I've been feeling somewhat bored in the past little while, not really wanting to get ready to go out and grind solo on quests while my guild friends are still at work, so I've quietly putzed around and made some changes/advancements to my professions on my toons:
63 Hunter drops Leatherworking and picks up Herbalism, then levels it to 300+ in a couple days of running around Azeroth on my epic mount.
24 Rogue drops Herbalism and picks up Leatherworking to go with his already-present Skinning skill
42 Mage skills up fishing from 80 - 180, then drops Mining and picks up Skinning, grinding up to 175 in a few hours spread over a couple of days
16 Druid levels cooking from 80 to 225
35 Priest levels cooking from 200 to 275
Levelling skinning on my Mage has been surprisingly fun, as has raising my fishing skill been, and both for the same reasons: I'm going into areas I'm highly overpowered for and anything that dares challenge me is downed in the magicks of ice, fire and arcane.
Respec'd to Frost, Decent For Skinning Grinding
Knowing I would be doing a lot of skinning, I decided to spec away from my Presence of Mind-levelled Arcane spec and this time I went completely into Frost. My impression of this so far is that it's great! The points in frost wind up slowing down my opponent more when I fire off my Frostbolt (compared to the old spec), and I notice that my Arcane Missiles and Fire blast don't hit for any less than they did when I had more points in their trees, so the result is this:
Mob is slower in approaching me, meaning my Arcane Missiles don't get interrupted because I don't get hit, and despite having all my points in Frost-related things, Arcane and Fire things still hit nice and hard in terms of damage.
Right now I've skilled up my Skinning far enough that I can skin up to level 38 or so, so my views about how effective Frost is in general for my mainly PvE mage remains to be fully examined, but so far I'm liking it, for sure.
Self-sufficiency To The Max
The main reason why I made some of these Professions switches with toons over level 35 was to improve my self-sufficiency and money-making ability. I find myself not really interested in buying herbs and skins from the Auction House, partially due to the costs but mostly due to the availability. It's so much easier if I have the gathering profession myself, and simply make use of my bank and storage toons to hold the materials until I decide to mass-mail them to the toon with the appropriate production profession.
Ultimately, cash isn't the main reason for this, but I do expect that my cash reserves will do well and keep growing over time, and being able to buy things like Epic Land Mount training for all my toons as they hit 60 will be no problem.
Flying Mount Training? I'm not sure about that, but frankly, by the time I start getting toons to 70, I just might have a whole wad of cash laying in the coffers. I've already got a pretty decent nest-egg from which sending 200g to a toon that just hit 35 and wants to level professions with AH-bought materials isn't painful at all.
Just like real life, I don't tend to spend very much cash on the game, and instead tend to gather it. Unlike real life, however, I can actually go for a few weeks in game without doing anything more than Auction House work (ie: no farming, etc) and STILL earn a whole whack of cash. I wish I could figure out how to do that IRL without spending a huge amount of time educating myself first...