The Shared Topic for March 14-20 over on Blog Azeroth is “Favorite Profession,” which got me thinking about what I should be doing with my pairs.

I don’t really have a ‘favorite’ profession, since the only ones I’ve put time into on my main are Tailoring and Enchanting. Other than my pure and undying hatred for Fishing, the rest are pretty much unknowns.

In theory you could skip professions while you are leveling, and I’ve done that to some extent on a few of my pairs. At low levels the professions aren’t as useful as they could be and the time and effort required to keep them at useful levels while doing Refer-a-Friend is insane.

Well, maybe not insane, but running around killing things in a desperate attempt to keep your skinning level up with your ‘things I am slaughtering’ level was a real headache with the druids.

Thankfully Refer-a-Friend is over and I can focus on ways to keep my toons in the black without spending too much time backtracking.

So what’s a non-speed-leveling soul to do?

My Plans, They Are Grand™

Right now, on my druid pair (Pattern and Recognition) I have Tailoring and Enchanting on Pattern, Skinning and Enchanting on Recognition.

This isn’t working as well as I’d hoped, so I’m going to play around on Undermine and see what’s making money nowadays. Thankfully none of the skills are high enough that leveling something else will waste much time.

Since Recog is a bear tank, I’m keeping skinning for the Master of Anatomy buff and dropping Enchanting to pick-up Mining. I know that neither of my gals will be wearing plate, but the Toughness buff is tank-happy and the mats feed nicely into Jewelcrafting.

For Pattern I’m starting from scratch dropping both enchanting and tailoring. These are actually the professions on my main, so there’s no real point in the duplication. Plus even for a balance druid, neither of these is as useful as they could be for low levels.

Since Recog has two gathering professions, I’m going to to pick crafting professions for Pattern, just to keep things balanced.

Leatherworking is the easy choice, since both sides of the pair will benefit from the crafted items, but Jewelcrafting is a bit of a shot in the dark. I haven’t tried this profession on a dual-boxing pair before and it may turn out to be a bad choice.

I want to try something different on each of my dual-boxing pairs, but since these two are my mains for the moment I’m going to use them as guniea pigs.

Onwards to Stormwind! [Insert Dramatic Pose Here]