Mining

Mining is the collection skill that matches up with both Engineering and Blacksmithing. Before you can mine, you’ll have to have a Mining Pick (which you can buy at any trade skill merchant), and will obviously need to train your mining skill up to at least level one. Then you can head out into the world and start looking for mining veins, which will let you unearth valuable metals.

You can never tell where you’ll find mining veins.

Metal is usually going to be found in veins near mountains and hills - it’ll rarely be found out in the open areas of a zone. This means that metal collection will usually require a bit more dedication than either herbalism or skinning. You won’t be able to create your own resources just by killing beasts, as you will in skinning, and you won’t be running across your resources as you run around the bulk of a zone; you’ll probably have to dedicate portions of your time to "mining runs," as they’re called, and run around in zones where lots of metal veins are known to be located. A good example of this is the range of mountains stretching from just above Crystal Lake in Elwynn Forest all the way around to the Eastvale Logging Camp; if you run from one end of those mountains to the other, you’ll usually find a number of copper veins. Unfortunately, after a player gets three or four pieces of ore from a vein, it’ll disappear, and won’t respawn for a few minutes. Thus, if you have the misfortune of starting a run a minute or two after another player, you’re unlikely to find much of anything to mine. This can make mining something of a random pastime. We’ll see how Blizzard deals with the increased server population in retail; if enough people have a hard time finding mining veins, it’s reasonable to assume they’ll either increase the number of them or decrease their respawning time.

Anyway, when you whack at a vein with your mining pick (if you have one in your inventory, all you need to do is right-click on the vein while you’re standing next to it to do so), you’ll get a window showing you what you’ve mined. This will always include at least one piece of ore, but may also include various other items like pieces of rock or valuable gems, many of which will also be usable in your crafting profession, or, if not, then can be sold for good chunks of change.

It’s the ore that you really want, though. Before you can use it, you’ll need to convert your metal ore into metal bars; this can only be done at a forge, which can usually only be found in towns with enough of a population to support an NPC blacksmith. (I.e. the smaller a town, the less likely it is to contain a forge.) When you’re standing close to a forge, you can use your smelting ability to smelt the ore into bars, which are what you’ll need before you can start smithing items.

Now, when you have bars of metal, you can feel free to start making engineering items, if you have the other required ingrediants. To blacksmith, though, you’ll need an anvil; check the blacksmithing section for more details on that.

Skinning

Skinning is the collection aspect of leatherworking. In order to skin, you’ll need to train at a Skinning trainer, buy a Skinning Knife (available from Leatherworking and most Trade Skill merchants), and find yourself something to skin! Of the various mob types, only beasts are skinnable, but not all beasts. Insects and birds are often not skinnable, but most other types of beasts are, so you shouldn’t have a problem finding something to take your knife to. You can check whether or not a target is skinnable by mousing over its corpse after it dies.

Skinning is the easiest collection skill; just be careful not to overload your inventory during long quests.

When you have your skinning ability set up, you can head out into the wilderness and start skinning away. If you obtain your skinning after your character has levelled up a bit, though, you may notice that you can’t skin mobs of your level after you kill them; like any profession, you’ll have to start out on easier targets, which in this case means that you’ll have to return to a newbie area and find low-level monsters to kill and skin. You should be able to skin anything at level 10 or below with a single point of skinning, but that’s just to get you started; to skin higher-level monsters, you’ll need to have five points in skinning for each level of the mob. For example, if you want to skin a level 30 monster, you’ll have to have a skinning skill of 150 or higher. As with most collection skills, the difficulty of the collection will impact whether or not you’ll gain a skill point when you perform it, meaning that you’ll have to consistently skin enemies near your theoretical limit in order to consistently skill up skinning.

On the good side, though, it’s very, very easy to skill up skinning, since there are good populations of beasts in every zone; you won’t have to hunt down mining veins or keep your eyes peeled for herbs, in other words. If you skin everything that’s available to you, you should be able to maximize your skinning skill without having to make "skinning runs" or anything like that, leaving you more time to focus on your leathercrafting.

Tailoring

Tailoring, along with Alchemy and Engineering, is one of the professions that most suits mages and warlocks. With it, you can create cloth clothing, armor, and other items that are most suitable to classes that aren’t heavily armored. Many of the armor pieces that you’re able to create will have inherent bonuses to intellect and spirit, and some will even give you direct bonuses to magical damage or healing, making them recursively useful for spellcasting classes. In addition to the normal armor items, though, you’ll also be able to make tailored shirts of various colors, odd items of clothing like the Tuxedo Jacket, as well as bags that will often fetch a good price at auction. (If you manage to max out your tailoring skill, you’ll eventually be able to create bags with up to sixteen slots!)

One of the unique things about tailoring is that, like Enchanting, it doesn’t have an associated gathering skill; the raw materials for tailoring (namely, linens of various quality) drop on humanoid enemies throughout the game world. Thus, there’s no need to do anything to obtain your materials except adventure as normal, assuming you face off against humanoid enemies fairly often. Unfortunately, the same linens used in tailoring are also used in First Aid, which is available to all classes regardless of their main professions. These means that, when fighting through an instanced dungeon, you’ll usually have to compete with almost every other member of your party for the cloth drops, unless you all agree beforehand on a fair distribution of them.