9.2 Legendary crafting (base items need to be removed for tier 7 crafting)

Community General Discussion
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I’ve been looking at all the 9.2 PTR stuff and I’m concerned at the potential issues for new and returning players to participate in the upcoming patch because of the absurd legendary crafting base items.

So for for the expansion players have technically had 2 options:
get into crafting professions and invest a massive amount of capital (and possibly time) to be able to craft your legendary gear, or simply buy the base item and the missives on the auction house.

The base items are where everything gets absurd. For leather/mail/plate base items you need to craft each rank 15 times to unlock the next rank.
15 rank 1 base items to unlock rank 2
15 rank 2 base items to unlock rank 3
15 rank 3 base items to unlock the final rank 4

new optional items to upgrade rank 3 to 5 or 4 to 6.

and that’s just for a SINGLE base item (bracer, chest, shoulders, etc.)

Oh and it takes 570 orboreal shards to craft 45 base items to unlock rank 4, which on my full server Moon Guard costs over 66,000 gold.

Oh and there’s only 1200 orboreal shards up on the auction house for the entire server so even if you wanted to get into crafting, there are only enough orboreal shards to unlock 2 different base items.

This is not including cloth armor and jewelry base items which need even more orboreal shards.

I understand they wanted to make crafting relevant again, and they wanted to put in a reliable gold sink into the game, and I didn’t like it but I tried to ignore it, but moving forward into 9.2, ie the end of the expansion, the base items have to go.

If you really want players to come back and to attract new players, you need to let them have access to current gear in the current content, and that includes letting them farm/grind their rank 7 legendary item (the other legendary will be a belt which I assume does not require a crafted base item because it’s coming from a new system or progression of the new zone).

No more base items, just the new cosmic flux currency you get from doing content in 9.2.

If we keep going with the base item insanity we are going to see insane prices for rank 7 legendaries because of the insane amount of materials and gold that already had to be invested into the first 6 ranks for just the base item. Missives are not an issue and never have been, they have no ranks and every scribe on the server is competing over the exact same thing so prices are more than reasonable, which is not true for base items at all.

If you want players to come back and start playing their mains and alts in 9.2 you have to let them create the newest rank of legendaries without spending hundreds of thousands or millions of gold. Wearing 190 ilvl gear is not reasonable at all. Just ditch the base items for the rest of the expansion and try to learn something from all of this.

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But if blizz did that, how would they meet their token sales quota???

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they can put other gold sinks in the game that incentivize whales to spend real money on tokens for gold.

They’ve already encouraged people to spend gold on tokens for the shop transmogs and mounts, just put something really cool in the game that costs an absurd amount of gold that IS NOT PLAYER POWER AND AN ESSENTIAL PART OF THE EXPANSION LIKE LEGENDARIES.

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I don’t intend to take away from the point of your post, however Orboreal Shards are a vendor item. No need to buy off the AH.

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lol this guy has probably been buying vendor items at a crazy markup off AH and didn’t even realize it.

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If you bought them from a vendor for 100 gold, you would save just over 9000 gold per base item, which is not nothing, but it doesn’t change anything else I said about base items being absurd.

Obviously I haven’t played my tailoring/enchanting alt this expansion, largely because this expansion is not alt friendly and the legendary base items are a part of that.

the only crafting I’ve done this expansion was making all my own flasks and oils, and I made some wormhole generators on my main who is an engineer.

I used all my own mats for all of that I never bought anything on the auction house to craft anything in shadowlands, which again ties into this post because I knew enough about crafting legendaries at the start of 9.0 to know it was way too expensive to get into.

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I don’t see the issue. Farming is farming. Players can farm the Gold to get Base items as easily as they can farm anything else.

…and if they remove the Base Items in 9.2 it would really screw over the crafters who’ve invested the time and Gold into unlocking the higher levels.

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9.2 is launching. Lots people are looking at all the new content and wondering if they should come back or start playing Shadowlands.

Do you have an extra million gold lying around you can throw into crafting on top of leveling the crafting job to 100 and gathering all the other mats that you aren’t going to buy with gold?

This is just to get your legendary that isn’t the belt. This is just work you have to do to get the legendary. Or you can just feed the goblins 400+ thousand gold per legendary and hope nothing changes that makes your legendary way less powerful or useful than it was when you made it (like my two covenant legendaries that are becoming pointless when I get the new legendary belt in 9.2).

The goblins already made their gold. They are still making gold, and they will continue to make gold long after legendary base items aren’t a thing anymore.

They play the game to make gold that’s all they care about they will still make gold without legendary base items.

It’s better for the game to open up rank 7 legendary crafting to everyone and just get rid of the base item. It’s the end of the expansion, open up the game to everyone, including the new players, the returning players, the poor players, the casuals, give everyone who wants to do content in 9.2 a viable way to craft legendaries just like they did with the vendor in 7.3 in Legion when they opened up legendaries to everyone for the end of that expansion too.

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The Legendary effect is the same no matter the Rank. A new player or someone coming back doesn’t need the top rank and Rank 1 Base items cost very little to buy.

That’s why it isn’t really an issue.

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And we also don’t need players to spend millions of gold getting into legendary crafting so they can start making a profit which just leads to even more extreme behavior like manipulating the market for reagents and undercutting competitors to make sure nobody else on the server has any chance of getting into legendary crafting.

Again if it’s not a big deal to run around in the game wearing 190 then it’s also not a big deal to just open up legendary crafting to everyone with a new currency that you get from doing any content in the new patch.

Just make gold some other way right? Just use the 190 ilvl gear right? They are both not a big deal and they both affect players.

Opening up legendaries to everyone just means all those ultra wealthy goblins are still ultra wealthy, they are just going to continue making wealth in other ways besides legendary crafting.

My option is just better for the game overall and for the general population of players in the game.

Your option is just better for the auction house goblins.

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While I agree OP that the cost and time sink of legendary crafting is utterly over the top (I started the mat hunting and grinding on my DK as a blacksmith to get the max rank belts ahead of 9.1 at the time)…

It’s far easier to just have a bunch of alts do dailies/weeklies and throw things like raw mats and korthite crystals on the AH as they come.

It was way easier to get the 65k gold for my warriors 262 pants than it would ever have been to grind crafting for them

Hope that helps a bit

1 Like
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Exactly and a new 60 can get a Rank 1 base item to get the Legendary effect they desire for the cost of a few dailies and a couple of Torghast runs.

The OP is pretending to care about new and returning players when this is just about him feeling left out of some imaginary crafting fountain of gold.

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Yeah I think it’s been stated by gold makers that the legendary crafting is only for the whales. Regular folk are better off buying their cheapest base item and then upgrade it. Frankly the whole thing is stupid and whoever though up of this way of crafting legendaries needs to go work on hello kitty adventure.

Your feed back OP has been given plenty of times and it’s a repeat now in 9.2. This team ain’t listening for this but good luck on the valiant fight.

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I love the crafting in SL. Super grindy and no skill involved.

But, I like going out and harvesting while I watch/listen to tv, podcasts and the like.

Don’t need to be a whale to craft legendaries, just have a lot of free time to kill.

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The crafting system is terrible, nothing feels less legendary than buying your way to your item.

Crafting requirements too high, vendor costs too high, player controlled market is laughable.

It’s clear the person who designed it probably doesn’t play the game.

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Yea the way they did the base item crafting was horrendous and caused them to skyrocket in prices. I’ve used a couple hundred thousand gold probably getting the items I need and it’s insane.

They should either remove the base items like you said, or make it only take 3-5 items to unlock the next rank instead of 15.

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Yeah I got lucky for the one I have on but if it stays the same next patch I’ll be rocking a rank 1 for the second leggo

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you can’t just casually grind orboreal shards while you watch videos on your TV.

As in thousands of orboreal shards and then you need hundreds of korthia crystals to upgrade them to rank 6 if we are talking multiple characters.

You actually need to invest massive amounts of time and gold to get into legendary crafting and that is how it has been for all of shadowlands so far.

The casuals know it, the whales know it, nobody seems to be disagreeing that you can’t just casually start crafting legendaries except you, because you are probably buying all your orboreal shards to craft your base items because you have the gold to do that.

Many players do not have the gold to do that. They either feel really bad paying huge amounts of gold for the base item or they feel even worse paying real money on tokens to get gold to buy the base item, or they feel bad running around in embarrassing 190 ilvl gear because they can’t afford better legendaries.

Doesn’t matter how you spin it, the status quo does not feel good for the vast majority of players and it would be better to just open up max rank legendaries the way they’ve always opened up everything at the end of the expansion. This isn’t a new or controversial idea. 9.2 is the end of this expansion, the level 60 boosts are already out, we are wrapping up the story, it’s time to let go of this insane legendary base item idea and just move on and let everyone have access to current gear for doing current content. No whaling or credit cards should be required to have player power in a pay to own subscription mmorpg.

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To be fair, it really wouldn’t. They’ve already made bank off of them, just don’t add new ones and make it so you can craft the new 9.2 ones without a base item. They aren’t screwed over because nothing else was ever established.

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Exactly.

It was a bad faith argument to begin with. The people who have invested many millions of gold have already more than made their initial investment back. Now they are just manipulating the markets to make sure nobody else can do it too because they now have all the resources and power to control the market.

Eventually no matter what the base items are going away. We aren’t using these legendaries forever. They made gold before and they will make gold after. We should not be focused on the auction house goblins at all. We should be talking about the overall health of the game and asking why it’s ok so many people are running around with 190 ilvl gear when we are going to be getting close to 300 ilvl gear with heroic raid in 9.2

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