So I have been grinding away at blacksmith. Other than some introductory armor to get me going, better stuff drops everywhere, not to mention set bonuses you can now achieve by simply clicking machine and morphing dropped gear. In addition, there are never any orders to craft.
And then I have a toon that is alchemy. Useful, period. Everything phial and potion is improved. Trinkets = nice.
Would it be foolish to dump all the points/time in BS and swap to alchemy?
if you don’t see a reason for it - yes I guess it would be foolish. I have two blacksmiths though and they are both going to get maxed out.
With enough alts you can max out all professions. That is what I did at least. Work Orders on a dead server is a joke.
Feels a bit late to be swapping professions. Your reasoning is sound, but if you’ve been advancing it as best you can, that’s an enormous number of specialization points being abandoned.
I’m on Proudmoore, which is high-population and has a LOT of crafter activity in trade chat (there are tons of crafters). I also never see any Public Orders and I check everyday. The public order system is a fail… Blizz tried to fix it by reducing the number you can fill from 20 to 4, thinking that would give other crafters a chance at filling public orders, but the fundamental issues seems to be not enough sparks so there are not enough buyers and supply of crafters far outweighs demand from buyers.
As Marla said, if you don’t see a use for it, then don’t waste time on it. Personally, I also have two smiths; one specializing in weapons, the other armor. They send orders to each other to fulfill the weekly crafting order quest and they both reached max skill by crafting cheap Master’s Hammers, since I couldn’t find customers to spend a spark, which were the only other recipes that offered a skill-up. Aside from the 4-piece Tier Bonus, your weapon/shield is the single gear slot that most likely affects your throughput… having a 418 weapon with the desired secondary stats and an embellishment (e.g., added mastery, or 2x duration food buff that lasts through death, etc.) is very much worth it to me. The FrostFire armors are also pretty good in combination with a ring that amplifies fire damage from the raid and the Elemental Lariat (diff profession) seems to be best-in-slot for many classes because of it’s unique stat bonus proc, but a 418 in any slot is certainly not “introductory armor.” Then again, if you don’t do content to get the concentrated primal infusions, and can get gear higher than 405 from other sources, then yes, BS may be a waste for you personally.
Professions in wow … waste of time, period.
You can say you get few % by running a lot of errands. You can get everything you get from professios, and mostly better, by just engaging in one of the multiple things they put in game for those who have no time for professions.
Sometimes I wonder how people get to max out professios … but I have my theories …
I’d say the fundemenatal issue is not the number of sparks out there, it’s the variable quality outcomes. Low-skill crafters need orders to gain skill, yet customers don’t want valuable resources “wasted” on anything less than max-quality. It’s a recipe for unhappiness.
(If people could put up orders with negative commissions, I’m sure they would be picked up just for the opportunities to gain skill)
I mean we’re, what, 8 weeks into 104 weeks of this expansion. So you’d have 96 weeks to enjoy Alchem.
To say nothing of the fact that unless there’s some huuugggggeeeeeeee change to how things work in this game, Alchemy is the #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and #6 most useful profession in this game. Nothing even comes close to how NECESSARY Alchemy is.
It would be really irritating is we had to proc rank 3 phials and potions.
Blacksmithing has gotten bad. I can get better armor and weapons.
We are missinf unique looking weapons and armor. I miss my blazefury
Alchemy was way easier to get near max level then any other profession. Or at least I was lucky and picked the right specialties to gain points.
What’s worse is the toon with alchemy is an alt I rarely play.
It’s just terrible. I cannot even level BS to use it effectively because I would never have enough sparks to level myself. The only hope is to rely on unfortunate folks that don’t know you shouldn’t leave your spark on the open trade market because you may get inferior results. I feel bad doing an order (that are nearly impossible to get) because they get a rank 3 or whatever item.
I feel like there should be some set bonus applied for BS gear, even if it was BS only. I think that was what they were trying to do the embellishments but I’d like to see maybe a set type embellishment. Or let me convert my BS stuff to the raid sets…
It is kinda like IRL. People wont tolerate if professions give you good gear, because who would accept that a person who does some hours of UI surfing can get better gear than the “epic raider” that slay all the dumb repeating but faster mobs ?
Who would tolerate that a UI surfing gives better rewards than the “oh so amazing” affixes that require you put two or three more keys in your smash muscle memory ?
Again, that thing about not wanting others to have fun their way, and then raging on blizzard for doing the exact same thing.
Alchemy doesn’t turn a profit. The only upside of alchemy is poisoning 1st boss of CoS and triple phial duration. Global commodities killed alchemy.
Maybe 10.1 will do something for alchemy but I doubt it.
Meanwhile, with BS, you can make money by just clicking a button or even more money if you put some artisan’s mettle up for it.
Alchemy is “easy” … if you have a lot of Artisan’s Mettle to burn on experiments.
If you have that, yep… pretty easy.
If you don’t have a lot of Mettle… it’s pretty much impossible. At least, in the near term. You gain Mettle slowly, so it’s more heavily time-gated than “hard.”
But at least it doesn’t require farming weird mats/patterns.
Theres really no gold in alch, all the most expensive phials sell for like 1k on my server… and you better for just selling the mats
You can do experiments , i did 10 experiments the other day i think i made about 5k gold, its not event that much
You dont need sparks to max bs. Im maxed .
There is a hammer that will take you to 100.