Again, if you already have these professions on characters, you don't have to worry about rearranging them and the small benefit you gain from pairing them isn't worth it for most people to completely redo their professions:

These pairings are recommended but not required as they are set up to reduce the amount of mailing you will have to do between characters, and also reduce the amount of switching between characters. If you already have max level or near max level professions, it might be easier for most players to leave them as they are and work around what they have.

Professions, such as Tailoring, Blacksmithing, and Leatherworking, that craft a lot of armor are best placed on characters; you will be spending a lot of time in Player versus Environment (PvE) content. Blizzard has a tendency of making a requirement of many of the crafts in these professions' items that are Bind-on-Pickup, so you will have to gather them yourself.

In Mists of Pandaria, this item is called Spirit of Harmony and, aside from crafting certain items, it is used for:

Keep in mind that, while everything in this list is strictly optional, having access to these can be a huge leg up over competitors that don't have them.

At the time of writing, the Spirit of Harmony items are Bind on Pickup only but Blizzard is discussing making them Bind to Account so that they can be traded across characters on the same Battle.net account at a future time.

You will be doing a lot of work in a process called shuffle; we will get into more detail in Chapter 3, Exploring Your Major Income Sources. In this process, certain professions are more important than others. So, if you are missing professions, I suggest you prioritize them as follows:

This list prioritizes professions based on which professions are typically most useful, and is designed to get you making as much gold as you can as soon as possible.

The gold-making opportunities for the secondary professions (First Aid, Cooking, Fishing, and Archaeology) are slim, so don't worry about leveling them so far as gold-making goes. Secondary professions are best on main characters as they benefit other aspects of play, such as raiding or PvP, more than gold-making.

Mists of Pandaria, like all expansions before it, introduces new levels in each profession. In Mists of Pandaria, the new 525-600 skill range for each profession requires Zen Master training in that profession to reach (this can be taught at 500 skill by any profession trainer). Unfortunately for those who have a hard time leveling new characters (for reasons such as not having the time, no patience for leveling, or whatever the cause), Zen Master requires a minimum level of 80 for a character to learn. Luckily, there are a few tricks you can employ to speed up the leveling processes if you don't have the time or will to do it the old-fashioned way:

While you are leveling a new alt, don't worry about leveling a new crafting profession at the same time. In fact, you should pick up dual gathering professions for the duration of the leveling process. If you pick up Mining and Herbalism, you get experience for each skill-granting node you gather; plus you can store the materials (that you gather) for leveling up professions at a later date. Another popular option is picking up only one of these professions (Mining or Herbalism) and then picking up Skinning as your second profession. Skinning has the benefit of not requiring you to go out of your way to collect materials; most of the time, you'll be skinning mobs you have to kill anyway.

Once you reach a certain point leveling alts, you will find that you have more spaces for professions than there are in the game. If you reach that point, you should consider stacking multiple copies of certain professions for extra benefit.

Some professions traditionally have a cooldown on crucial items, so you can only make a set amount of the said item each day. Currently the professions with cooldowns are:

As mentioned earlier, some professions need certain Bind on Pickup items such as Spirit of Harmony, so it could be beneficial having multiple copies of these professions on toons if you play them frequently (or even semi-frequently):

Finally, Jewelcrafting also takes some time to research all the end-game cuts. So if you have multiple Jewelcrafters, you can get a leg up on the competition when new cuts are introduced (such as new expansion releases and patches when epic gems are introduced).

Once you've decided which professions you want and have the space on a character to learn it (remember that each character can only know two primary professions at a time), it's simply time to dive in. If you leveled with gathering professions, you should already have most of the materials required to level; if not, a trip to your friendly neighborhood Auction House can quickly remedy the problem.

Use resources such as the profession-leveling guides at http://www.wow-professions.com/ to help expedite the leveling process and reduce the amount of materials you will need.

Along with the primary professions (limited to two per character) discussed so far, each character can pick up secondary professions: Fishing, Cooking, First Aid, and Archaeology. Unlike primary professions, a character can have all four of these professions at the same time.

While generally not involved in gold-making, these professions do have some limited use with certain markets, niche markets if you will. Because of this and the nature of the professions, you only need one set of these per server. So it's suggested that you place these on your main character or the character you spend most time with outside gold-making, as many of the benefits of these professions don't strictly have to do with gold-making. Several of these professions also do better on characters that have more time logged on them, so you're killing two birds with one stone, so to speak, by placing them on your main character.