Huge props to the creators. Loving Forever so far.
LONG time player who’s had profession alt armies since OG wrath, and this is my opinion.
We have less meaningful choice than ever regarding professions. Here’s why: Crafted merchant’s favor gear is really strong. With the slow pace of leveling and nerfed dungeon xp (all good btw), the clear optimization strategy that’s developing on the beta is you take the crafting profession that corresponds to your armor type, run dungeons once for the quests, and craft whatever weak spots remain in your gear. Because this crafted gear is all BoP, you now have a VERY strong incentive to take BS if you’re a warrior or paladin, for example.
This virtually locks in most players to the profession that corresponds to their armor class, which is a step backwards even from vanilla. In my opinion, there should be at minimum a consideration for each profession for any individual character, even if other choices are slightly more meta or thematically stereotypical.
If I create a hunter, there should at least be a consideration of going tailoring or blacksmithing, or dual gathering, or any other combination of professions that doesn’t take leatherworking. As things stand, this will almost never happen. The incentive for LW is far too strong right now. Something needs to change with the merchant’s favor system. I don’t know if just making them BoE is the answer, and in fact I don’t think it is. But the system as designed has made it such that if you assigned a crafting profession automatically according to armor class at the character creation screen, you would cover like 95% or more of players’ eventual profession choice.
The second part of this feedback involves racials. Super disappointed to see the changes with profession racials. They were somewhat meaningless before (like cultivation in vanilla is almost irrelevant), but now we have a broken cultivation racial (as evidenced by a bunch of level 10 tauren getting end zone herbs (lol), and an actual benefit to engineering by gnomes. The gnome change should have been the standard.
How this should be changed, in my opinion, is every race/class combination should at least have some implication in terms of what professions you eventually choose. Right now if you are going to create a character on alliance, if you think you’re going to use engineering the gnome racial is at least a consideration. But that’s the extent of racials relating to professions that may influence character choice. This should be expanded to SOOO many more combinations. Like if I’m making a horde warrior, there should be all sorts of racials that influence my choice of profession and race. Maybe tailoring isn’t meta, but maybe it allows me to craft an upgradable end game cloak that avoids a notorious low droprate cloak on my progression path so I at least consider taking tailoring on my warrior. Maybe it allows me to skip a notorious rep grind ala Sons of Hodir. And maybe since undead have a meaningful racial related to say tailoring, it at least makes me consider making an undead warrior with tailoring instead of a tauren warrior with blacksmithing like 99% of all warriors on the horde.
Edit:
In addition, here’s what I would do. This probably sucks and has all sorts of unintended consequences, because I’m not a game dev, but here it is anyway:
All crafting profession racials could have either reduced reagent costs or occasional refunding of reagents, very small chance to discover an unknown recipe, or small chance to craft an additional item.
All gathering professions could have increased gathering speed, chance at additional harvest per node, or small increased chance of scarce materials harvest. Additional skill points could also be included similar to vanilla, but it would need to be in addition to one of the above perks.
Orc - Blacksmithing
Forsaken - Alchemy
Tauren - Herbalism
Troll - Skinning and Fishing
Human - Tailoring and First Aid
Dwarf - Mining and Cooking
Night Elf - Leatherworking
Gnome - Engineering
Skyborne - Enchanting
As new races are added, you could add a different type of benefit for a particular profession (like for example if ogres are added they receive faster mining speed and don’t require a mining pick, whereas dwarves have increased likelihood of scarce mining materials), or you could introduce additional professions along with a new race and they receive a benefit to that profession.