Crafting: Old days vs. now

In the earlier releases of the game, crafting was one of my joys. I’d happily gather and craft, then search the AH to see what sold best, what was in demand. It was a wonderful and enjoyable break from dungeons or questing.

Now it’s nothing but a pain. You can only sell thru a complicated process dependent on luck and a buyer willing to spend ridiculous amounts of time to find or order an item. Even as a crafter I don’t want to use it, so I put little up… which means people quickly learn how hard it is to find that right item or potion… and just don’t even look any more.

Prices are so wonky it’s insane. You have no idea whether you’ll make a profit, or even pay for the exorbitant amount of time you spend gathering mats to make the item. Additional specialized materials are virtually impossible to find without tedious farming for days.

This time around, after seeing the process made even worse than it was in DF, I dropped my crafts and will just gather. No, I won’t have (or make) that once-in-a-lifetime exotic gear. But I also won’t have the stress involved to get/make it.

The fun no longer exists. It’s a painful grind… at best. And others I talk to are doing much the same. Blizz, could we get crafting and selling made fun again?

If you like the new process, good for you. I cheer you on. I just won’t be buying those items you made, myself. I seek fun in crafting, not agony, and don’t enjoy paying 6000g+mats for a specialty item. I get enough of that IRL… both stress and expenses.

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I could produce a giant Pepe Silvia conspiracy board, but instead I am just going to take point A and jump to point Z.

The new crafting system greatly pushes people to spend gold to acquire mats to recraft, remake, rebuy, etc. WoW also sell a token that effectively allows players to buy gold.

Connect those dots and there’s your reason why things are how they are.

Blizz like money.

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Tinfoil hat aside, you may have a point.

We live in a Kotick game, and that just smells of his greedy handy work.

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God forbid crafting get a facelift after almost two decades and become a viable avenue for crafting meaningful weapons and armor.

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Was it necessary to make it overly complicated and even punishing by refusing to allow to reallocate Knowledge Points?

No

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Are you saying that the Lionheart Executioner was not a meaningful weapon? or Verigan’s Fist, for that matter.

Early in WoW’s history, you certainly could make meaningful weapons and armour.

Yes, a facelift was needed, but it was the wrong facelift.

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The professions are definitely convoluted but it’s one of the last remaining RPG elements still in the game and should stay.

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I craft transmog gear. Problem solved.

Items made from the Ancient transmog patterns sell for reasonable amounts, and everyone loves the Thunder Forge weapons, but all sorts of items sell slowly but surely, even silly PvP gear from Cata, MoP, WoD …

Personally, I thought WoD did a fairly good job of professions.

Not perfect, but an iteration of that system was really all professions needed.

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What crafting are you talking about? Items last an entire expansion now. We actually have an economy now. Crafting has been useless most of WoW’s life. If you’re not wearing crafted gear you are gimping you yourself.

There is nothing difficult or complicated about it. People are lazy and don’t want to spend 5 minutes reading up.

Sorry, but I disagree with you 100%. The new system is awesome, and you actually have to invest now.

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Exactly my opinion of TBC professions. It was a path that needed to be followed, and it wasn’t.

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I agree that it should stay. However, it should be much more straightforward - like it was early in the game - and the crafters should be able to make meaningful weapons and armor.

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Back in the early days, crafting was something you did if you wanted to do something simple. At least much of it was.

Now it’s another way to compete, and it’s complicated enough, and convoluted enough, that it’s certainly not casual content. I get people like it, and that’s great, but it’s just another path of casual content lost to us.

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All my toons are going double gathering. I’m only lvl 76 and I’ve made ~100k without crafting a thing.

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Verigan’s Fist was a quest reward it wasn’t crafted.

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This is my point. Exactly. There is no reason for the process to become agony, just because the items themselves get facelifts or improvements. Of course the items of today should be better than Vanilla. But to bury it under all the unnecessary process seems… counterproductive at best. OK… we can make better gear. We just have to jump thru hoops to get it into the hands of a buyer, which makes it (to me) too much stress with not enough fun.

A D3 vendor used to say: “I tried the adventuring life. Didn’t like it. Too much pain, not enough profit.” Like others, I’ll stick to gathering as long as this selling process is the norm.

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New crafting is so convoluted. Old crafting was BIS

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BUYER: Had to find a crafter, meet up, trade the things over, offer a /pray that he would not zaccidently dc, wait for him to craft, hope he zaccidently did not right click the item to bind it to himself, trade it back to you THEN hit trade when the agreed upon payment was entered.

CRAFTER: Had to wait for a buyer screaming in trade, meet, make room in the bags for HIS stuff to go, make SURE your stuff would not get mixed up with his. trade to get his mats, CHECK that EVERYTHING is in there, lets skip where you have to fish everything back if something is missing and make sure you are not handing over some of YOUR stuff, craft the thing, trade it over and wait till he put the amount you agreed to.

OR you meant craft stuff and cram in the AH where it would be under cut by the mob of undercutting morons into oblivion??

Yeah Ill take the consortium, smash your rose tinted glasses where ever you want.

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LOL, yes! You’re right! My bad, but it was a little like crafting since you had to get all the materials for it.

Crafting is better now than it has ever been in the history of WoW’s lifetime. Sorry if you dislike that professions is now an actual activity, but they are objectively better now than they have ever been before.

It is neither complicated nor convoluted, and it is certainly something that’s available to casual players. Stop treating “casual” to mean something which it doesn’t mean.

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