tradeskills worth it?

Alcaro

soo i just learned about the tradeskill split. i know i'm slow, but cut me some slack, i was asleep when it happened. anyway, now that i'm caught up, i've slowly become obsessed with them and their endless potential for new opportunities. as alcaro is level 60+, she has two slots available and i have no idea what to fill them with. help?

the gist of it is: i want gold. what tradeskill, besides the ones requiring licenses [cooking, tailoring, jewellery, etc.], have the greatest potential for yielding gold? at first i thought about trying conjuration, since i can totally see alcaro dancing naked and throwing crushed kola nuts at random passersby just because she's weird psycho like that. but the whole ourobori/chanting/whatever kinda looked like some alternative form of trigonometry to me and doing math goes against my religion.

soooo. tips?

Aereidhna

Crafting skills are probably better as far as making money (via commissions) but the licenses are expensive. The market for most other tradeskills seems flooded and not that lucrative to me, but I only have the crafting and forging skills so I'm not really an accurate judge. I don't make a lot of money off of forging but people are nice and tip me well sometimes, I took it up more as a hobby than to make money. But you can make a decent amount from commissions for tailoring, jewellery, and cooking.

Kyrra

The gathering skills (harvesting, synthesis, gathering) are probably your best bet if you just want to make gold with little expense. Once you have Butchering in Gathering, you can go farming for reagents which are always in high demand for inkmillers. And with Synthesis, even if you choose not to end up making your own minerals, people will pay for the primes and especially the sulphur which is always in a massive demand.

Conjuration and augmentation are better skills for making gold if you have a shop. I'm pretty sure the majority of people will check shops for what they need first, but things like meteor arrows, eye sigils, fist sigils, mushroom sigils, monolith sigils, and flame sigils generally have a high demand. I can speak from experience that doing enchanting orders can be great but they are also time consuming. If someone hits you up for 500 or 1000 meteor arrows, you'll need to be prepared to be sitting in front of an ouroboroi for a few hours and it'll definitely help to have a medallion for Conjuration. With the enchanting trade skills, you also have to factor in a cost for commodities and scrolls.

Inks are always in demand so inkmilling could be worthwhile, especially if you paired it with Gathering. Not only do some people burn through inks like nobody's business (hello, Runewardens) but those with Toxicology seem to almost need bulk amounts of the things. I personally find farming for reagents to be a pita but people like Vix seem to have an earnest passion for it.

It's really up to you to decide how much time and effort you want to invest in particular tradeskills and also how much gold you want to be spending in order to be making. Some require little effort or expense on your part but are time consuming in other ways. But like forging aren't so time consuming anymore (compared to old forging) but there's a massive cost there for commodities to great things. 

Kayeil

I have the three crafting skills, gathering, and inkmilling. You're only going to make money with crafting skills if you can remain motivated and inspired, and willing to take commissions often. Gathering and inkmilling are easy, all you need is a butcher cleaver and an ink mill and you're good to go. Not only can you then supply yourself with inks, but you then get to sell inks and/or reagents to others when you have extras. With multiclass being a thing now, more people have picked up runie so I think ink will be even more in demand than before. You also get the option of gathering cooking ingredients which you can also sell, but I am not sure how well they sell as I only use that part of the gathering skill for my own personal use. Downside? I'm the type that hates walking around picking things up or hunting denizens that are technically too small for me to be hunting to butcher them for reagents. If you're going to get bored quick of walking around and picking things up, then gathering, harvesting, and synthesis are not for you. I highly discourage choosing weaponsmithing and armoursmithing because the commodity cost means you're going to make little to no profit, and it's a lot of work to reach the maximum forging rank. I can't comment too much on the other trade skills, but things like venom and the enchanting skills are probably easier to make money off of if one has a shop to run.

Dochitha

I have synthesis, harvesting and remedies. Remedies learned just to health and mana cos I hate running out of sips half way hunting. 

Synthesis is mostly for myself too though I sell extras when I see someone wanting minerals, usually potash. 

Lately I got a glove and have been extracting for profits, I don't know but it looks like the world needs more primes all the time. 

Sena

I don't have hard numbers any more, but from what I've seen making your own minerals is still far worse than getting gold in other ways and just buying them. Not sure what primes are selling for these days though, if one of them goes for at least 4-5 gold each (3 gold would probably be enough with a glove), that should make synthesis worth it, much better than making minerals (so if they do sell for that much then synthesis would be best used by selling primes to buy minerals).

I gave a very rough approximation of the tradeskills and how they compare to other methods of earning gold here (near the end of the post). From that, it's easier to see that what really matters when choosing tradeskills is what type of income (lower, but steady and infinitely available; extremely high but unpredictable and inconsistent; high but with a massive initial investment so the profit comes years in the future) you want rather than just how much, and also what sort of work you'd prefer (simple repetitive tasks, or interacting with others, or writing, or some combination).

Mining has changed commodity prices a lot since that post though. That's probably had the biggest impact on weapon/armoursmithing. The profit hasn't necessarily changed much because the higher commodity costs can be passed on to the customer, but it greatly increases the cost of increasing your rank (which is very hard to do if you only forge things you can sell).