Tradeskills are fun ... and you can use them for the Shawl quest, plus a couple other quests I'm forgetting about. But that's about it.
- Baking/Brewing/Pottery/Tinkering: Pointless (more or less); I guess a little baking is good for turning all that frost giant meat you get in Velious into +Stamina frost giant steaks, but you can also just buy +1 stamina food off that ogre in Freeport
- Tailoring/Smithing: Almost everything they make is inferior to stuff you can buy in EC Tunnel, unless you care about fashion quest
- (what little decent armor can be made, like some of the Velious tailoring armor, requires 100x more plat to reach the necessary level than just buying a full set for all of your toons)
- Alchemy: Cheaper/faster to buy off new Shaman than make yourself (I buy SoW potions for my alts rather than make them, just so I don't have to run up to Halas).
- Jewlerycrafting: Makes some useful stuff, but again to get to the level where you can make that stuff you'll spend 100x the plat vs. just buying what you need from another player
- Posionmaking: Not worth the trouble (or at least that's what I've heard Rogues say)
Now I'm not saying you
shouldn't do tradeskills: silly fun stuff (like tradeskills or languages) are a part of EQ and an interesting side of the game. But are any
worth it? Not really.