Concentration & Professions Feedback

In Development The War Within Beta Test
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I’m just gonna give some general feedback for now, and ignore the fact that a lot of things right now are clearly WIP or not yet implemented.

As a general feel for professions overall, the one thing that strikes out is that everything seems set up to be as confusing as possible, and to obscure information for the player as much as possible. Some of this has been a carryover from the rework in Dragonflight, but it hasn’t improved and potentially only gotten worse.

Let’s take something basic like Skinning. On Live, there’s Primary Reagent Difficulty, and “Skill”. What do these mean? From the base UI, I have no idea. There’s a theshold where I won’t get getting RAnk 1 mats anymore, or I need to unlock Rank 3 mats? I can find this out if I look it up elsewhere on the internet, but the base UI is essentially useless. War Within means you’ll always have a chance to get all levels of mats, so now that’s even more confusing. Great.

How do I make choices? Well, once i get to 25 and have the ability to look at the trees, I have to tab to each specialisation, then I see some blank overview, then I need to click another button to actually open up the tree again. If I ever close this window or whatever, I have to go through these multiple clicks again. For each tab. To actually see what a point does, I have to have clicked over it, then moused over each spot to keep it in my memory. If I saw one that included something critical like “You can now see hidden herbs”, or “you need this to unlock/use this reagent”, I better remember where it was, or take notes, because getting back here could be an annoying mission where I’m fighting the UI once again.

The worst of that is the Engineering schematic unlock. When you’re looking at a set of 3 choices and want more info about those choices, e.g. the mats they might take, does this give a skill up, etc., you end up closing windows, having them reset on you, repeat. On any profession if you have a bunch of mats (or are able to buy a bunch of mats), and want to figure out how many you need at 3*, how many you need at 1*, to be able to make a craft at the quality you want to target, forget about it. Is a 15 skill improvement in Mining going to be helpful, or should you pick the talent that gives you a chance to get a certain mat instead? What even is that chance?

Every part of this is just telling a player that if want to understand what’s going on, go look up a guide, or find an addon. Or don’t think about it, and hope it doesn’t matter. Except right now certain choices or paths will just end up bricking your profession, or making the play experience worse. Skill, Concentration, weekly caps, multiple ranks of “quality”, every layer just makes it worse.

And funnily enough, it also makes it harder to give feedback, and harder to know if something’s bugged, not yet implemented, or working correctly.

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62

Yeah, the experimentation system in Alchemy is hot garbage. It just felt like constant punishment…zero fun. No other profession was like this. I don’t know who was in charge of designing how DF Alchemy worked, but they clearly hated the player.

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63

Doing Enchanting & Tailoring, the 2 don’t seem to sync up very well with one another anymore.

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64

Okay, finally got through the main campaign and hit 80.

It was pointed out further up the thread, but there is just not enough stuff in the current system to effectively level Enchanting as you go along. I was only able to get enough materials to hit rank 22, and that was with me mostly using the NPC crafting orders to hit first crafts. This might open up a bit once you hit 25 and can start looking for and using recipes in the specializations, but it’s ROUGH, and we’re going to be constantly starved until we get points into the disenchanting tree.

Several mobs were also mismarked in terms of what can or can’t be gathered from them, but I bugged those as I found them.

Concentration seems like a better answer to skill gaps than we had in DF, which is good, but we could still do with a bit more transparency for what stats do what.

And NPC crafting orders are currently bugged in a weird way. You need to have the materials on hand to craft them, even though you aren’t supplying those mats and they aren’t consumed. This led to an awkward moment when I needed to roll a test clone character and generate 100k gold in order to buy a single Leyline Residue to do a crafting order, only to put the dumb thing back on the AH immediately after.

2 Likes
65

Re: Engineering. As a few others have mentioned, the amount of RNG built into TWW Engineering feels awful.

It’s very easy to get locked into having no way to increase your skill level if you pick your specialization incorrectly. All progress being locked behind a daily cooldown feels terrible and means that anyone who joins the expansion after the start date, is probably out of luck from finishing. DF had pretty poor catch up mechanics for professions and this just seems set up to make it even harder.

Not being able to target almost anything outside of generally explosives, feels awful. Corner-stone recipes like the Wormhole generators and profession tools feel like they should be something the player can target.

There’s 4 separate 10 point threads just to be able to craft the cogwheels so we can pick the stats on our Engineering gear . None of that could be re balanced to work towards more targeted recipe unlocks?

I understand the fantasy that you’re going for, but as what comes down to the sole means of progress this is decidedly unfun game play.

Also, the chance of Mount parts to drop from rummaging feels ridiculously low. It doesn’t help that it’s currently bugged and the loot window prevents you from using the rummage all function. But being able to craft a mount that you can’t craft the parts for and have to RNG hope you “find the parts” is just not fun.

2 Likes
66

to make a long story short the professions are a hot mess right now , and they need to scrapt it and go back to the way it was prior to dragonflight … the way it was originally …

gather 200 herbs make a potions. gather 100 copper to make 20 copper bars (smelt )

this new system is hot garbage .

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67

I would love an option to turn off the notification that you know you are using your own mats in the NPC work orders. It made doing anything in Dragonflight that much less fun when public or your own alts order meant you also had to press it.

1 Like
68

Something that I’d like to see is a way to re-spec your Professions.

You’re able to do this with your character at a Class level. Why not give this option to those folks who want to reallocate their hard-earned specialization points?

The mechanic for it could consume Artisan’s Alacrity or maybe even have a Gold or Vibrant Shard cost (or even Kej). What I’m trying to illustrate is that it can be accomplished and there are ways by which it could be done without too much fuss.

That said, I don’t know (admittedly) what rework would need to be done from a coding perspective to handle this (in order to ensure that you’re getting back the correct amount of points you put in and removing any gained abilities, etc), but it doesn’t seem like it would be any kind of Sisyphean effort.

Just a thought.

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69

One big change I don’t like is that it seems like you no longer have recipes that take you to 100 skill without doing work orders (In dragonflight, this was the case for LW, but the other profs did have ways to 100 outside of work orders). Unless I am missing something for blacksmithing (The prof I tested out on beta)?

I feel like the design of the crafting system should move away from requiring crafting orders and just let them augment the profession experience rather than require it. I think in a perfect world, each spec tree would have one recipe you can learn through Knowledge points at the end of one of the bottom nodes that can take you to 100% without crafting orders (think Master’s Hammer in DF blacksmithing).

The NPC orders are nice, but they are random so you can’t rely on them to provide skill points or even patterns that you can do.

2 Likes
70

My piece of feedback for professions as a whole is that there’s a big imbalance in terms of profession points needed to “max out” a profession (fill the tree).

Here’s a table detailing how many points it takes to max out all crafting professions:

|Profession | Points | Nodes | Points per node |
|Alchemy | 565 | 17 | 33,24|
|Blacksmithing | 865 | 34 | 25,44|
|Enchanting | 640 | 27 | 23,70|
|Enginieering | 480 | 18 | 26,67|
|Inscription | 780 | 26 | 30,00|
|Jewelcrafting | 720 | 29 | 24,83|
|Leatherworking | 800 | 32 | 25,00|
|Tailoring | 670 | 26 | 25,77|
|Average | 690 | 26,1 | 26,41|

You can see the big discrepancies in terms of effort between the max (Blacksmithing) and min (Engineering). That’s almost 100% more for BS than Eng (with Eng being pretty much underwhelming). Even within the more useful professions, you can also see big differences with Tailoring, which caters the same amount of classes/players gear-wise as BS, but is almost 200 points less to max than BS.

When comparing consumable crafting professions like Inscription vs Alchemy, you can also see a big imbalance in cost per node as well, with these two being over 30 points per node against others at 25 per node. This speaks volumes of the content available for these professions and how it’s balanced out.

All in all, it feels VERY unbalanced. I’m not saying everything should cost the same to max, but it should be within a reasonable closeness. I’d say a bracket between 550 and 650 points to max would allow for differentiation for those that provide more (BS, LW, JC) and still keep it reasonably close.

What should be similar between different professions?

  • Cost in points to create a single piece of gear
  • Cost in points to create a 1H/2H weapon / off-hand
  • Cost in points to create a single piece of profession tools

With this approach, it will be a more even playing field amongst professions in terms of effort needed to be able to play the market.

2 Likes
71

Three key issues with professions that still need to be addressed:

  1. The skill gates for the third and fourth profession tabs. People can and will get stuck between 50 and 75 skill for many professions, with the only clear path forward relying on the small monthly boost from the DMF hand ins. The 75 to 100 range will be even worse.
  2. Reliance on the NPC order system for acuity and knowledge points. In its current iteration it will be an absolute lottery early on as to whether you can even meet the specified requirements for weekly KP and acuity (both in terms of having unlocked the specific recs and having invested enough points into the specific trees). Then even if you can perform the craft in question it will then be necessary to determine whether it is worth doing so due to the cost / scarcity of mats you have to provide yourself. It was an interesting concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired.
  3. The imbalance between supply and demand for mats. Levelling profs in TWW will require massive quantities of materials, including in most cases cross-profession reagents. The only winners here will be the bots and the goblins with huge gold pools able to get ahead early and stay ahead well into the expansion.
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72

Part of the problem is that professions like engineering and alchemy have built in difficulty that doesn’t occur in other professions. Having to use invent or pilfer to learn recipes is bad enough, but the fact that these recipes are random means a person can play that system for days and never get a useful (marketable) item to make. They want everyone to feel the same amount of pain levelling professions it seems, but no amount of points reduction won’t make these professions feel terrible compared to the rest.

3 Likes
73

That’s an interesting point I thought about when I encountered it, but haven’t thought to bring up in any Beta thread. I sort of shrugged it off because professions were very clearly incomplete at the time.

We literally went through one expansion (DF) starting with the cutoffs being 25/50/75/100, then realised that was painful and annoying and had it changed to 25/50/60/75.

Reverting back to the numbers that simply did not work practically re-introduces the same problems, especially since many of the War Within profession trees are essentially just copy-pasted Dragonflight profession trees in the first place.

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74

I just don’t like how they turned crafting into something so complicated and convoluted that only people with a huge bank can level it and being self sufficient is hard as hell.

I really didn’t like having to pay tens of thousands in tips for crafted gear at the beginning of DF. Not doing it again. Mats were expensive as hell and then people expecting a 50k tip on top? No thanks(Argent Dawn EU was awful).

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75

Admittedly, I wasn’t able to read through the entire thread but wanted to pose a suggestion, please forgive me if this was addressed. Can we get profession tools to work like enchanting rods used to? In other words, be backwards compatible for previous expansions. In the case of inspiration, just have it be greyed out for TWW crafting and only apply its bonus for DF crafts, etc. This would save some bag space for those who still want to be able to craft items from older expansions, by keeping them from having to hold on to old tools.

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76

ALCHEMY: For the high-end discovery of recipes in Alchemy if it’s going for be a 24-hour CD it needs to have a much better discovery rate. It blows up 90-95% of the time discovering nothing and now on a 24-hour CD

2 Likes