Azerothian Floriography: The Blog Azeroth Shared Topic

This week’s shared topic is all about professions:

Professions are fun for some and a necessary evil for others.

Some of us have farming professions. Some of us have crafting professions. Some of us have a little bit of everything! Professions are leveled because they fit our style of play, help us in raiding, allow us to outfit our alts, and make us money.

What professions do you have on your main? Do his/her professions fit their personality? Why did you choose them? If you chose professions based on your character and not on gaming needs, would that change some of their professions they use?

(This can include the secondary professions of archaeology, fishing, cooking, and first aid too!)

suggested by Effraeti.

I admit to having a bit of a love and hate relationship with my professions. Some I adore, I have three Priests with alchemy for example, others especially when I was raiding felt more like something I was forced into rather than my own personal choice.

If it were solely up to me and all the professions offered the exact same bonus, all my characters would be herbalists. My first character was a Warlock and I remember running around Ashenvale on her and coming across my first Kingsblood. This plant and I looked at each other and in that brief moment I knew then that my destiny was to pick flowers.

During the rest of vanilla, my entire guild knew without looking at the guild screen that if I was online and we weren’t raiding or pvping, odds on I’d be in either Felwood or Winterspring meandering around herbing without a care in the world. Even though it was a pvp server, I was protected by both my guildtag (not because the rest of the server loved us but because they were used to us travelling in packs and had made the mistake of attacking innocent healers before only to be stunlocked by rogues) and my association with Mr Harpy. I had a couple of conversations on IRC with various Horde which went like this “Saw you in Winterspring, thought about trying my luck but thought it was probably a trap. Attack Priest, get aim shotted by shadowmelded Hunter and camped for ages for daring to attack his “precious”. Based on the fact that my beloved did once spend 5 hours camping someone it was probably a smart move and it meant that apart from the odd new player or the very brave, I got to pick flowers to my heart’s content. In fact I picked so many that despite my mana pot addiction, at the start of the next expansion I had a stockpile to use up.

When the Dark Portal opened and flight form was introduced, I switched herbalism from my Priest to my Druid and have been flying around pulling them up in my beak ever since.

Of course the ability to disguise yourself as a herb has to be one of the best things Cataclysm added to the game. I keep a large stack of these on me at all times. Attempt to pick me at your own risk however.

I find it particularly relaxing, put some music on and then just fly around. Some of the herbs have beautiful names, others amazing graphics and some have both. I particularly like Netherbloom because it’s sort of a creepy venus fly trap, reaching out every so often and snatching up that little purple glow.

As a child, I loved reading the Latin names of plants (in fact when I was about 10 and thought that having children was something you had to do, I was planning on calling a daughter Alchemilla Mollis, the formal name for Lady’s Mantle.. ) and have lots of books on botany and herbs, influenced perhaps by the fact that the three most important women in my life when growing up, my Mother, Grandmama and Great Grandmama were all great gardeners (well technically two of them still are).

My Grandmother is very formal when it comes to sending flowers, still subscribing to the Victorian ideas about the language of flowers, with different species and then different colours within a family giving different meanings. When applied to Azeroth, some seem fairly obvious, a bouquet of Grave Moss for example is surely the Goblin equivalent of a horse’s head in your bed. I imagine too that sending a Heartsblossom would imply that the sender can’t live without you. Others are slightly trickier to place but it could be a fun afternoon’s work figuring it out.

Herbalism is definitely a perfect match for me and with hindsight it suits my Druid more than it would my Gnome Priest. It’s easier to imagine the Druid chasing up rare species of plants in exotic lands than is to see Sprout, whose idea of weeding is probably to use explosives.