On my server Blackhand - EU, definitely 20k+ active players, largest german PvE server this seems to be absolutely dead. It is saturday evening and for blacksmithing I can find a total of 10 orders listed. I can provide for none of them and have yet to finish the 5 crafting order quest for blacksmithing and engineering. Without those it’s getting really stale to get more skill points for crafting without wasting Sparks and Chaos that I better save for future endeavours. Why does it have to be 5 for each profession? 1 should be enough since this seems more like a tutorial quest to familiarise yourself with the system (that barely anybody uses).
Yeah, there are zero public orders for me as an Inscriptionist, also on a big server (Wyrmrest Accord). I don’t know if they are being quickly sniped by other Inscriptionists, or if there is some other reason people are not submitting public orders. I am filling my 5 orders for the quest by having my own alts send them.
7 Likes
Not much on US Mal’Ganis either. My DK has only finished 2 of the 5 blacksmithing orders for the quest and they were both for friends. I have not seen very many public orders and it seems that some items don’t even appear as an option on the crafting order menu.
I found someone in Trade Chat who wanted a specific 2h sword, I told them I could make it if they placed a crafting order… We joined a party and I walked them through how to place an order and they said the 2h sword was not even an option to list an order for. I checked myself to confirm this was the case. Are some items missing from public orders purposely or is it a bug?
7 Likes
I think it’s too early to tell.
Frankly, for a large portion of the playerbase they don’t yet have the resources to open crafting orders. Only 1 Spark of Ingenuity is available so far and I expect that once we get more of those more and more crafting orders will open up.
5 Likes
Honestly, the whole new crafting stuff is so overwhelming that I don’t even dare looking into it. I’ve gotten 100 points into mining, tried to get some points into engineering, and I just can’t get a grip on how many points I’ll get, how I can spend them, how I can change my specialization etc.
The crafting seems all over the place (literally, npcs all over the map and I have no idea where to go), and I can’t get a good overview in-game at all. I don’t know what I should be picking for what, I’m getting recipes that have a bunch of mumbo jumbo in the tooltips that require a guide on wowhead to decipher.
Oh and 1 reagent bag is not even close to being enough with the amount of new crafting materials 
30 Likes
Same on my server - zero crafting orders for tailor/enchant. I saw one the other day but the recipe requires a super high renown in the 20s, which I am very far from and I don’t know if anyone could even fill that. I do think it might be too early to really judge if its a success or not, but there are some issues with it right now in the beginning like I will never be able to fulfill 5 orders for quite some time. Even if I have the recipe, I will probably be too slow to fill as everyone is waiting to fill and craft 
4 Likes
I think the main issue with public orders is that specializations hamper them. The main use I see is for people to get the BOP stuff from professions you don’t have, and to use your BOP mats on other professions you don’t have.
However, if I want to, say, get a guaranteed 392 BOP weapon from a blacksmith for my spec, I am HEAVILY incentivized not to post a public order for any old blacksmith who doesn’t have Shortblade Specialization to pick it up, I need to manually find a Shortblade Specialist and send a personal order. This is so that the base-ilvl 382 recipe can craft up to ilvl 392. Not only that, but I also need to find a Shortblade Specialist with enough specialization points to make that 392 roll guaranteed.
As a result, the only thing I’d use a Public Order on is stuff where I don’t care about specializations, which isn’t much right now. The only thing I can think of right now that fits that criteria is the BOP blue-quality crafting tools (like the engineering ones that come from blacksmithing or whatever) that I won’t be able to buy at the AH.
Also, not a lot of players seem to have enough BOP materials to even be able to use the order system yet. Artisan’s Mettle is a grind, Sparks of Ingenuity are time-gated and few people are using recrafts than will happen in the future.
Pretty much every piece of profession gear is going to require the crafting order system in the future because none of it is BOE to sell on the auction house, only current green/blue low-ilevel gear is even BOE. Recrafting is going to be a big deal too so people don’t waste their Sparks. I think, given these factors, it’s way too soon to write it off. But there is probably room for improvement in the readability of this system. I also think there needs to be better ability for buyers to require certain specializations in public orders so I’m not forced to use solely personal orders.
5 Likes
I’ve been messing around with leather working and have it leveled about halfway. It’s cost about 30k gold so far which I find a bit on the absurd side even for the beginning of an xpack.
The low level green/blue items I’ve made in the process are selling for obscenely low amounts on the AH. This is obviously partially because a good number of people are also making the same items while leveling but also because the AH mega crafters are manipulating the AH by posting a dozen or so of the same item at a low price, causing others to post at that low price. They then buy it all up at that low price and reset the price by selling it all high. This is something you can only really do with a ton of gold and spending all of your time working the AH as your main portion of the game. Obviously this isn’t really an issue for the higher level items using crafting orders but my point here is that the AH manipulators are making it prohibitively expensive for many players to even level a profession at all. The game shouldn’t be designed to require such vast amounts of gold to buy in to an entire portion of the game. This is in my view a major issue with the system.
I saw mentioned above the idea that a wowhead guide is needed. I think that’s exactly correct. I would go a step further and say that a guide for crafters and a separate guide for buyers is needed. These guides need to be useful and not just a regurgited wall of indecipherable goblty goook. Keep it simple so a knucklehead like me can actually use it to get up to speed quickly without needing a PhD in wow crafting.
12 Likes
You can actually post a personal order or guild order on an alt, and fulfill it on your main for this. Doesn’t really solve the underlying problems with this system, but for those who want that knowledge each week until it’s addressed, a workaround of sorts.
As Amber said, a lot of things aren’t even eligible for crafting orders, which is silly. Like, for instance, Engineering. Someone wants to commission a toy from me. No biggie.
However, those toys require a lot of materials specific to engineering like gears and bolts.
But they can’t order those via crafting orders - leaving them no option but to buy them from the AH at a large upcost. It’s silly. If people have the materials, they should be able to commission anything from the profession. Especially if they’re used in recipes they can commission.
Then there’s things like the S.A.V.I.O.R., which I don’t believe can be commissioned, (I very much could be wrong, but my guildie couldnt commission it from me), which is locked behind a high knowledge in a specific area of the profession, but would be useful to all people with that profession. Why are those not orderable? Etc.
This doesn’t even touch the fact gathering professions have a weekly cap on knowledge you can locate, and crafting professions have an even lower weekly cap from the very few weekly quests you get from the Consortium. It’s silly. It’ll take over a year to cap out one profession at this rate. I understand giving us things to work towards, but I think they went a little too far in the gating this time. (Like if someone wants to mine/herb/skin for hours and hours a day, why should they not be able to cap that profession?) Why can we not gain knowledge randomly while crafting recipes, (with a few basic recipes excluded), etc.
I’m just not sold on Crafting Orders or the Knowledge system in general, personally. (I really don’t like that Engineering only has 2 of the hidden treasures that give knowledge and every other profession has 7-8. Feels really malicious towards engineers, and no, it’s not a matter of we haven’t found them, unless the other 5-6 are encrypted, as they were not datamined either.)
14 Likes
It does seem to be very targeted when in reality it should be for everything. They need to just relax the restrictions completely and let people do what they want.
4 Likes
That’s how I feel. And work on expanding it to previous expansions over time as well.
One thing I hope they’ll fix before Vault launches is:
Why is this not orderable? Lol. It’s BoP and is Failure Detection Pylon v2. It’s designed for raids and M+. It requires engineering to use, (like all gadgets), but not everyone will want to invest as much money and knowledge into learning the schematic.
Meanwhile, I had invested in it in hopes of being able to help my guild craft them, as they’re focusing on heroic this expansion so I won’t be raiding this xpac since I likely won’t be doing much LFR due to Group Loot and they won’t be doing Normal except once in a blue moon.
So now I’m 40 points deep in a engineering specialization for a pattern I didn’t really need and can’t use it to help others. >_>
4 Likes
Ive always liked the idea of selling things to people and making money without having to meet in org and trade. if they streamlined this and just made it to where I could offer up or someone could request any item it would greatly improve the crafting in the game and make it feel more alive.
If they made it so the person selling the crafting order could be favorited so they become like a broker it would be even better.
5 Likes
I’ve been enjoying the crafting order system. I’ve picked up a few orders so far. The biggest issue in my opinion is that people don’t know what new patterns and items are available to even request. I have been marketing my own items that I have specialized with my professions to sell those and have people make crafting orders for me. The system brings me back to Vanilla when I had to advertise my services when no one knew what professions offered at that time either. I think as the expansion progresses and players start seeing these powerful items on other people, they will start placing those requests into the crafting order system as well. There just aren’t enough Sparks of ingenuity to have enough players walking around with powerful items as free marketing. I think the crafting orders will increase as the expansion goes on. I would like to point out that I strongly believe Blizzard needs to allow us to see everything on the public orders that we can create instead of us having to click through each individual item to see if there is an existing order there. That can become very frustrating.
5 Likes
Regarding visibility/access/knowledge for this new system: Many players are still not aware at all of how any of this works. The requirements (material) for the customer and the (rather isolated) location. At some point this kind of NPC should make their way into the old capitals too.
6 Likes
Feedback after having gotten used to the system a bit more:
- I wish there was a way to phantom-add reagents of differing qualities to see the impact on my skill.
- Skill breakpoints for different qualities don’t seem readily apparent, to see the q4 breakpoint you have to have a q3 recipe ready for example.
- We need a storefront type UI so I can order from people without having to coincide playtimes to find out they even exist as a crafter. Trading Post discords will soon take over this role and I believe this is something better harvested as an in-game feature instead. I want to more easily find my crafters, and I don’t want it to become this super commodified, impersonal discord when I could be browsing players’ storefronts on an AH-like UI instead.
- We need confirmation prompts when crafting an order that will consume our BOP mats. Scammers are trying to send recipes with “all mats” and forgetting something like Artisan’s Mettle just hoping the crafter doesn’t notice.
- There needs to be a better way to show you’re eligible to inspire a certain proc to buyers.
9 Likes
Yeah, using Trade Chat as a way to find crafters is really not working for me. I’ve been trying to get some profession tools crafted and I keep asking in trade chat if anyone can craft each item, and getting crickets. I also tried and failed to find a jewelcrafter who could cut an illimited diamond for me. Meanwhile the lariat spam is nonstop.
I’m sure crafters exist who can make the things I’m looking for, but how do I find them other than repeatedly asking in trade chat and hoping eventually one will log on? We have this really cool crafting system in Dragonflight that I want to engage with, and yet this one piece of it–needing to find crafters and having no interface for that other than rapidly scrolling trade chat spam–makes it frustrating and inaccessible.
5 Likes
They literally waited to the last possible testing phase in the beta to test the crafting orders. It is no wonder that the system has failed when you have to rely on discord servers to find the people who have the high quality stuff that you want. Nobody wants to risk getting a low quality item from the public crafting order when you want max level one.
It is probably way too late to adjust and fix the UI, but this is what you get when Blizzard waits till the last minute to test the system.
A failed design.
7 Likes
still stuck on 75 enginerring everything that gives skill up is a spark thing or professions items that cost artisan mettle… so i can’t craft it without work orders… Im sitting in front of the bench for hours there are very few work orders… it just makes me sad to haven’t even lvl up my professions with my main character after 4 weeks into the addon, just because i can’t sit 24 /7 in front of the work order table.
6 Likes
I agree with you man i totally messed up my spec points in engineering and HAD to level up the Artisan rep just to craft new things to gain skill ups. If they had a Reset item or revealed the amount of scrap I would actually be getting I would never have sunk 20 points into the failed part of engineering and using scrap.
5 Likes