Finished goods trade skills

Enchanting is a weird and useful, if expensive, trade skill to have. It basically involves decomposing green, blue, or even purple (ie, uncommon, rare, and epic) items to make the reagents for enchantments. As you can imagine, this is a long, expensive, and difficult trade skill to max out but once you do, you will be making steady money. Enchanters are always welcome in groups, especially for 5-man instances, because if something drops that no one can use, you can break it down for a reagent and people can roll on it.

Engineering is possibly the most unique trade of all. It creates consumable items like dynamite that help add to your damage, specialized trinkets and weird items and rocket helmets. The trinkets can be specialized to fight against spellcaster, or some designs can be used to resurrect players even if you’re not a healer. Engineering is absolutely awesome to have for PvP, though it is rather expensive to skill up, like enchanting. Mining is the best gatherer trade to have for engineering, though it won’t make you self-sufficient. You’ll still need to buy other components from the auction hall.

Jewelcrafting is new, useful, and fairly lucrative. With it you create necklaces, rings, and can cut gems to fit into items with sockets in them at higher levels. There are also consummable items that can be created with jewelcrafting.

Blacksmithing is possibly the best choice for a rogue right now. Like all finished goods trades it’s a bit of a pain to finish skilling up, but the rewards for a Rogue are the most tangible: weapons. Specifically, you want to specialize as a weaponsmith and then focus as a hammersmith, because one of the best weapons in the game at the moment is a crafted hammer. To make things better, this hammer can be upgraded to make it even more powerful as you gather the necessary reagents. The thing is, you need to be a master hammersmith to even use this hammer, so don’t think you can simply buy one!

Leatherworking uses leather, obviously, to craft armor and certain consummable items. It’s gotten a big boost in the expansion and is a viable trade for a Rogue. Like all finished goods skills, it’s only truly profitable once you hit the higher levels and can start crafting the cool consummables and creating cured hides with your long cooldown ability.

Finally, there’s Alchemy. It’s not especially bad, but not particularly useful for a Rogue. Having your own supply of potions is somewhat cool, and at high levels the ability to transmute is both lucrative and necessary, if you specialize that way.

Ultimately, if you’re new on a server and have no one to help you with money, it may be easiest to go skinning and herbalism or mining. However, you will miss out on the advantages of a finished goods skill in the long run. Blacksmithing is probably the best choice, since it guarantees a good weapon for you. Engineering is also a good option if you’re sure you want to do a lot of PvP to earn your weapons as PvP rewards. However, just go with what sounds cool. You may have some regrets in the end, but nothing is irreversible and none of the regrets will have you slicing your wrists.