Beyond Thundergnome

Server was down as mentioned all night for maintenance, so no play time for a certain diminutive dweomer-caster.  As promised, I'll instead touch upon the mechanics behind the crafting system.

First up, you're allowed two "professions" and they can be broken down as "gathering" professions (herbalism, mining, and skinning) or "production" professions (tailoring, leatherworking, blacksmithing, engineering, jewelcrafting, scribes, and alchemy, and enchanting). 

Gathering professions are somewhat self-explanatory...either you'll be gathering from resource nodes scattered around the world or you'll be ripping the virtual flesh off various creatures (but not other players and/or other humanoids).

The production professions work like this, mostly: obtain a recipe for an item by hook, crook, or trainer (most of which are crooks themselves), gather the ingredients for it and click a button.  It is one of the simplest systems I've seen, with no chances of failures or complications during the crafting process itself.  There's also no completing work orders for skillups, so you're forced in many professions to make hundreds of worthless items to skill up as cheaply as possible.  As your skill increases, more "difficult" (read: costlier to make) recipes must be employed to guarantee a skill increase upon crafting completion.  Most professions are massive resource sinks.

This being said, there's a thing that encourage people to grind the highest levels of skill at two crafts, as well as reputation with various factions to obtain key recipes from faction-aligned vendors.  That thing?  Special equipment that can only be used by people with that level of skill or gear that can only be used by the creator.

The production professions in a nutshell:

Tailors - bags, cloaks, and cloth armor.  Apparently they suck so bad, Blizzard had to give them extra perks like bonus cloth resource drops from humanoids and a flying mount only tailors can ride.

Leatherworkers - leather armor and permanent enhancements to certain pieces of armor through the use of armor kits

Blacksmiths - heavy armors, weapons, shield spikes, other miscellaneous bits

Engineers – explosives (!) and general utility gadgets, both expendable and permanent.  Most of the permanent gear can only be used by other engineers.

Jewelcrafting - Cuts gems that can be crammed into socketed armor, a la Diablo II.

Scribes - Create glyphs that permanently enhance a player's spells or skills.

Alchemy - Potions, potions, and poisons.

Enchanting - Permanent statistic increases on armor and weaponry, as well as the ability to reduce magic items to raw materials.

Personally, I picked enchantment for the "magic to slag" feature.  The components generated often sell for more than the item itself is worth and is a great way to "recycle" unwanted quest rewards.  At some point I'll need to start upping the skill again, as I'm starting to encounter rewards that require a higher level of skill to "disenchant".