Which PADI specialties are useful and which ones are "underwater basket weaving"?

[Hostage]

A lot of these courses seem like a waste of good money. Which ones are really useful and help you as a diver, which ones are money grabers, and which ones did you do and like?

Thanks in advance,

Hostage

[James R]

A lot of this is going to be heavily dependent on the instructor. Does he (or she) do the minimum to get your c-card in the mail? Also, what are you good at? What do you need to work on? What are you interested in? There may not be a generic answer that fits your unique situation.

For me the best I took:
Rescue (if this is a specialty)
Navigation
Nitrox


Not really a huge benefit:
Night - I had a lot of night dives and was not uncomfortable at all before.
Deep - I had tons of deep dives, dives with a pony bottle, and so on. Was required for other courses I wanted.

The rest I have done kinda fall in the middle.

[the wart]

Nitrox.

Sometimes Deep can be useful, but only as pre-requisite to certain Tech Courses.

Ice Diver should be pretty good..... although there is an Urban Legend that an Egyptian Instructor (who has never left Egypt) has this Specialty rating. So shop around.

[Hawkwood]

.... Also, what are you good at? What do you need to work on? What are you interested in? There may not be a generic answer that fits your unique situation.
....

Given the wording of the OP's question, this is a great answer!

[Scott]

Nitrox is good to have.
Peak Bouyancy if you spent about 5 minutes on hovering, kicks and trim in your OW.
Search & Recovery if you chance to find something underwater.

Everything else really depends on what interests you.

[Hostage]

I do have a lot of interest in wreck diving and live a few miles from Lake Ontario. I had a lot of fun at the AOW wreck portion we did on the Islander this past weekend.

[Dive-aholic]

Taught to minimum standards they can all be a waste of time. With the right instructor they can all be great courses. The key is to find what interests you and choose a good instructor.

[mikemill]

The underwater basket weaving one is highly recommended.

[pheel]

I do have a lot of interest in wreck diving and live a few miles from Lake Ontario. I had a lot of fun at the AOW wreck portion we did on the Islander this past weekend.

Last year I was thinking about doing wreck specialty. My instructor told me that it was pretty much a waste of time so I didn't do it.
However in the past I did Nitrox, Ice diving and drysuit and they were all useful. Rescue is also a must. Beside that, other specialties look to me as basket weaving

[drrich2]

Nitrox is good for live-aboards & other 'high # repetitive diving' environments like shore diving Bonaire (and staying down longer on some other dives), and you need the certification card to get Nitrox.

Deep Diver is useful unless you've got good mentoring & read up heavily on deep diving on ScubaBoard.com threads (which I recommend anyway), since early on you have no idea how narcosis-prone you are, and having an Instructor handy to walk you through those first deep dives is a good thing.

Navigation should be quite good - I hope to do this someday. It plays to my weaknesses, though. I think Navigation is a weakness of many divers (including me), and if you just to just do tropical warm-water high-viz 'follow the leader' guided dives in charter boats in the Caribbean, you may not need it. But it's a good skill to have.

Rescue Diver - just did this one. It's highly recommended on ScubaBoard.com for good reason. It teaches you to think through thinks & hopefully avert panic. It's as much about taking care of yourself as anybody else, and both are good things. You need to be certified in CPR and First Aid to take it, though.

Advanced Open Water - can be a nice introduction to some different types of diving, and you need this before you take Rescue Diver if memory serves.

What all types & locations of diving do you plan to do? For example, a course in dry suit diving would be pretty useless to me since I don't own or plan to use one, but for some types of diving, a dry suit is a must.

Richard.