10 thoughts after collecting every profession spec point!

Gameplay Professions
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I finally finished collecting every specialization point in every profession spread across my small army of alts. I have a few thoughts on the profession systems in Dragonflight.

1.) Collecting every talent point in every profession deserves a feat of strength. - It meant farming the same profession items week after week on half a dozen characters for like 9 months straight.

2.) All professions are not created equally… blacksmithing requiring 30 points per armor slot vs tailoring only 10 felt a little disjointed. Made leveling some (tailoring, gathering professions, inscription, …) feel easy while others felt like they took forever!

3.) Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I loved artisan mettle and how it works for most items allowing you to charge a little extra to guarantee max rank.

4.) I would have loved to see the class profession bonusses matter a little more. For example, something like for jewelcrafting the draenei bonus being enough to push those Epic gems into guaranteed max rank. Would have made profession and class choice a more interesting dynamic. Even just re-tooling these bonuses to offer extra resourcefulness / inspiration would have made them feel more impactful.

5.) I’m not a person who likes to spam chat to advertise. I mostly did all this to help my guild with cheap easy guild orders, Not having a rank selection on public work orders really cut down the amount of work orders posted for folks like me. I still have done pretty well off of responding to people who post LF in trade chat, but the convenience would have made it better.

6.) That said on the whole the work order system made crafting so much easier, so on the whole I’m a big fan. Would love to see the expanded. It will need lots of filters added to support this though.

7.) Not having good filtering options built in for all of the garbage no mats low gold offers that get put in hurt the WO system though. If I hadn’t started using “no mats no make”, I would have made far fewer public orders 'cus who has time for sorting that.

8.) As a guy who raids on a lot of characters, putting the profession recipes as rare drops in the raid marked as BoE was a great decision. The only change I would make to it, is if need is rolled on a recipe, then it should become BoP. Lots of folks don’t play at crafting and roll need on recipes just because they have the profession, just to post them on AH and roll need on them again the next week. That is more a greed roll.

9.) The game desperately needs an account wide reagent bank… I can’t count the amount of time I spent swapping between characters to send awakened elements or random reagents. Not a lot of fun.

10.) Lastly, insanely time gated / low drop recipes (elemental lariat, ringbound hourglass) felt stupidly bad if you are unlucky. Assault in the raid offered a nice catch-up for raid recipes, but these two remained stupidly elusive while being important recipes to have.

All in all, even with the duration of this grind, I love the new profession systems and hope blizz continues it, while implementing some of the changes listed above.

Bonus: huge shoutout to Tama’s Profession Weak Aura, without it would it have been painful!

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Decent write up. Not going to go point by point (because that would be boring), but here are my thoughts

Kudos to you for collecting them all. I’m too scatterbrained to do that

I notice the disparity between professions every week. What it takes to fill the weekly crafting order for my LW is miles ahead of what it takes my tailor. And BS recipes sell for a lot more on the AH than everything but JC

Strongly disagree that recipes should drop from raids. I know they want to create synergy between different types of players, but it doesn’t work that way. Every day I see recipes listed for 100X the amount I could make from them. There is no reason for me to buy a recipe for 500k if I couldn’t make 10% of that. So they either go to guildies or some crackhead listing it over and over for more than it is worth. If raiders had to get a rare ingredient from a crafter that was charging an insane amount for, it would get hotfixed.

I enjoy the crafting system. There are weeks I make very little. Others where I make a fair bit. And I take a ghoulish delight in seeing low gold/no mats sit in my queue for days without getting picked up. And I will refuse to do any order from players with glyphs in their names unless it’s at a premium

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Agreed.

In general, there’s a lot of good ideas, and I think that working end game gear into crafting was a major positive. But professions haven’t played as a fun or rewarding activity.

The negatives are things like:

  • Spending knowledge on Potion / Phial Knowledge which are completely useless once you learn the recipes.
  • Trying to templatize things like inspiration or resourcefulness into all professions.
  • Learning the profession for the most part didn’t require doing the profession, it required doing FOMO weekly fetch quests.
  • Items where you can spend a lot of knowledge to try and gurantee a rank 3 craft only to find out there’s no way. You either get inspired or you don’t, and other effort was wasted knowledge. Looks like everything has at least a convoluted way to get to rank 3. But this brings up two additional problems. How convoluted the methods can be, and then, what’s the point of inspiration? Like potion/phail knowledge, you’re spending a lot of knowledge points on something that has absolutely no purpose at the end of the experience.
  • Awakened mats used for everything causing them to price based on the most expensive item you can make with them.
  • The interface copy isn’t all that clear, especially at launch “Gaining +1 skill per point in this specialization” OK… what does that mean? what recipes are part of that “Specialization”? Figuring out what really did what was an ester egg hunt. “Skill” for an item could be exploded all over the specializations.
  • Using soul bound items as a required part of leveling your base skill while at the same time having base skill a gate keeper for unlocking knowledge categories.
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People getting banned for posting their skills. Seems like a bad system. Otherwise its fine I guess. Maybe a bit overcomplicated for the average player.

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All recipes in the game can be guaranteed max rank with max spec points so I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to mean. Can you clarify?

I think my biggest gripe is Blizzard’s nerf to the public order count also including a nerf to the recharge rate. Being able to essentially only fill one public order per day is straight up nonsense. Sure, it means someone can monopolize orders on low pop servers even with 4 publics a day (which is what the recharge rate should be IMO) but that’s a server population issue and not a system issue. On a populated server it is beyond annoying and a little disheartening to see orders I can’t fill because I’m capped.

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Most, not all.

Weapon enchants like “Sophic devotion” can’t be. And as far as I can tell Fauna runes cant be either. ( Buzzing rune, chirping, etc )

A lot can be done with everything maxed, all the +skill gear, and an insight.

But even if everything could be, then what’s the point of all the skill points put into “inspiration”?

And fauna runes are an example of the poor documentation and copy. They’re called “Fauna” in the specializations, but just “Runes and Sigils” in the recipe list. So the only clue you have as to what the specialization is effecting is the line “used to empower your weapons” in the specialization roll over text. And not only that, there are “Runes and Sigils” that are effected by other specializations with equally poor indications as to what’s going on.

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I can max both of these, having an enchanter and scribe with max points. Scribe just requires Illustrious Insights, while enchanting requires you to shatter an Awakened element of the same alignment as the enchant you want to create (e.g. Order for Sophic) for the bonus 25 skill in addition to the Insight’s bonus. edit: saw your reply on the other post, lol.

Yes, inspiration is functionally useless as a result of this. I don’t really know what they want out of it.

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Ya, just learned about the shatter in another thread.

But that’s the magic of this system. Got to search for weird and obscure things like + skill gear or shatterer.

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  1. Big True

  2. Blacksmithing is really only 10 ahead compared to tailoring/LW. LW is 30-30-20 and then tailoring is 30-40-10 or 30-50-10 depending on the spec. The uniqueness is kind of alright imo, but I think they should have been equal overall at 80 points per piece.

3.) Big true as well

4.) I’m fine with profession racials mattering more, but (at least in a world where trade chat is still separate by faction) the racials just need to be mirrored across factions. The gem thing is only a problem because they aren’t BOE and can’t be rerolled, so it’s 50 mettle every time to guarantee, and most people aren’t going to pay for insights for a single gem.

5.) I disagree on this one. Having ranks being able to be set on public would just turn it into the defacto way for people to do orders, while also having people whine when their 100g 447 rank 5 minimum order with t2 mats doesn’t get filled, with little understanding why. I think the public order system is fine for casuals who don’t care that much about what ilevel they get and just need an item.

6.) I like that they expanded it to the new classic crafting stuff they introduced. Ideally this would get expanded to every craftable item in the game, though I could see how that would be a lot of work for not the most return. I think the system right now either needs a way for customers to set a minimum inspire chance (that doesn’t matter if the item is 100% guaranteed) or to see what inspiration chance the crafter had when they crafted it, that would lead to a lot more people having confidence in the system. Right now I just send a screenshot with most crafts I do.

7.) Big true, minimum commission on all BOE items should be like 80% the price of the cheapest mats at time of posting. The BOP items like gear at least have some merit in being there for crafters to spend a bit of gold in exchange for skill ups

8.) I also agree with this, it could make doing guild stuff a bit more annoying, but probably worth, still?

9.) I have no opinion on this

10.) It’s fine to have low drop/chase recipes, the problem is that they stayed in elemental storms that no one does anymore. Lariat should have moved to cavern rares and hourglass should have been a drop from the world boss or something, anything that players would be doing in the current patch.

I hope blizzard sees that a lot of people are happy with the new prof system. I really like that it gives me an avenue to make gold while being social with people, and without having to interact with the AH.

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I hate the work order system. I have to constantly go to my alts to make work orders for my mains just to get the points from the quests.

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I personally wished they had implemented a less=complicated and old-fashioned way to get to the skill cap. And then leave all the complicated specialization stuff for folks that enjoy that kind of thing. Historically i’ve enjoyed professions, but the last couple expansions I really haven’t tried much except for whatever can give XP as you level up. My army of alts is around skill 50 in everything and I have zero desire to do much more than this!

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Personally I’m of the opinion that you should be able to max your Profession skill level from recipes learnt from the instructor. Other recipes found via your Profession skill-tree would just be what you essentially choose to specialize in.

I’d also really like to see a skill from gathering professions that allows you to spot enhanced nodes (as a different dot colour) on your mini-map.

Finally, I think they should also reconsider their stance on no-mats postings on Crafting Orders, especially as the vast majority of the needed mats can be easily (and, in many cases, cheaply) bought on the Auction House.