Consolidation of Professions

Gameplay Professions
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with how Professions have gotten since WOD, I feel its time to look into doing what they did with First Aid and Consolidate Professions where it makes sense. What i mean by this is with how gutted Inscription is it minus well get added to Alchemy along with Herbalism to allow ALchemy to become super self-sifitient and since most (if not everyone) uses Alchemy it might be best making it a Secondary Profession. Would also help Making Skinning part of LW. by Taking Herbalism and Skinning and combining them to there perspective Crafting Professions would allow them to be as self sifitient, There are only a cery small amount of Patterns in other professions that require Skins or Herbs/Inks.

the Final aspect is just take Mineing and allow JC, BS and Engineering to mine the ore for them. By doing said consolidations would allow more casuals to only have 4 toons to have all the professions and play the game to there casual wants/needs.

By also combing Alchemy, Inscription and Herbalism into a single profession and making it a Secondary profession would also allow people to have access to Healing pots for there solo play plus the ability to make Flasks and Pots for themselves for Raids, M+ or if there into PVP.

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Disagree with merging gathering professions into crafting professions. You might as well just let players level all the professions on one character or make gathering a secondary profession. All three options make the profession system worse, not better.

The one change I would suggest though is removing cloth scavenging from tailoring. Skinning would then be the defacto gathering professions for tailoring, leatherworking, and allowing scribes to make their own scrolls from leather (i.e. 1 leather becomes 10-20 scrolls as opposed to converting pigments to inks in order to level the profession).

Another change might be to rethink the whole skill point system in general, as suggested by another player. Instead of tiers, learning Leatherworking would allow you to instantly make any crafted armor in the game…at a common quality. You then discover better quality, uncommon, rank 2 versions of the gear. Make enough, pieces of that gear, you learn the rare, rank 3 version and occasionally proc a higher level epic item when crafting (always with 1-2 sockets). You would still have rare patterns that have to be farmed or purchased from the other side of the world, but skill, be it 950 or 150 BfA would be completely irrelevant and pointless. Then again, Activision just implemented tiers, and spending money on development for professions is not in their fiscal prospectus.

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going off the rank system I feel would need more then 3 tiers/LVLs where it be more Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic and with a select few a Legendary LVL/teir that way certain peices could be more wanted then otehrs.

Whats your view about Alchemy and Inscription?

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9.0 - We have decided to consolidate several professions to simplify the crafting and gathering systems. Based on feedback we determined that the old profession systems were degenerate game play and added little value to our fun metric. New professions are as follows:

Artisan (Enchanting, Inscription, Tailoring, Archaeology)
Butchery (Leatherworking, Cooking, Fishing, Skinning)
Metalworking (Jewelcrafting, Blacksmithing, Engineering, Mining)
Botanist (Alchemy, Herbalism)

9.1 - Botanist now removed due to balancing considerations. Players can now buy potions and flask at a vendor in their respective capital cities using mission resources.

10.0 - Engagement with the profession system was at an all-time low in the last expansion. To increase user engagement, we’ve decided to roll all crafting professions into a single profession that can be easily managed with a phone:

Doing (Artisan, Butchery, Metalworking)

11.0 - Doing removed, all professional bonuses and buffs have been consolidated into Stat, which also includes all previous primary and secondary attributes.

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I’m still salty about that, so no.

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If they gave us a cooking overhaul like what we had in MoP I wouldn’t mind a Butchery secondary profession, like fishing, to collect more mats from kills.

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We wouldn’t need a rank 4 for epics, they would be random procs like they were at the start of BfA. Professions in wow are easy, so their is still the issue of needing to make a crap ton of vendor trash / DE fodder. Requiring 10-20 crafts of rare pants for an epic version with a gem socket would hopefully fill that issue.

Alchemy would likely be similar, no skill, just ranks. You learn the basics from the trainer, combat potions, healing potions, flasks, etc… Rank 2 discoveries would then require significantly less materials (i.e. half as much if not more to justify the labor put into training). Rank 2 flasks would offer the extended duration benefit for alchemists. Rank 3s again proc extra. Think about it, other than random discoveries, you just throw gold at alchemy right now to level it, skill is just a road block to the flask perk ensuring you spent enough gold first.

For inscription, ranks really don’t work. It would need to be more adventure based like farming the new glyphs during the Legion expansion. Traveling to the DMF to learn to make cards (sorry guys, thinking quest chains), visiting far off NPCs, possibly locked behind jumping type puzzles, in order to learn a new glyph, or killing naga over and over to pieces together rare scraps of a new glyph (i.e. surf and turf). Perhaps turning leather into papyrus teaches you new origami pets over time, but only while standing in certain areas for inspiration. But NO farming emissary caches to be gifted a glyph unless it is a guaranteed drop at exalted.

EDIT - Legendaries would be their own patterns locked behind “challenging” content, just like in Legion.

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There are some good ideas here and I’d like to add my own based on being a returning player having been gone since 2011 and experience in other games. This is probably going to be long, sorry. This is a topic about which I have a lot to say. I’d like to preface this with the opinion that having world drop or dungeon drop patterns for more rare things is cool and is another reason to run old content and/or give players with those patterns something to AH for higher gold values.

  1. Returning players- with the large number of expansions in the game now, requiring each character to level up to each new expansion bracket in order to access trainers is a significant obstacle. Adding some mechanism by which crafter alts can access all the different levels of training; either by trainers in major cities giving access to all expansions’ patterns or by doing away with level/quest requirements needed to access each expansion’s trainers would be beneficial.

The thought of being required to level all of my crafter alts to 110 (I can’t afford that many level boosts, nor would I pay hundreds of dollars for them if I could) is a major roadblock. I’m cool with needing high level/current content requirements for gatherers, as they’re the ones having to go out into the world to get the mats after all. However; giving access to trainers with all levels of patterns in Org and Stormwind would be a significant QoL improvement.

2- Removed patterns. This is a huge downer. Coming back to find that a lot of old content patterns have been removed from the game was pretty upsetting. It’s good for the folks who got the patterns back when and are able to make a gold making niche with it and I in no way begrudge them that. I’ve got a couple characters with Vanilla patterns that can sell for a lot too. However; as a collector/completionist and returning player having no way to get those patterns sucks. It would be a big bonus to have access to those patterns again via a trainer, dungeon drop, and/or reputation requirement, but simply removing them from the game was lazy development. This is even more true now that the transmog system is so robust.

3- Experiences from other games:

LOTRO- It has/had? a system where each character took one profession that included three skills related to crafting; ie Weaponsmith had mining, smithing, and another that I can’t recall. Combining related gathering and crafting skills into one larger profession was a great touch. We still had to either a) level multiple characters to be self-sufficient or b) play the AH. I personally prefer to be self-sufficient and enjoy being able to play different characters with different RP concepts so that worked well for me.

FFXIV- All gathering and crafting professions available on one character. This is my personal favorite option and one which I’d love to see WoW integrate. Crafting and gathering professions were (not sure about now) effectively separate classes that required time to level independently of other classes/professions when I played. I can’t tell you how much I loved that system. Not only was I able to be self-sufficient, but it gave me a lot of stuff to do in-game and kept me more engaged in the game than I otherwise would have been. On top of this, having various tiers of gear which gave chances (procs) to get high quality materials and/or increase the number of materials gathered was not only exciting, but it created it’s own economy for crafted gathering and profession equipment and tools.

Both games had a thriving economy for those who preferred to use the AH rather than be self-sufficient, people who would rather work on only a couple crafting professions, and/or buy ready-made equipment. It was the best of all worlds for crafting.

Consolidating gathering and crafting professions somehow and giving access to all levels of common patterns could be a hefty stimulant for crafting. I know that doing so would give me more incentive to play as I would have more reason to spends hours and hours gathering materials (something I enjoy) to feed my crafter alts for profession leveling. Needing to have current content level characters to do gathering would likewise give me reason to spend time in current content (BfA in this case) to gather those resources.

Reply to a previous point- I love the idea of different tiers of profession skill, one star, two star, etc giving access to higher quality tiers of a given item. That sure beats the current paradigm of each higher tier only needing one or two fewer materials to make the same large number of each item.

I think that’s enough for now.

Thank you for reading all this,
Vendorioc

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Who uses Alchemy ? As a hunter , I have little time for it, however, due to certain quests, Herbalism is needed, having it as a secondary would be handy, if the trainers would function…

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Merge cloth scavenging with skinning. There is no reason to have cloth drop without a gathering profession now that first aid is just a part of tailoring. In exchange for now needing a gathering prof, the cost of tailoring patterns can be significantly reduced.

Merge enchanting with inscription. They are thematically similar and inscription hasn’t had a real nice since glyphs were basically removed. Disenchanting is gone; enchanters now us ink.

Currently, there are 8 crafting professions and 3 gathering professions. Only one of the current crafts is supported by skinning while two of the current crafts don’t require gathering at all.

With the two mergers above, you would have 3 crafts supported by mining, 2 crafts supported by skinning/scavenging, and 2 crafts supported by herbalism.

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