Independence

I've always made a point in WoW to deal with the AH as little as possible. Sure it's a great resource to use in order to make money, but with my playstyle I'd really rather do other things than have to traffic my items back and forth to make some extra gold.

One good thing about this is I find ways to supply myself with the materials I need to level up my professions. There are a lot of professions leveling guides out there, but most of them are very similar in which items to make that will require the least amount of materials overall.

This is all well and good, but there are those other players that exploit this, and if you don't want to do the farming yourself you have to be ready to pay quite a bit if you want to level up your profession quickly.

Now I don't tend to have that kind of money, and while I could farm items to sell on the AH, it seems easier to just farm the items I need for myself and skip the AH altogether.

It's worked out pretty good so far. My priest has an almost endless supply of cloth coming from the lower level characters as they come up. The druid gets leather not only from his own skinning, but from the hunter as well, and then any items he makes get sent to the priest to disenchant, thus giving me some enchanting materials.

I will be trying to get my Horde characters to have the same synergy as well, although I will be taking some different professions with them, just to change things up.

This synergy not only relates to leveling professions, but also to supplying myself with items. In the process of leveling leatherworking, I managed to make my hunter a set of mail armor that dealt exclusively with agility and RAP. It's way better than the quest items I was in before, and will probably last me through the rest of Outland. I should be able to supply my shaman as well, and my priest can supply herself with armor oncer he tailoring catches up.

The only thing I'm having trouble with is my shaman trying to level her jewelcrafting. She mines her own ore, which helps a lot, but I'm just not motivated to do the work it requires. I really think I need to use a leveling guide for this one, because it's looking to be way to expensive and time consuming if I try to figure it out for myself.

One thing I'm glad I don't have to deal with is leveling those secondary professions. For all you raiders who need to gather and cook food in order to provide the necessary buffs, it's a no brainer that you need to level your secondary professions. For me, I don't raid, I almost exclusively stick to solo content, I don't really want to go fishing or cook in a game, and so I just don't bother with them.

This isn't to say that depending on people every so often is a bad thing. Keep in mind that there are times when you're going to need help, and knowing when and how to get that help is essential if you're going to get where you want to. So if you like to go it alone like me, just remember that you always have the option of getting help when you need it. I've met quite a few decent people who were willing to give me a hand, despite my solo playstyle.