Return of Reckoning

Is it optimal to level up Apothecary with Butchering or with Cultivation first and then switch to Butchering?

I've always leveled apothecary with cultivation and then swapped to butchering. With butchering you need to go farm mobs, with cultivation you can rvr/scs/whatever while leveling your trade skills.

Apoth to me feels more natural with Cultivation but either is fine. Cultivation creates the key ingredient for almost every major potion. The perk of Butchering is it produces the main ingredient for a few Liniments as well as Armour & Toughness potions. If you go Butchering you'll just have to buy stuff like Goldweed and Extenders from other players.

Brand new player with 1 char should never pick butchering 1st as you'll get stuck leveling apot. And the ingredients you find you wont be able to make 60min pots with because you'll lack the 200 extender (and apoth level to use them even if you buy). Otherwise you can hit 200 cult by level15 and level apoth 1-200 in a few hours after that.

If you have/roll a 2nd char even in t1 you can make them the butcher, a lvl15 mob will drop a lvl75 armor ingredient and your main (lvl20ish now) would have the skill to make 60min lvl20 armor pots.

Big benefit of cultivating if you can do it while you pvp easily with miraclegrow addon. You cant butcher. So even if the plan is to roll 1 char and stick with it I'd stay cultivating and never swap butcher. A stack of 40 goldweed sells for like 7g all day so you can just sell goldweed and buy armor pots and then no pve. You can also sell int/str/health pots from just cultivating and use the money to buy armor/toughness pots.

Thanks for info.