Earlier this week I told everyone about Mordigg getting to 80 and our attempts at putting together some decent tanking gear for him. Operation "Make Mordigg Less Squishy" is still an ongoing process, but we've made progress. Part of the process was picking a new trade skill for him. He's already made the decision and powered his way through to get what he needed, but for the sake of discussion, I'll walk through the decision-making process we used.
There's multiple different routes one could go as a tank to get benefits from trade skills. For example, I am a miner/blacksmith, which provides me with extra Stamina and two extra prismatic sockets for gems. Solannis is a scribe/jewelcrafter, giving him a better shoulder enchant than the one provided by the Sons of Hodir, a high-Stamina trinket, and the ability to use Dragon's Eyes for better quality gems (i.e. the 41-Stamina Solid Dragon's Eye vs. the 24-Stamina Solid Sky Sapphire). Mordigg, on the other hand, was a skinner/herbalist, which provided him with... some small bonus to his critical strike chance and a small heal over time with a three-minute cooldown. Neither of these is really a tanking benefit - they're nice, but we can do better. We'd been using Mordigg to gather supplies for the others on the team while he trained in Northrend. Our resident leatherworker powered his way to 430-something based mostly off Mordigg's leather, while Sol's inscription and Mr. Boomkin's alchemy have benefited from the herb supply. After looking at everyone's trade skills, we decided to have Mordigg drop skinning. Our leatherworker already has capped skinning despite being only 70, plus he already has our leg armor kit recipes, so most of the important stuff is out of the way anyways. Given that it will be a while before any of our leather/mail wearers get to 80 anyways, we have time to prepare for getting their equipment. Now that we'd freed a trade skill slot, it was time to pick Mordigg's new profession.
Let's start by listing our options out: alchemy, blacksmithing, enchanting, engineering, inscription, jewelcrafting, leatherworking, and tailoring. The last two on the list can be cut right now: there is nothing from either of these other than their bracer/cloak linings that we can't get from the others on the team. That's true for most of these trade skills, so it comes down to the self-only benefits and the cost involved. Leatherworking's bracer enchant is 50 Stamina more than the best bracer enchant out there. This actually makes leatherworking have one of the best payoffs for a tanking trade skill out there, but it's a minor increase over the other trade skills and the downside is how time-consuming and costly it is to level. If there wasn't already a leatherworker on the team, I'd consider it, but given that we have one and Mordigg just dropped skinning, I can't justify the time/expense to level it. As for tailoring, it has a cloak enchant that gives 300 attack power for 15 seconds. Given how often it procs, it's assumed to be the equivalent of a constant 75 attack power. Attack power is nice as a tank, but we'd rather have survivability (Stamina, armor, defense rating, etc.) or a more useful threat stat (hit, expertise, or Strength which is affected by talents and Blessing of Kings). Tailoring is also quite expensive and time-consuming to level, given the cloth prices in the auction house and that we've been sending all of our cloth up till now to a tailor/enchanter friend of ours. Enchanting is out as well: the 24 Stamina ring enchants are quite nice, but considering that it requires materials that would be quite time-consuming to acquire and it would redirect resources away from our enchanter friends who already have most of the recipes we need, it would be the least cost-effective upgrade. This leaves us with alchemy, blacksmithing, engineering, inscription, and jewelcrafting to choose from.
Blacksmithing is a time and resource intensive journey that would require me to go and scour Azeroth and Outland for Mordigg's materials. Learning jewelcrafting, as Solannis puts it, is "a world of frustration and pain" that would also require me to go gather his materials. Engineering isn't quite as bad to learn according to our local engineers and the trinket is quite nice, but the recent improvements that have been made to the Tempered Titansteel Helm eliminates the need for the goggles, so half of the benefit is gone. Given that blacksmithing's extra sockets and jewelcrafting's higher-quality gems are essentially sidegrades (though customizable ones) to the benefits of other trade skills, and the fact that I didn't feel like farming materials for him or paying the ridiculous auction house prices, that left us with two trades that Mordigg could learn that he could gather his own materials for: alchemy and inscription.
Alchemy has a very nice tanking trinket and increased benefits from potions, elixirs, and flasks. It would also provide a second source of alchemy research to support Mr. Boomkin's work. Inscription would give Mordigg a superior shoulder enchant to that provided by the Sons of Hodir with no reputation grinding required (definitely a plus in my eyes) and he would be able to supplement Sol's glyph research. There are drawbacks however: alchemy draws a lot of benefit from consumables that Mordigg would need to keep in supply and even these are gated by the limits on potion and elixir/flask usage, while Inscription would going to have a lot of overlap in glyph recipes since Sol's been at this a while.
To eliminate some of the variables here, we made some assumptions based on what resources the team had available. Our druid buddy has been performing alchemy research since the first week we were in Northrend, and two of our healer contacts aren't that far behind him. Odds are that if anyone on the team needs something brewed, they'll help us out. Same thing goes for inscription research: Sol has most of the glyph recipes, but if we really need something that he doesn't have, hitting the auction house won't kill us considering no one on the team respecs all that often. That left us with alchemy providing better consumables and a trinket and inscription giving us a much stronger shoulder enchant with no reputation grind.
Looking ahead to where Mordigg regularly starts tanking heroic dungeons, the alchemy trinket would fall to the wayside to make room for Essence of Gossamer. It's definitely a good starter trinket, but between that and the Seal of the Pantheon, the alchemy trinket would be the one to replace. So now it's alchemy's better consumables versus inscription's shoulder enchant.
The improvement to consumables is certainly nothing to scoff at, being anywhere from 35-50+% better than the regular potions. Given an elixir pair of Mighty Defense and Mighty Strength, that's a difference of 11 defense rating and 12 Strength over the unmodified elixirs according to a post on Tankspot. The downside to this benefit is that it only applies to elixirs/flasks that the alchemist can create. This means that if Mordigg gets unlucky with his research (which has a 3-day cooldown), this benefit is greatly restricted. There's also the matter of the consumables themselves. Consumables are meant to enhance your abilities to make life easier, not boost you so you're just at the required level. You'll use them for learning new fights, but after that you might not use them all that often, so the benefit from alchemy is diminished.
Inscription however is a static bonus. Compared to Greater Inscription of the Pinnacle, the scribe-only Master's Inscription of the Pinnacle has an additional 32 dodge rating. That's the equivalent of two Subtle Scarlet Rubies. It's not as flexible as the blacksmithing sockets or jewelcrafter gems, but it's a lot of extra avoidance that frees up two other sockets for Stamina or threat. Having Mordigg pick up inscription would also free up a lot of time/resources that would have been necessary to get him to exalted with Sons of Hodir, allowing those Relics of Ulduar to go towards Sol, who still needs the Smooth Autumn's Glow recipe at Exalted, or other members of the team that make their way to Northrend.
The decisions made here may not fit every tank out there. Not everyone has a blacksmith on their team or has a smithing friend. If this is the case, I heartily endorse picking up the trade; it's a lot of work, but the resources available to you as a smith (and especially if you have mining to go with it) are quite useful. Same goes for jewelcrafting: it's a royal pain to learn, but it's handy to never need to hit the auction house for a gem. The decision to have Mordigg learn inscription really came down to, "What has the best benefit/time-and-money ratio?" After Mordigg went to the trainer, it took about 800-900 gold to get him up to 400 inscription for his shoulder enchant. Solannis did have some old ink stockpiled though, and we bummed some off of a buddy as well; given herb prices, that probably would've put the entire run up to 1000-1200 total for the whole thing had we started with nothing. I know for a fact there's no way we ever would have made that much progress in smithing or jewelcrafting for that kind of gold.
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