Guide of Cataclysm Professions

As veteran WoW players are aware, professions are among the most important parts of the game. Nothing brings in gold like them; for example dailies are ok for extra cash but the way to go for real gold is the professions. Like in Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King and Vanilla before it, Cataclysm professions are more or less the same. Here's a guide on Cataclysm professions that I hope will get you on the right track. 

In Cataclysm, profession are separated into two different kinds: primary and secondary.

There are 10 primary professions:

-Mining (Gathering): Using a pick, collect stones, ore and gems from nodes. 
-Herbalism (Gathering): Collect herbs from nodes.
-Skinning (Gathering): Skin animals and various enemies for their pelts.
-Blacksmithing (Crafting): Using ore, make armor and weapons.
-Jewelcrafting (Crafting): Using gems, make jewels with special properties that can be socketed into armor.
-Enchanting (Crafting): Enchant armor and weapons with stat upgrades and special abilities.
-Tailoring (Crafting): Fashion armor out of pelts.
-Alchemy (Crafting): Create potions using plants and other reagents that grant various temporary effects.
-Engineering (Crafting): With materials like stones, ore and engineering reagents, make items with strange yet useful effects.
-Inscription (Crafting): Upgrade select abilities with glyphs.

And 4 secondary professions:

-Fishing: Fish with a fishing rod--pretty straightforward. Fish sometimes does well on the auction house, and if you couple this with cooking you can make some very nice recipes that will give you temporary stat boosts.
-First Aid: Weave bandages with cloth of enemy corpses. Loses much of it's usefulness at high levels for most classes, but with all the cloth you will find you may as well level it up; especially for rogues and warriors, who lack readily available healing abilities.
-Cooking: Learn recipes and make dishes using cooking supplies and meat. As I mentioned already, recipes can give nice boosts to your stats. Be sure to skill the profession up whenever possible. Cooking is really handy in raids, where a high level skill and recipes are welcomed by groups.
-Archaeology: The newest cataclysm profession. Locate, put together and identify artifacts.

Each character can only learn two of the primary professions, but all of the secondary professions can be learned. Primary professions are your moneymakers, while secondary professions are more of the practical variety. They're all helpful in their own way, though.

- There are two different types of primary Cataclysm professions: gathering and crafting. Gathering professions include mining, herbalism, archaeology and skinning. Crafting includes blacksmithing and jewelcrafting, etc. As a rule of thumb, it's best to couple a crafting profession with one of the gathering ones. Items you can find with the gathering professions find their uses amongst the different crafting ones. Although the thought of being able to both make your own armor and socket them with your own self-made gems is alluring, without a gathering profession you would have to buy all the necessary supplies from other people or the auction house, and most likely at extremely high prices as well. On top of that, you can take your own excess materials as a gatherer, and put them for sale on the auction house, where people without gathering professions will be forced to buy them out.

Some of the greatest cataclysm profession combos are the following (crafting/gathering):

-Leatherworking/Skinning
-Engineering/Mining
-Blacksmithing/Mining
-Leatherworking/Skinning
-Alchemy/Herbalism

- All Cataclysm professions can currently be skilled up to a 525 skill level. To craft and skill up as efficiently as possible be sure to remember this order in crafting items (starting with the most important): orange, yellow, green. If you want to always get a skill point while crafting and don't mind acquiring harder-to-find supplies, orange recipes will always give you a skill point. Yellow recipes do come with the possible risk of no point coming out of it, but the odds aren't so bad. Green meanwhile is a definite risk, with odds more around the 40% range. If you have the means to make an orange item, do it.

If you need more help regarding the professions in Cataclysm use Dugi's Dailies, one of the most comprehensive and coolest World of Warcraft Professions Guides available today.

Above all else, building your professions takes a lot of effort and diligence. If you stick with it though, you'll have mastered one of the most important aspects World of Warcraft has to offer.