lose a lot fast.

Okay there you have it.. enchanting, there is very little "its fun" "Just because I like it" reasoning here.

Though it is fun to make piles and piles of gold in the AH... when Postal take 4 minutes to empty the mailbox,  your gold take is 20k 30K 40K 50K... thats fun... and I like it... there are negatives with each profession, this one is the profession I overcome the hurdles and learned to manage and tolerate the many downsides to the profession.

Tomorrow Jewelcrafting...