So yes 7 would cover it. If you wanted to drop Engineering you probably could. It wasn’t a big moneymaker for me.
It depends on your goals as well. Are you going to use these crafters to gear yourself? Or to primarily grind gold? If you are just going for gold grinding, I would say you could drop Tailoring. I didn’t make much with it this xpac.
The talent trees: analyze them when they come out and see which are most likely to be the moneymaker the fastest. For my blacksmith that was crafting weapons. For my jewelcrafter that was making rings and amulets. For the gathering profs the talent tree that maxxes out how many ore or herbs you get per node will likely be better up front.
On last bit of advice is to not dump too much gold into maxxing professions early on. Do as many patron orders as possible without a huge gold sink for mats.
And if you plan to level 6-8 alts better get cracking and start now. You don’t want to do that the first two weeks of the xpac.
I have second team that streamlines it slightly by having an alchemy/engineer to cut down slightly on the gathering profession reduandancy. But then I turn around and have a bunch of redundant gatherers anyway.
(I think trying to maintain as many crafting alts as I do is probably not healthy)
A miner/herbalist can be an efficient focused gatherer, but is a bit slow getting started due to the need for artisan’s mettle (in practice I split my time thinly across way too many gatherers, which is very wasteful, but I suppose the redundant KP grind does help motivate me to keep going). I think the whole question of whether or not to focus on a single gatherer or not is a question of taste and what does and doesn’t motivate you rather than raw efficiency,
I was wondering about this the other day, is crafting limited if you aren’t max level? Or could a level 83 or whatever have fully maxed out professions while being fed mats from other characters?
I had the set up Spiralle suggested for years. But now that you can pick up a profession without having to level through every expansion, I’ll be reducing it to the set up I posted.
The only reason you might need to gear one up would be for a recipe that drops in an instance. But you can usually buy it off the AH. But some are stupidly expensive, see the recipe that JCs use for the extra sockets as an example.
Another thought, mine are all Druids and hunters. I did this to keep my rotations in practice. Trying to have a different class for each profession was tiresome to keep up with, for me anyway.
I’m not 100% sure if anything important is level-gated or not, but my experience is that levelling ends up feeling like a pretty trivial part of the total time commitment of being a crafter, so might as well do it.
If it is anything like the last two expansions you can get 50 in crafting before hitting max if you have the mats, and then anything after 50 is a needless slog for some reason.
I’m hoping they drop the stupid gear levels this xpac. Nothing worse than coming into an xpac on a fresh alt and being behind in gear and then only being able to craft 3 or 4 pieces with the rest being level restricted to max level
i have 4 crafters:
alc eng (main)
blacksmithing jewelcrafting
tailor inscription
leatherworking enchanting
there isnt too much thought put into the combinations except alc/eng on my main, leatherworking on my druid, tailoring on my lock, and blacksmithing on my DK.
I have another druid alt that i use for herb/mine but thats only at the beginning of the expansion when prices are high.