So at the start of TBC, including pre-patch, guides and other warriors suggested going BS/Engineering for tank and DPS both for the crafted gear like goggles, BS weapons, and the rocket trinket. My view on the min-maxing situation was, "I don't want to put myself in a situation where I can't farm materials for myself when I need it to craft something." As time went on, this thought broke down from how tedious it was to actually farm ores myself and the prevalance of bots decimating the ore market. After the first month, I had rarely used mining for anything other than make profits on incredibly small margins that I would sell over the course of a week.

Yesterday morning, I was looking at engineering stuff, most notably sapper charges and bullet/arrow machines for our hunters, and seeing if it was worthwhile to invest into engineering to get these. The goggles for DPS were actually worse than the T4 helmet for warrior, but the tank goggles were insanely well statted. I was told that I would need to make sure my gear is top of the line when I eventually needed to play as a tank again, so this was a perfect opportunity to set myself up to be more potent in raids, even covering initial AOE threat somewhat with sapper charges.

While I had made up my mind at this point, my GM messages me and asks if I had mining. He's done this before, asking if I can smelt stuff for him so he can make cash money, so I reply with a yes. After a short conversation, he introduces me to a quirky trinket: the Gnomish Battle Chicken. He said it's a 5% haste buff for 90s that stacks for all members in your party (so up to 25% for 90s) and can be used right before the pull to get a microlust. The trinket has a 20 minute CD and requires Gnomish Engineering to get. After doing some research, here was my write-up to the "Windfury Group", which included a tank, and other melee who would be thrown into this group as well.

-start of post: The Write-up
I have a proposition for you all.
[Gnomish Battle Chicken] https://tbc.wowhead.com/item=10725/gnomish-battle-chicken
This is an engineering trinket that you can craft at a very low engineering level that has a 20 minute CD that does 2 things:
1: It attacks the target for 1 damage every 2 seconds. When it enrages (10s buff), it does 40-70 damage every second. According to this player, it's enraged fairly often so 5 chickens could be outputting 150 DPS for free for 80ish seconds.
2: It will provide the party with a 5% attack speed buff for 5 minutes. This apparently stacks, allowing us to get a 25% attack speed buff with 5 chickens out.
Note: This chicken actually levels up with you. So it will be lvl 70 when you use it, meaning it will actually be able to do damage to bosses instead of missing 95% of the time.

As far as I am aware, Ilim, Jackarta, Pollock and (now) I have engineering. You  do need to be gnomish in order to equip and use this trinket. It requires 230 engineering to learn it from the Gnomish trainer. Getting to 230 engineering is fairly inexpensive, all things considered, and is cheaper to acquire than getting the goggles that most of you had just made. Assuming proper pulls are made, this would allow Pollock to get threat very quickly on the boss and give the rest of our melee group a mini lust on pull. If you have a profession that is not actively contributing to your DPS/utility like Skinning, Mining, Herbalism, I would highly recommend you switch to Engineering.

I am currently making the swap myself, dropping mining after being somewhat reluctant about it ever since TBC launched. With prices of all ores, hides, and herbs plummeting, and the prevalence of bots, gathering professions are not nearly as profitable as engineering can be with gas clouds.
-end of post

This chicken is being vastly undersold in this post. It's not an 80s 25% haste buff, it's a FIVE MINUTE 25% haste buff. The chicken itself also does a lot of damage. Assuming it's lvl 70, it loses about 30% dps because it doesn't have hit or expertise. It hits between 40-70 per second (55 dps), so it's adding another 192 dps to the raid for 90s, which is MASSIVE. It's literally WF on a warrior all over again.

There's technically downsides to this strategy, but it's gold related. Because of Blizzard's infinite wisdom, you can't just spend a small amount of gold to swap between gnomish and goblin engineering and, instead, have to level up from scratch each time you want to swap. It takes roughly 1200g to get from 1-350 (the level to wear your goggles) but only 300g of that is 1-230, the requirement for the chicken. Our GM, the guy who proposed the idea, has offered to pay for people to get to 230 engi at least, but not 350 because it's somewhat expensive. Everyone who was pinged about it agreed that it's a solid strategy and a massive DPS boost, so it's only a matter of time until the Chicken Meta rises.