How else are people supposed to do the god aweful weekly?
Also, why is tipping culture now way more prevalent in this expansion? I understand the commission if you’re providing mats, but If I provide all the mats and all you’re doing is hitting a button and the stupid system is already costing me 20g just to use it… why would I ever want to pay you to simply hit a button?
If this system was as hyped up as it was meant to be, and worked as it was intended than a person should never need to utlize their own mats to level up their professions. However, this isn’t the case and never will be. Most people are having to use alts to make workorders to themselves just to complete a weekly. Most people are sitting stranded at a certain level of profession skill simply because they cannot create goods to level up their profession.
This new profession system sucks. It has good merit, and in a perfect world would be awesome. However, we live in a far from perfect world and this system is failing because of it. I would rather do Torghast everyday than deal with these new professions. They have good improvements, don’t get me wrong, but the overall design needs major rework to actually make this feasible beyond the rare minority who either got lucky with their profession knowledge placement or read guides.
You’re not paying them the commission to hit a button, you’re paying them because they sunk time and resources into leveling up their crafting such that the button was available for them to press, otherwise you would have crafted it yourself.
This was not a community council idea, though someone there might have started a thread about it. People have been asking for buy orders for many years.
There are some major issues with crafting, although it is a massive improvement over WoW’s ‘traditional’ system of crafting. Let’s start with the first item:
Blizz seems to have an over-large fetish for making things soulbound and it’s really really dumb. Things, particularly crafted things, should be BOE not BOP. I’m fairly sure blizz does this because they are also over-infatuated with various western culture issues that I can’t go into here on the forums. But this is a cultural issue and it’s a major problem in the design philosophy of the game that leads to iLvL bloat that’s completely unnecessary. We don’t need 30+ iLvL per tier… ten would be fine.
The next aspect is the fact that you can’t be all crafters at once, that severely limits the ability to take advantage of synergies and creates opportunity for gouging.
Add onto that the fact that blizz is fascinated with silly BOP mats and yeah it just spirals out of control fast. Adding the fact that blizz couldn’t help but make it an RNG slot machine instead of an actual player skill thing where crafting itself is a minigame and it’s just sad.
Honestly it feels like someone read a summary of FF14 crafting but never bothered to play it and actually dive deep into it. I’d take ff14 crafting any day over this.
That would be very dangerous for powerful items that are intended to be restricted by Spark of Inspiration acquisition. Someone with an alt army could get a ton of Sparks as soon as the first one is available and deck themselves out in full gear day 1. Which doesn’t sound like a good thing to me.
Or a spark could be an upgrade item you can only use after you’ve bound the gear to yourself.
Either way, dismissing what I said without actually understanding it, makes this pointless to continue. The devs did half a job and don’t understand the flaws in their philosophy because of cultural issues.
Not what people want to hear, but specialization has solved the single most important issue that has prevented crafting from being relevant since ~TBC.
There are more crafters than there customers.
If everyone could craft the best gear/whatever. Then the AH would be flooded with gear/goods sold at a loss as crafters scrable to out compete each other for the few customers that exists. This was the case on pretty much any high pop server for the past few expansions. Enchants on my realm sold for less than the materials for the entirety of Shadowlands, outside of the first few weeks. This is still true in Dragonflight as well, outside of max level goods.
Blizzard tried to solve this issue in the past by heavily time gating the amount of high tier material a crafter could produce, and make it BoP. See MoP and it’s myriad of BoP crafting materials. But that introduced another problem, that being it would take literally a month to produce some goods because you could only make 1 or 2 of the BoP materials a day, while needing 30 of them, like for example the Sky Golem.
Is the current system perfect? Not by any means, but the foundation is there for something great.
Its not terrible for such a massive overhaul. Professions are clearly another progression path now, as its going to take me months to max them all out.
The public work order system is obviously the stinker in the whole thing. It replicates functions that the AH fufilled just fine, for no obvious benefit. Like tacking on social media to a web service that doesnt need it. For example, I have a bunch of BoP drake customizations that no one is going to order, maybe ever. The simple short term fix would be to make some more stuff BoE while we decide what exactly the system is supposed to do.
I would say the biggest difference between work orders and the AH is the Sparks of Inspiration. If work orders were just AH with extra steps, then a player with gold could get as many high ilvl crafted items as they wanted immediately. Sparks limit the rate at which any one character can benefit from the system.
Ultimately I think work orders’ biggest failure is that there’s no incentive for people to post crafting orders regularly. The scarcity of sparks ends up being both the main reason the system exists as well as its biggest weakness. No one wants to “waste” their sparks so they’re either holding them, afraid to spend them, or they look up the best thing to spend it on, get it crafted, then that’s it. They no longer need work orders after that.
I feel like Blizzard felt like I’d be fulfilling more crafting orders than I am by a long shot but… I can’t for the life of me figure out what they thought I’d be crafting.
The purpose of crafting orders was how to solve this question:
“How do we have BoP crafting materials drop in Mythic+, and have players make BoP gear from it, even if they don’t have the relevant profession?”
Answer: work orders.
That’s the entire reason the system exists. People keep trying to read too much into it.
And, as the blue post said first and foremost, THE SYSTEM IS DOING WHAT IT’S SUPPOSED TO in that regard.
Are people wearing tons of 418 ilvl crafted gear? Yes. Most of the 418+ gear in the game right now has come from work orders.
Work orders are not the be-all, end-all of Dragonflight crafting.
Work orders are not a replacement for the auction house.
Work orders are not there as an endless Midas Mill of gold for you.
Returned Trade Chat to being exclusively about trade. If for some reason you keep this chat on in Dragonflight, you will be pleased to be barraged with 100 “LF X Profession CRAFT x Item” flooding your chatbox per minute. Even though last expansion we had systems like auction houses that could solve this headache of sifting and posting craft requests, for some reason Blizzard thought it would be better to invalidate that core system
This. I leveled slow. Enjoyed the story until i hit the rep gate (working on renown 19 now). My mage is a tailor/enchanter. I’ve never seen even 1 item on the crafting order system. As far as i can tell nobody uses it. Trade chat or city chat is bombarded with looking for crafter instead of posting orders.
I think if they removed the personal order system and left it public only they would make a small impact. In the flip side it would prevent people from just creating for themselves on alts.
Unsure how to fix this but i would like the chance to clear one quest I’ve had since i first hit valdrakken. (Fulfill 3 creating orders).
But as designed, it only functions if your realm has a X number of active players using it. Most servers don’t have the numbers, thus WOs are dead on them.
What Blizzard needs to do it merge all the low population servers into a dozen or so realms.
I think that’s true as well. My biggest disconnect is that Blizzard gives me a weekly quest to fill 3 work orders which gives me the impression that they thought people would be asking for many more crafting orders than they actually are. So I think it fails more from the crafter side than the customer side. From the customer side, I agree it does exactly what it’s supposed to.
So my main question for Blizzard at this point is, “as a crafter, how often did you think I’d be filling orders and what did you think I’d be crafting in those orders?”
A lot of people have brought up FF14 crafting in comparison and I actually don’t think the main difference is in how the crafters make gear. I think the main difference is in what’s available to craft. Namely, when I do crafting to make money in FF14 you know what I’m mostly crafting? Furniture for housing and previous expansion gear for cosmetics. Now obviously WoW doesn’t have housing, but the main point is that we lack for work order crafts that someone would pay for just because they want it rather than for its combat value. We have the odd mount or toy here and there but I don’t think that’s enough. We need some sort of regular work order we can fill that Blizzard doesn’t feel like they need to limit via a Sparks system.
