Professions

Now I have been playing Rift throughout the week but before I get into the adventures of Stuart and Foxy I want to expand on something that you won't find a lot of information about in the game.

That would be professions.

Professions, in MMOs, are side projects/jobs you can take on to further customize your character and adds another facet of the game. You are usually limited to a certain amount of primary professions (in this game you can have 3) which include both gathering and crafting professions. In most cases the materials you gather from gathering professions (herbs from herbalism or meat from foraging) can be used to make things within a crafting profession (armor from blacksmiths or potions from alchemy).

Now, in the early stages of the game you come across quests that explain and teach you about professions but the explanations weren't sufficient enough for me to know if I was making the right choice (professions are something that you level up with your character. You can change them later of course but leveling a professions is usually tedious unless you do it while leveling.)

It was at this point I decided to access an outside source.
http://telarapedia.com/wiki/Rift_Wiki
I love wikipedia-related info sources. Since I'm not going to be citing this source in a paper I consider it a completely valid source of information.

Now the first thing I find when I search for "Professions" is this handy little graph/map
http://telarapedia.com/wiki/File:Rift_Profession_Map.png
(I would post the image but Blogger has issues with .png apparently)

The three in the center of the chart are gathering professions and the ones on the outside are crafting professions. The lines show which gathering professions give materials for each crafting professions. Since you are allowed 3 you can do a combination like Foraging+Butchery+Apothecary so that your 2 gatehring professions feed the same crafting profession
or
Butchery+Outfitting+Runecrafting since outfitting only needs one gathering profession which leaves you free to take runecrafting (which doesn't need any)

Already, just on the first page of this professions guide, I know how to organize which professions to take and how each one works with the others.

You can also click on specific professions to gather more information on them. I'm going to click on runecrafting so that I can figure out what it is exactly

Runecrafting:

Runecrafting is a crafting profession to creates runeshards and runes which are used to augment equipment with bonuses such as +dexterity and +spell crit. The raw materials required are obtained from other magical items that have had the runebreak skill used on them.

So basically you break/destroy pieces of gear or weapons to make other pieces of gear or weapons stronger. Basic enough
Also on the page are locations of trainers on both the Defiant and Guardian side and also a list of "recipes" you can acquire.

Going through the lists and descriptions I am going to decide on Foraging (collecting plants) Butchery (collecting skins and parts of animals) and Apothecary (making potions out of the plants and animal parts)

Watch out Telara! Stuart the druidic alchemist is coming to save you!