I agree mostly and have a slightly different view myself. I actually have an alt with every profession so I don’t have to search or pay commission but it still stinks.
Go buy crest then set a work order for enchant crest.
Hop into my enchanter to fulfill the order
Back to my character needing gear.
Buy mats and set another work order.
Over to my alt with the crafting profession.
If I wanted to play Excel as a game, I’d play something like EVE.
Anyways, crafting is overly complicated by design as a means to suck up a bunch of player time, which many will bypass with gold, which then indirectly feeds Blizzard’s gold-selling token business.
I believe there is an interview at the start of DF or juat before its launch of the devs that worked on it
it looks like blizz took out the possible items to fill optional slots too, so I can’t peruse and decide/figure out what I want from looking at the window.
Literally nothing about crafting since DF is a boon for this game.
Yet another thing SL did better than DF and TWW.
More objective evidence the game is going downhill.
That’s a toggle you can check in the boxes, hide if unavailable.
Its a way for them to move gold around… its better then when they forced legendary items through it but yeah it sucks.
People want raid tier gear, but don’t want to invest the time and effort to get it.
What a surprise.
Here’s what i do, gather the mats myself, post the craft to myself, craft it myself 
never heard of it, or checked or unchecked any boxes like that- can you find a pic or take a screenshot for me?
Actually, do you mean when clicking the optional slot and selecting hide if unavailable? That’s not what I mean. I mean before that point.
The comparison made wasn’t that they are functionally the same, but that the ‘confusion’ of both lasts as long as you do not attempt to understand it.
The crafting system is very simple and easy to use. You just have to put an iota of thought into instead of getting angry
I tried Smithing, since it’s one of my fav’s.
I spent so much time gathering mats, just to discover that it’s nearly as complicated as engineering…
I hate engineering…
Don’t get me started on tailoring…
Since you need crests for the higher level gear and they are BoP, it’s hard to say it’s p2w unless you consider everything in the game p2w since carry sales exist.
JC has finally become profitable , not much as Alche still , but I was able to get skills points and make little gold at the same time , Now I need to make those epic necklaces to get to 100
This is what is crazy, engineering used to be my favorite…so you know professions are crap when somebody like myself can’t stand them. The different levels to mats and them taking up so much freaking bag space is what did it for me.
The current team complicate everything and forget the allure of simplicity.
Maybe people forum can help?
“hey guys, can you help me with crafting X item? I dont know how to do Y while crafting”
Or maybe asking for some good video guide?
How is “reading” something you consider complicated?
Here’s the following stuff to consider:
If all you care about is having a profession, that’s all you need to do. If you want to go more in-depth, you can try to optimize. Alloys are easy to make since you just go to Means of Production and then specialize in Alloys. If you want to increase the amount of Alloys you get, you improve your Everburning Forge aka. Everburning Ignition consumable.
You know… the thing you are making in order to get to 100/100 Skill, that thing?
Literally nothing about how any of this works is difficult, all you need to do is read the tooltips. Blacksmithing is literally just a case of “Do you want to make armours, or weapons, or materials - put your skill points towards that.”
Blacksmithing doesn’t even have an “in-general” Skill-increase specialization, which is the common thing with most other professions. You quite literally just decide on “I want to make X” and then put points towards making X.
Professions used to be crap, but aren’t since DF. So it is the other way around; if you used to like professions before, but doesn’t anymore, it is because you didn’t like professions - you just liked having something to tick off and say “Welp, I’m done with that - don’t have to bother with professions ever again until I get a new recipe, yay for not making anything with my professions!”
Folks like you two make me so damn annoyed, because you are quite literally saying “I liked it better when we had nothing to do” because professions weren’t simple… they were a waste of time, because you just did them at the start of an expansion… and then never again. Unless you were an Alchemist making flasks, enchanter making enchants, or a jeweler for the odd occasions when someone needed gems.
There used to be three professions in the game, and nothing else. Saying that somehow that was better… just means that you never liked professions.
You can cut most of these problems out by leveling some professions yourself.
I don’t participate in the profession economy. I craft for myself, my wife, and the NPC patrons. It’s just another one of those things that makes you more self-sufficient in the game.
Nah they’re pretty much garbage still. It’s pretty classic Blizz to rely on the free work of third parties to provide the information that makes their systems functional though.
The only thing more useless than the dungeon journal is how the information on profs is displayed and explained in-game.
which is why I dont bother going out of my way to craft gear. not only is it expensive at the moment, but its also a bothersome task to get it done. along with the fact the gear isnt easily upgradeable, because you need to gather more bothersome expensive materials to upgrade them.
its a lot of effort for very little reward, which sounds like it fits perfectly into blizzards game design.
Make some crafters.
I am loving it. I have all the crafters.
I can make myself champion gear at will provided I have the sparks.
AAAAAAND I can set the stats with my scribe.
No. I enjoyed leveling every profession pre-DF because it was fun. Not as a check list. If all it was is a checklist to me then I would still be leveling them. They are too convoluted now.
To imitate your tone: This is going to sound crazy…but the reason I liked it before was because it was fun. Your annoyance is irrelevant to what I find enjoyable.
I solved my own problem by just not leveling professions anymore. If Blizzard ever changes them back or revamps them, then I’ll take another look and see if I will find them fun again.