Constructive feedback: The Issues

Gameplay Professions
1

First up, I love the new crafting system. It’s way better than the old one. There’s so many really good ideas here. But there’s also a number of substantial flaws. I just wanted to put out a list of what I think the major issues are, in the hopes that we get a blue post before too long about whether or not these are major issues, and what steps are being contemplated to address them. Blizzard has been really good about communication in Dragonflight, so let’s try to provide an organized list of issues that we’d like to hear from the devs on. The idea here is not to provide a list of changes that we’d like to see made, but rather a list of pain points that need to be addressed by some change or another. Here’s my list; feel free to add to it:

  • Massive mismatch between supply and demand for crafting orders.
  • Leveling to 100 skill shouldn’t be as frustrating and near-impossible as it actually is.
  • Alchemy RNG feels bad.
  • There’s a Catch-22 in skill development; no one wants your Rank 2-3 crafts, but you can’t get big enough to do Rank 5 crafts unless people are buying your low level crafts.
  • From the buyer side, putting up a public work order almost always means getting something less good than you were hoping for, and that feels bad.
  • As a result, public work orders are largely being neglected in favor of endless trade chat spamming as buyers seek sellers that can guarantee a certain rank.
  • Inability to place multiple work orders at a time.
  • Unintuitive specialization UI and skill dependencies combined with no respec means it’s easy to make bad and irreversible decisions about how you spend knowledge points.
  • Those problems in many cases can’t be fixed until you hit level 100 and can unlock all specializations, but hitting level 100 is really hard (see above), PARTICULARLY if you made some bad decisions early.
  • Sparks are rare, and there’s a good chance that you’ll find a piece of gear for the slot minutes after you spend a spark there. This makes sparks feel more valuable than the gear you can get with sparks.
  • Consortium rep and mettle are farmable by constant profession-swapping.
  • Bad tutorials
  • Mats more pricey than finished goods (might need more data on this, this might be a Week 3 Thing).
  • Inability to sim crafting with different combinations of mats unless you have them in bags.
  • Some professions (alchemy, engineering?) have nothing worth making a crafting order for.
  • Inspiration useless at certain points (not enough skill to up a rank, max rank already guaranteed).
  • Multi-craft feels bad in crafting orders, the buyer not the seller feels the joy of the proc, but it’s the seller who invested in multi-craft.
  • Rank 3 consumables very hard to craft and end up being insanely expensive. (You can invest all your knowledge in crafting weighstones, but you can’t guarantee a rank 3 unless you’re full profession gear, skill 100 (HOW, if you’re specialized in weighstones?), and spending illumination mettle on the craft.) And a rank 2 craft will probably lose you money. Relying on Insight RNG to make money feels bad.
  • Matrix IVs are badly tuned. Just as hard to craft a 382 Matrix IV as it is to craft a 386 epic recipe, but WAY cheaper. So there’s much more demand for R5 Matrix IVs then for epic recipes, but Matrix IVs don’t give skill up.
  • Crafted trinkets are undertuned, which is a huge problem for anyone who has specialized in some version of trinket crafting, particularly scribes specialized into darkmoon decks.

I think that’s about it. Feel free to add to this list with constructively-phrased descriptions of your personal pain points. What feels bad about interacting with the new system?

37 Likes
2

Add that the introduction to the new work order system is awful. Fully scripted quests where we place work orders with and for NPCs using the full AI is a minimum that is needed to get people to understand the system.

Related there is no way for customers to know if somthing they are putting an order in for actually has a crafter available on the server who can make it!

9 Likes
3

I hate that you can’t tell the end products quality without having the actual mats in your bags. You only know the outcome of an item crafted with q2 and q3 mats when you have those items in your bags. This is a major pain point for me. Crafters need to be able to test different mats outcomes without needing to have them all in their bags

4 Likes
4

Yes, we need to be able to simulate recipes based on ingredients we don’t have. Honestly, it should be tied to the profession link - and I don’t even know why they hide the user’s specialization when you DO link profession. Everything should be visible to see what a person can craft for them, and be able to input their own ingredients (that they do or do not have). It’s just a hassle otherwise…

2 Likes
5

For me, I have two large issues personally. The first is that I have seen two alchemy crafting orders, both for a recipe that came out of the raid. I can only assume someone filled it, but I certainly did not.

Secondly, I am uncertain on the specific cause, but finished goods are selling for far less than raw goods. Every time I make something in alchemy, it is a loss in potential goods compared to simply selling the mats and buying what I wanted to make.

Both of these issues are a mix of players and blizzard’s game design, so I see why they can’t just flip a switch and change it. Regarding the first issue, demand for alchemy crafting orders is simply nonexistent. Everyone wants to get in on the new profession system, but at least for alchemy there is almost nothing someone would want to make a public work order for. The stones suffer from the same issues other professions have, specifically that you can not guarantee quality via public work orders, and they are generally not top tier trinkets. With the spark of inspiration requirement, even if every player in wow wanted a trinket, I doubt that would generate more than 5-10 work orders this patch per alchemist. For the remainder of alchemy work orders, I simply can not blame people. I don’t know how much of that stuff I would be willing to make for myself, much less pay for. Most of the soulbound phials buff professions, but it probably a losing trade to buy one of them. To fix the first issue, public work orders must be able to specify quality. Additionally, blizzard should spend some time thinking what people would actually want to order in large enough quantities via that system that there would actually be work for a crafter who is not at the station checking orders 24/7. Maybe reducing the number of daily work orders down to 5 (with the exception for expiring ones) would be a good start there as well. I feel like we don’t have 20 alchemy orders in a day, much less 20 per person.

For the second issue, I can only assume the really low prices are related to people leveling professions. I can only hope crafting an item will one day be worth it, but as of now, I would have been better served with two gathering professions. This is certainly a player problem, though I suspect blizzard’s design lowers the value of finished products. People are leveling their professions right now, which produces a lot of excess waste. Alchemy research gives a bunch of random phials/potions, making things for skill ups does the same, and first craft bonuses encourage people to make everything for knowledge. I am guessing that some of that contributes to the glut of finished products and the strong demand for raw products. I don’t have a solution at this point that would not involve removing the free market.

4 Likes
6

Here’s the catch 22.

Most of you want to make crafting easier and allow everyone access to all the recipes easily. By doing that you will throw the supply vs demand even further out of whack than it already is.

What you are asking for will make crafting essentially a personal activity for you and your alts.

4 Likes
7

Yes, this is why I’m trying to focus on problems rather than proposed solutions (but trying to do so in a positive way). I think we as a community can provide more value by focusing on what bugs us rather than how we’d like to see it fixed. I rather like the throttling that’s built into the crafting system and the attendant need to specialize, and I agree that many of the proposed changes that are popular on here will just take us back to the old profession system, which would be hugely disappointing.

So 4 new things for the list of pain points:

  • Bad tutorials
  • Mats more pricey than finished goods (might need more data on this, this might be a Week 3 Thing).
  • Inability to sim crafting with different combinations of mats unless you have them in bags.
  • Some professions (alchemy) have nothing worth making a crafting order for.
6 Likes
8

You can’t really solve Mats costing more than the finished goods. This is a lot of players being willing to sell their products at a loss because it’s not real life and they don’t go out of business for doing so.

9

I agree that blizzard certainly can’t flip a switch and change this. It is possible that once people stop leveling professions the problem will fix itself. I don’t know, microbiology is my thing, not economics, much less wow economics. At the same time, blizzard’s design choices certainly impact the availability of resources and finished products. Their leveling system encourages people to make a bunch of random stuff they don’t need, with the skill points being far more valuable than the finished products.

I am still hoping it will resolve itself, though at the moment it is annoying. It feels so odd to gather my materials, sell them, and then buy flasks ect. when I need them instead of making them for myself or guild members. I have stopped crafting everything except for potion/phial research, and somehow just through research I keep generating piles of random things I don’t need so I dump them on the AH, probably contributing to the prices.

10

When it comes to Alchemy I think this will be permanent because of Multi-craft. In order to be able to turn a profit by buying mats and selling Phials/potions, you will need to max Multi-crafting.

On top of that like you mentioned, experimentation gives phials/potions.

1 Like
11

There are things that I like about the new profession system, but since my main is an Alchemist and Alchemists got the short end of the straw on basically every part of the system, I think I would have been better with the old system. Here’s a list of problems I have notices so far.

For Alchemy, having to use mettle to maybe learn recipes is really painful. I’m now literally weeks if not months away from being able to buy blue crafting gear because I don’t have the mettle for it, when I have friends swimming in the stuff and able to get their blue quality profession gear now. That sucks.

Also, Alchemists don’t get to use the crafting order system for basically anything other than trinkets. Why the heck can’t you go put in an order for 20 phials and send it to someone to craft for you? Why do we have to trade mats when nobody else does? We can, I suppose, also use them for the very bad and insanely overpriced gathering stat phials that nobody wants. These things are only made for the first skill bonus and are universally garbage. Making them cost mettle is awful and making them bop is dumb.

Alchemy also make zero things at a profit right now (and has made nothing at a profit since the expansion launched). These recipes should probably be revisited to adjust the mats to make them more useable. Probably should use Rousing instead of Awakened for them. If it weren’t for random crafts from experimentation, there wouldn’t be any on the AH. And that’s not a valid way to craft, since it costs mettle and you can’t make what you want.

For other professions, multicraft and resourcefulness procs–those should always go to the crafter, not the buyer. Buyers aren’t paying for those procs, did nothing to achieve those procs, and giving them to the buyer actively hurts the crafter by reducing demand for the next sale. It would be better for multicraft to not exist at all in crafting orders than to give the procs to the buyer over the seller.

Public crafting orders are basically dead already because you can’t specify quality. The UI needs an overhaul so people can see what they’re going to get when they send you stuff.

Instead of constant trade chat spam, a UI that shows persistant ads for crafters when you look up an item would be much better. I can’t search through trade chat for someone posting, so I have to happen to get lucky and see them when they post to know who can make things. Why not just let me post a flier on a community craft board, basically. I go to make a work order, I click on the item I want, and a list pops up with all the crafters who have asked to be included. It shows their price, quality, etc. Much easier and more sensible.

If you link your crafting menu to someone, they can’t see how much skill you have in particular things, and instead see only the recipes you have learned, which doesn’t hardly matter. I still need to then talk to you for 10 mins to figure out if I need level 3 cloth and level 2 thread or whatever to make what i want at the rank I want.

There is no way to see what you need to proc certain ranks without having all the qualities of all the mats in your bags. That’s something everyone noticed and started complaining about on the first day of the expansion. I don’t know how this shipped so obviously incomplete.

Inspiration is a god idea, but this version of it is kind of lame. Having a guaranteed preset amount of extra skill means that you can game out what mat you put in depending on if its possible to proc a higher tier or not. Inspiration should happen more often but for somewhat random amounts of extra skill. At least give it a range so it’s more interesting.

If you can already make something at max skill, or if your inspiration amount pushed you past the skill needed for a craft at max skill, that extra skill should increase your multicraft or resourcefulness. It stinks to have inspiration basically mean nothing on many crafts because you already have it maxed out.

Cauldrons for potions instead of flasks is super weird. Not being able to trade the conjured potions is really stupid. And needing Primal Chaos to buy potions from the good potion cauldron is just idiotic.

6 Likes
12

The problem is they incentivize making things nobody wants with the first craft bonus. That drives prices down by flooding the market with things being made not because the market wants it, but because there is another purpose for making it. That’s why literally zero things craft at a profit for alchemy right now.

2 Likes
13

There is no demand though… Throw a wrench into the supply side, nothing will change. You can’t just wish demand into existence.

2 Likes
14

There is plenty of demand, just not at the current prices. The optimal mana potion I should be using costs between 600 and 800 gold each right now. No chance I buy or use those. If they were at a reasonable price, I’d use one or two a pull.

1 Like
15

I am fairly sure the supply and demand issue is mainly aimed at gear crafting. Cloth, leather, etc.

1 Like
16

I would also add a bad UI for work orders to the list. In particular a lack of information about the crafters skill in private orders.

2 Likes
17

The reason why you can’t craft at profit for Alchemy is too many Alchemists combined with Multi-craft. If you haven’t heavily invested in multi-craft you will never turn a profit with Alchemy because you are competing against people who have.

1 Like
18

There is a demand, just for things you can’t craft. You really think people don’t want high end gear?

19

If you’ve gone deep into multicraft, you can’t make phials at high quality without inspiration procs. Hell, I’ve put all my points into skill, and I can’t make rank 3 without inspiration.

Even if I multicraft, I still lose money on most crafts. This isn’t the issue.

20

The only way I can get my jewelcrafting any higher is with the specialization I’ve locked myself out of. Maybe I should have done a ton of research beforehand, but this system seriously seems broken.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some people who don’t mind spending their incredibly rare and valuable sparks on sub-par items.

1 Like