First Aid - Should you even bother?

First Aid could use some updating, not to mention just about all professions, primary and secondary, but I'll focus just on First Aid for this post. WoW Insider's The Queue touched on this today and several of it's readers comments suggested improvements and advancements that could help make this secondary profession a little more interesting and capable. Instead of following suite and wildly speculating about how changes could improve things I'm just going to look at what First Aid is, here and now and break down whether or not it's even worth leveling up. Yes, there's a bunch of achievements you can rank up through the profession, one of which (Ultimate Triage) can actually be kind of fun to try to get and better yet is awesome when you didn't even realize it. But for actual function in game it really only reigns supreme in one area, PvP.

In Combat
The great benefit First Aid has is that bandages can be used in combat so that mostly throws it into the PvP category which also touches on it's unique feature that they can be used on other players regardless if they have the profession or not. Though in reality unless you have some amazing on the fly communication going on that other player will likely move the second you start using this 8-second cast-time based bandage hence interrupting it's effect. But for self heals during PvP this is where First Aid really shines, Those bandages can be a literal life saver when used after a perfectly timed CC. In addition, unlike a health potion which can only be used once after combat has started, you'll be able to bandage again after it's 1 minute cooldown is up regardless of dropping combat or not.  But it's not the only in combat self heal ability, there's actually a whole race our there with a bandage effect talent build right in.

Forsaken Racial
If you're Forsaken/Undead your Cannibalize can also be used while fighting and gives the benefit of regenerating mana as well, provided there's a fresh corpse around, which is pretty common in battlegrounds, but only rarely reliable or available in arenas. But out and about in the world questing or running dungeons you won't have to go too far to find, kill then eat a humanoid or undead npc. Beasts, demons, dragonkin can not be Cannibalized. So here's this a whole race on Azeroth who already have and even more power effect built into their character from level 1. No material gathering, no leveling, nada. Just eat away. No, I didn't forget Gift of the Naaru. But a 20% heal with a minute longer cooldown doesn't even come close to working as a replacement for a bandage. But you play Alliance or you play Horde but you'd never even consider rolling an Undead? Well luckily you have a 4 in 10 shot of playing something way more ubiquitous than a Forsaken.

Healing Classes
If you play any healing class in any spec then like me you probably didn't bother leveling First Aid on them at all and never thought about it again. Many years ago I started leveling First Aid on my first alt, an Enhance Shaman. By level 20-something I realized that I still had a stack of Linen Bandages that I've never used so I stopped wasting my cloth to continue leveling it.  He's still sitting at 55/150 First Aid.

Outside of Combat and Class Abilities
Outside of combat there's just so many more readily available options beside bandages. There's food! Cheap, plentiful, utterly common food. You don't even have to make an effort to get it seeing as most humanoid mobs will drop some after you kill them.  Warlocks have Soul Harvest which when used after a Soul Burned Health Stone can take you from 10% health to full in half the time of eating. Precede that with a couple Life Taps and your down time is pretty much nil. Soul Burn is kind of a personal gripe with me since I'm a Forsaken warlock. They basically rolled one of my racial's into my class so eh no big whoop. Though on my priest Cannibalize is still awesome for 5 mans when I just eat on the go and never have to bother a mage for water, speaking of which... Mages have glyphed health regeneration through Evocation, +40%! Actually, every class has some sort of health regeneration talent or ability. Most aren't as available, reliable or convenient as just eating, but Recuperation, Spirit Mend, Enrage Regeneration, Blood Tap/Lichborne+Death Coil, etc... You get the idea.

So outside of PvP is there really a reason to waste all that cloth and time on First Aid? Not for this player. Embersilk, even as this point of the expansion is still too valuable for me to squander on bandages that'll go unused. Even my main who is nearing 13,000 achievement points isn't even getting any for his Preparing for Disaster. He'll get it eventually, but I'll wait for MoP when those bandages will once again grant skill up points.