Rift Professions Guide

In the game of Rift, professions are skill sets available to each player, separate from talents and abilities and the soul trees. There are a total of 9 professions available in Rift, 3 of which are GATHERING and 6 others that are CRAFTING. The gathering professions simply allow you to collect useful materials, whereas the crafting professions allow you to learn abilities that create items and gear, often requiring some materials obtained through a gathering profession. When a profession is learned, you start with a skill of "0" and level up by using the profession to make/gather things, eventually reaching higher levels that allow for more powerful crafting/gathering.

Let's peel apart each profession one by one.

Gathering Professions:

• Foraging - Gather plants and lumber, usually from the ground. This can be an easy profession to make profitable, because lumber and herbs and needed by almost every other profession in the game.
• Butchery - Obtained hides from skinning slain monsters. Needed widely, but mostly by Outfitter and Armorsmith.
• Mining - Collects gems and ores from nodes that randomly spawn through the world of Rift. This is greatly needed by Weaponsmiths. Because Weaponsmiths is more or less the most popular profession and requires a lot of ore to level up, Mining can potentially be the most profitable profession if making gold is your goal.

Crafting Professions:

• Apothecary - Make potions that serve various functions, such as healing and buffing stats, as well as making bombs and other damage dealing items. Dependent on herbs gathered by Foraging.
• Outfitter - Creates cloth and leather items, and can break down cloth and leather items back into usable materials. Outfitters can also create bags to increase inventory space. Outfitters require butchered materials and cloth that drops from monsters and NPCs.
• Armorsmithing - Craft armor. I.E. plate, chain, and shields. Can also break plate armor, chain armor, and shields into useable materials. Requires mainly metals gathered by mining, but also requires some leather from butchers.
• Runecrafting - Can enchant weapons and armor to become more powerful in some way. Runecrafters get materials themselves by disenchanting, or breaking down, armor and weapons into materials. For those of you familiar with World of Warcraft, this is a lot like Enchanting.
• Weaponsmithing - Make weapons (except staves and wands). ***This is an expensive profession*** You will most likely not make money form this profession unless you get to be one of the top weaponsmiths first on your server and then monopolize the weapon making there. This is difficult and a lot of work. Weaponsmiths require mainly metals from mining, but also lumber from foragers.
• Artificing - Create staves, wands, rings, amulets. Artificers can also break down jewelry into useable materials. Items from miners are most needed, along with some help from foragers to supply lumber.

As you may have picked up on, some gathering professions directly benefit some crafting professions. Utilizing this can be the key to generating gold revenue, or maximizing the potential of your crafting profession. Choose professions that will complement each other, and be aware of who needs your gathered goods the most. You could just take all 3 gathering professions and sell materials to make gold and not worry about crafting anything.

These are just the essential basics of the professions. For a more advanced and in-depth guide on the professions and leveling, you should look to something like Power Leveling Secrets.

Anyway, I hope that's some help to you out there struggling trying to decide which professions to take up.

Good luck, and I'll see you on the battlefield!