Secondary Skills

Unlike professions, you can obtain as many of the secondary skills as you wish, even if you already have two professions. These skills revolve around creating or finding items that will let you more easily heal yourself; they’re not usually highly lucrative and won’t let you create equipment or long-term buffs.

Cooking

Cooking is simple, albeit somewhat circumscribed at this point in the game. As a cook, you’ll be tasked with finding meat of various animals, ranging from the commonplace, such as boars and wolves, to the relatively obscure. (Meat drops off of beasts naturally; you don’t need any other collection skills to find it.) When you have meat, you can bring it back to a fire or cooking rack to make it into food.

Most of the food that you can create is straightforward, of the sit, eat, and regain health variety, but you will eventually be able to make food that will buff your spirit and stamina for 15 minutes with each meal. This can be fairly useful, but it takes an awfully long time to get up to the higher levels of the skill, and when you do, you might find that many of the recipes you’re interested in will also require a high level of fishing skill to acquire the ingredients in what can be an unpleasant bait-and-switch if you haven’t been spending a lot of time fishing.

First Aid

First aid is likely going to be something that almost every player will want to pick up, mostly because it’s easy to use and lets you cut the downtime related to health drain, or lets you heal up your teammates, no matter what class you are, even during combat!

You can use First Aid on almost anything, including other players and pets.

To start out with First Aid, you’ll need to gain the skill from a First Aid trainer, then find some cloth. Cloth (linen, wool, silk, etc) is a common drop on humanoid enemies, and can be made into bandages with your First Aid ability; these bandages can then be applied to yourself or to a teammate, and will heal your target over a short period of time. The best part of all this is that cloth is pretty easy to find, which makes First Aid an easy skill to build up, especially if you grab it at a low level. If you wait until you’re a high level before you nab it, you’ll have to start out with the linen recipes before you can work your way up to the higher-quality cloth, which will either force you to buy a bunch of linen at auction or camp a bunch of low-level spawns, neither of which is a very palatable option.

It’s important to remember, though, that applying a bandage is considered to be a channeling action. This means that your target (or yourself) won’t get all of the benefits of the bandage right away; it’ll take around six seconds for the complete effect to be felt, during which time you can be interrupted if you’re hit. (This prevents you from bandaging yourself during solo combat, by the way, or at least prevents you from getting the full effect of a bandage, as it’ll cut out as soon as you’re struck by a weapon or spell.) Also note that when a bandage is applied, the target can’t be bandaged again for sixty seconds. Thus, first aid is best used for either shortening the downtime between solo fights, or for healing yourself during combat when you don’t have aggro, or for healing a teammate who’s on the cusp of death. You’re never going to be able to match the pure healing power of a class with healing spells, and you’ll find that over-reliance on bandages will result in your running out of them at inopportune times, especially in instanced dungeons, but still - it’s a free skill that every non-healing class will find use for at some point or another.

Well, almost every non-healing class, we should say. The only reason you might not want to pick up first aid is if you’re also a tailor; since tailoring requires large amounts of cloth, then you’d have to be splitting your resources between two skills, meaning that you’d be unlikely to excel in either of them. Since the classes that are most often tailors are mages (who can summon in food to heal themselves in between fights) and priests (who obviously have little need for first aid anyway), you’re unlikely to miss first aid if you choose to be a tailor.

Fishing

Whether you consider fishing to be merely boring, really boring, or brain-liquefyingly boring, will depend on your level of patience. After you receive your initial training in fishing, you’ll be asked to buy a fishing pole and optional bait. (You’ll probably want the bait, as it greatly increased your fishing skill for a few minutes.) When you have a pole, you can walk up to the edge of a body of water and use your fishing skill to cast your line. If for some reason the water is unfishable, you’ll get an error message telling you so, so pack it up and head somewhere else when this occurs.

BOOOO-RING!

When you’ve cast a line, all you can really do is wait for your bobber to, well, bob; when you see it splashing around, right click on it to see what you’ve caught. The thing here is that your bobber will rarely splash before the timer drops below halfway, sometimes won’t splash until the timer is almost done, and sometimes won’t splash at all, forcing you to recast. The tedium really starts to set in when you realize that, even if the bobber does splash, you’re not guaranteed to get anything; at low levels, at least, you’re going to get an awful lot of "Your Fish Got Away!" messages.

The thing about fishing is that, if you’re willing to put the time into it, you’re going to find plenty of restorative items (fish that can be eaten like any other food), including some that are a bit more powerful than what you would normally be able to buy. If you’re a real cheapskate, then, and don’t want to have to pay for food, then fishing might be a good alternative for you, if you’re willing to soak up some of your time with it. (You might also want to try out cooking and see which one is easier for you.)

In addition to plain old edible fish, you can also find inedible fish (these are useful in alchemy and can sometimes be valuable at the auction house), messages in bottles (usually containing scrolls of some sort), and lockboxes (which are rare, but will usually contain something decent). Of course, you’re going to have to stand around by a body of water to get anything at all, unlike first aid and cooking, which at least have the benefits of letting you gain experience while you gather the materials required for them. Still, though, it’s relatively inexpensive to train yourself in fishing, so you might want to give it a shot and see whether or not you enjoy it.