The crafting system totally needs a new overhaul. I’ve played since vanilla and have gone through all the changes of the crafting system and I can say as a casual player who invests most of her time with crafting for myself, friends, guildies and anyone that needs it, these past two expansions are the only time I never was fully invested in crafting, never maxed out my skill because of ingredients that are needed and crafting orders that people only want if they are the maxed skill. To gate my crafting behind non casual content such as sparks and hard to acquire ingredients is totally unfair to the casual player that gets on not for mythics or raiding but to have fun with their friends and help out those who need it. The daily system was even workable where you learned once a day a new recipe with a craft. The crafting orders on the outside looking in seemed great but once i started posting I found out that players only wanted the top tier items, in dragonflight I was stuck making fake orders for friends not really anything I could level up with just to get the daily to get the skill points to level up the profession and even with all that I played never could get it maxed. Even the npc orders on War Within want items with sparks which are difficult to come by. Not to mention the items aren’t in demand considering they can get higher level items at any point in time in raids, delves, any content pretty much. At least in Shadowlands I was able to craft Legendary components and make a little gold to fund my crafting since I liked having alts with all different crafting professions. Please help us out because I just don’t feel excited to craft anymore and want to enjoy doing my favorite past time on wow. P.S please bring back pre legion Archeology and bring back fishing. Fishing in garrisons with whole raid groups was one of the most fun and social aspects of the game that has been sorely lacking for a couple expansions. Maybe archeology could implement the housing system where we find items to place in our new homes.
General Observation: paragraphs and line breaks would have really helped readers understand your thought process.
Ok. There are a lot of people like you in game and on these forums. Both in terms of how long they’ve played and why they craft.
While this may sound cruel, what you describe here is a lack of understanding of the new crafting system. It is possible for you, me, any player, to be able to craft something at max rank almost from week 1 of opening the applicable Khaz Algar profession. It requires some planning and focusing on where you apply your Knowledge Points, but it is very easy to do.
Public Work Orders are only limited by whether you can craft the item unless you choose to apply your own limitation of ‘oh, I can’t craft this at max like the person is asking so I won’t craft it at all.’ While polite, Public Orders are at the mercy of the crafter.
Private Orders can be outcome restricted, but now we are back at choosing your crafting route to be able to craft and re-craft specific items at max rank early. Then building out from there until you can craft everything at max rank.
Let me point out that for both DF and TWW, there is not a single crafting material that is a raid-only drop. There are recipes that only drop from raids, but they require the same non-raid materials as all other crafts. That is a significant improvement in my book over previous expansions.
Even Sparks are obtained through open world content from the various weekly chests (like Pinnacle Caches) from world quests, Heroic Dungeons, Timewalking Dungeons, Delves, and so forth.
For the materials that are Delve only drops (Delves are solo player content), they are all purchaseable on the AH for pretty reasonable prices.
DF work orders had some weaknesses such as what you identify that have been corrected with TWW.
See my explanation above. Crafting max rank for players can be done quickly for the first item or two then you spread out after reaching each successive item to max.
One of the great benefits to TWW NPC Patron Orders is that it is the way for players like you to skill up to max (100 skill) when you have no reliable source of work orders from your friends, guildies, or the screwy Public Order menu. Sparks and Acuity are never an issue with these orders because they are always provided by the NPC. You may be on tap for several thousand gold worth of other crafting materials, but that becomes a personal assessment of whether those skill points are worth that expenditure. Since the NPC orders primarily want only Rank 2 and 3, rarely Rank 4, products, it is very simple to reach max skill in every profession.
Not quite. Omen crafted gear goes to 606, which is top end Veteran, and 4/8 Champion gear. But with crafting I can dictate the stats and add embellishments making crafting potentially a much better option than pulling the RNG slot on a T8 Bountiful delve or a weekly Vault reward.
Adding a Runed Harbinger Crest takes that to 619, which is 8/8 Champion and 4/6 Hero level. Adding a Gilded Harbinger Crest takes it up to 636, which is just below Mythic Raiding.
In short, crafting can fill in the gaps for unlucky RNG, and is very in demand for appropriate slots with Embellishments. Certain finished items are less in demand, but you can choose to leave spending your points on those until the end by taking the time to learn the market on your server. Understanding your server’s market should be nothing new after crafting for so long.
While I cannot speak about SL crafting since I skipped the expansion, TWW professions take me a bare 30 minutes a day to cycle through 14 crafting characters to check and fulfill their daily Patron Orders. Add an additional 30 minutes every four days on the reset to do those additional Patron Orders. Five months in, I can craft almost every item in every profession at max rank whenever I want or need. If professions is such a large portion of your game, can you afford 30 minutes per day and another 30 minutes every four days for all your crafters?
This is problematic and sounds like there may be other things in your life affecting your perception of the game. I recommend taking a break from crafting in general, and possibly WoW more broadly. It may help you refocus your mind on what is important and why it is important. A break may also help you interact with the new crafting system as it is now designed instead of trying to make it fill your mental cubby hole of what it used to be.
I’m not quite sure what you are asking for Fishing so I won’t address it.
I like your ideas for Archaeology.
That was an excellent analysis Solaria.
I’ll add here: SL crafting was an absolute nightmare. To say that is better than “press orange concentration button and win” TWW crafting is just bananas.
How many Rank 4 legendary items were you making? To rank them up cost millions. And if it wasn’t the “top gear” next patch? Sucks to be you. Gotta rank up whatever is the new FOMO.
And didn’t get there fast enough? Oh, you’re not recouping those costs. Did you like paying 125 g per orboreal shard from the vendor? Oh by the way you need 30. Per item. And you need 15 to level up.
At least you can farm profaned tinderbox!
And if you were getting crafting items from the mission table, the mission tables functions were so broken that every addon had a different result. The pick random ally/enemy function: broken. The thorns function:broken. The scaling:broken. If you like I can show you some hilarious videos of the enemies attacking themselves and healing your followers to full. It was very very bad. Oh and hope you know LUA because one of the mission helper add-ons authors quit mid expansion and we had to edit it ourselves.
I think Teishoku meant BIS instead of FOMO but you get the gist. I very much still have ptsd from the horrors that were orboreal shards. Take off the rose tinted glasses sweetie you are fooling yourself about the good old days.
The new crafting system is the first one were I haven’t had to constantly pug raids just to get the mats I need for the last few points in a prof. With the KP system, while frustrating at times, I actually feel like my character is learning how to better hone their craft rather then just mindlessly clicking the ‘number go up’ craft.
The system is awful. That you have to preface any response with “lack of understanding” highlights the problem. The system is convoluted and requires an ridiculous amount of time if you’re trying to maintaining professions on a few alts.
Current Issues:
- Cost - Some professions, like BS, cost an incredible amount of gold just to fulfill the daily patron orders. Even now, I still have some days that would put me back 15k-30k or even more. We should be MAKING a small amount of gold back from orders, not spending our on gold we are working for. A patron order that cost 5k+ that only rewards 50g is a slap in the face. This is ignoring the steep cost of recipes. 100-200k or more? Maybe even more if you want the rare ones.
- Confusing - The current system lacks in game resources to educate players on what everything does. I found myself watching LENGTHY videos to understand the basics. The uncessary profession stats. The absurd cost of profession equipment. Managing reagents. It’s too much. The game should make it clear what everything does. Bottled Brilliance??? I still have no idea how this works or what it does.
- Time Investment - That a player has to log on nearly every day just to babysit their work orders to continue to push their profession is an awful system. Make the patron orders LONGER. If I don’t get off work and immediately come home I miss a bunch of orders.
- TOO LONG - We’re a half a year into this expansion and still have a ways to go before any professions is capped out. I hate this. Let me focus on the game. I want to make some gold, but this is seriously frustrating.
Lastly, despite ALL of this, we are still dealing with bots sniping work orders. Depends on the time of day, but anything that pops up that is 5k+ immediately gets taken. Same goes for trade chat. I message people in 4-5 seconds of them LF a craft and they say someone is already doing it… What?
Professions shouldn’t be this sweaty. I used to enjoy just collecting recipes. That was fun. Now some recipes are so rare that if you don’t buy it you won’t get it. zzz.
The system needs help.
You can make the alloys. I know witch alloy tickles you and there IS a very easy way to get the pricy mats for it at low cost. BS has never been cheap to build, ever.
Nothing that cannot be fixed by basic reading comprehension there. It reads harsh, but is what it is.
The trade back for it is that the professions are RELEVANT for the whole of the exp! Not some gear that you painstakingly gather mats for to be tossed in the next raid that drops an upgrade. And dont bring up the dang SL legendries for arguments, since you made you first grievance about gold costs.
See previous answer.
That addon is garbage. Tried it for a whole of 10 mins trying to set it up. Nothing that a good spreadsheet with my toons name and quotes, good old copy/paste wont do! I get to craft for folks most days. As for public order wars… Well not much to do there. There will always be a more no lifer that you hawking the listings.
Prices of sought after recipes have always been steep, nothing new there. Lots of guilds finance themselves with them. Have through the dawn of the WoW. Nothing for blizz to fix there, tis a player run economy. Increase the drop rate? It would never drop enough for most folks.
Well, thought about responding but you’re going with insults. What a waste of time.
Hey everyone, everything is fine! If you say anything at all the gatekeepers are going to shame you and tell you you’re wrong despite the system obviously being hated by tons of players.
Telling you to read is insulting you? Read the wheels. How is that insulting?? Gatekeeper? What is keeping you? I am all the way over there crafting things, how is that keeping you from progressing your crafts? Victimhood is strong in you is all.
That last part might be an insult, but you did call me a gatekeeper so I feel quite justified in firing back.
Basic reading comprehension? Really? That’s what you think telling someone to read means? How pathetic do you have to be to insult someone over some pretty basic issues that have been raised by tons of players already?
Being civil isn’t hard, but I guess it is for you.
Regardless, the system sucks. You can defend it and the rest of us can point out how bad it is compared to what we had in the past.
When? When was it better in the past?? I did them all. When they were current. When did the end-game craft of any professions lasted you the whole exp? SL ? That is a gold pit and you must know it. What else? Id love to read that! And believe me I will read it.
Everything to mop and prior was SUBSTANTIALLY more straight forward. You could power level professions easily in a day. Even WoD went quick AND you had the garrison to play around with. Now? Now it’s the same garbage every day. Log in, do patron orders, farm wax, so on.
It’s insane anyone would defend this like it’s good. 1/4 of the way into the expansion and we still don’t have professions maxed and just forget about leveling them on alts if you start late.
So, what you miss, if I am reading you correct. Powerleveling? That racing to 100 and done? Straightforward sure, Ill give you that. Into a brick wall. Apart from consumables there is nothing to do with your profession. Sure there’s that fancy epic item that you make for yourself… And then it gets replaced in LFR! You miss THAT??? Don’t go feeling insulted there but I am very much surprised, yes, Ill go with that.
Sorry for your difficulties with the current TWW professions. I for my part DO NOT miss that past.
Talking trash over professions in a video game? lol
So pathetic.
What exactly takes a ridiculous amount of time? It takes me 30 minutes a day to run through the Patron Orders on 14 characters. That’s just over 2 minutes per character. Is 2 minutes a day a ridiculous amount of time? It then takes another 30 minutes on the four day reset for the same 14 characters. Another 2 minutes per character every four days.
Individually, my total investment per character per week is 16 or 18 minutes. Is that a ridiculous amount of time? It sure doesn’t feel like it to me.
I’ll admit at the start of the expansion I took almost an hour per profession to read every tab, every wheel, every bonus and location, and cross check against the recipe list to make sure I knew where I wanted to go with every profession. But is that an unreasonable amount of time?
Cost:
As Kaladnei pointed out, cost is a player created function that Blizzard can affect but not directly control. Whether you are willing to fork out that amount of gold is on you, especially now where it really does not matter if it takes another week to finish whatever wheel you happen to be working on. Could and should Blizzard adjust what materials are provided to even out the costs now that they see stabilized values? I think so even while I don’t really care all that much because some professions, like Blacksmithing, have always been much more expensive than the others.
Individual recipe costs are the same. I only purchase one set of the PvP recipes (I don’t PvP so AH for all of them) for each profession. But I won’t purchase any of them until they’re listed for less than 4k unless there happens to be a Public Work Order that will recoup 90% of the cost. If you are willing to fork over 50-100k that first week knowing you will not recoup the cost, that’s on you. Even with the rare drop recipes, I’ve collected almost all of them for less than 10k each. With rare (pardon the pun) exception, I know I’ll never recoup the cost of paying 200k or more so why bother?
Why should Patron Orders be a source of gold for players? They exist to enable people to skill up and gain KPs. Nothing more. Crafting for other players, either directly or by selling products on the AH, has always been the way to make gold with professions. Why should Blizzard change that now?
Confusing:
There are some missing elements in the current profession introduction. Even basic premises of Orange is guaranteed skill up, Yellow is more than 40% chance, Green is below 40%, and Grey is 0% have kind of been lost though they can be empirically determined if one is watching what happens in their recipe list while working their professions. There are also a few random profession crafts that Blizzard missed in the TWW wheels (much fewer than in DF). But at least 90% of them are accounted for if you cross-check the wheel to the section header in the recipe list. So what is confusing?
Unnecessary is a personal perspective based on your perceived value. Every profession stat provides some benefit to the crafters that can use them. It may not be very much. It may wax or wane as you gain more profession skill or what you are doing with professions changes. But all stats are useful.
To your specific example of Bottled Brilliance. The item is functionally irrelevant because it only affects recipes that are yellow and green (it may affect grey even though I haven’t seen it do so) when that crafter is below max skill. Could that be explained better? Probably. Have there always been crafts that are functionally irrelevant or pointless? Also yes.
Time Investment:
Patron Orders have three resets that all occur on the daily server reset. Every four days you get a drop of orders that include an allocation of Glimmers. These orders last for four days. Every day you get a drop that can include one or more orders for Flickers. These orders last 24 hours. And every so often there is another drop that expires at the half-day mark, but they never offer Glimmers or Flickers. In short, you only need to check each crafters Patron Orders once per server day, at any time during that server day. How is that not enough time?
Too Long:
Why do you need to be capped on a given profession? You can start making gold after a few days, no more than a week, with almost all of the crafting professions. The gathering professions are day 1 gold makers.
How are professions interfering with you playing the game? My main, this character, hits all weekly Mining drops, the Blacksmith chest drops, and the Blacksmith kill drops while doing a single round of World Quests, the two Special Assignments, and the Azj-Kahet Pact in 90 minutes on Tuesday. That leaves the rest of the week for me to do whatever I want. For my crafters that I just want the chest and kill drops, that takes about 15 minutes per character.
Now, I will say that I want Blizzard to accelerate KP gains with the x.1, and even more with the x.2, patch. But if they don’t, /shrug, I’ll get over it.
Closing:
There are changes I want to see Blizzard make to professions and the new system. I think it is rather dumb to regrind KPs for the same gear slots in multiple expansions. But what I’ve proposed in other threads would be even more complex and time intensive, with corresponding increases in capability and power, than what we have now.
Professions before DF were simple: find mats, make item, next. No thought. Variable longevity. Variable utility. Now, most professions are useful and viable for the entire expansion. Did reaching that state add some difficulty and obnoxiousness? Yes. Are there ways Blizzard could smooth out some of the rough edges? Also yes. Was it worth it? To me, all three yes.
I get it. I’m doing professions on 13 toons. It’s going to take more time than 2 minutes. I get that once you’re done with everything for the week, sure it can be quick, but you still have your weeklies todo, you still have to buy mats as needed, any public orders, and so on. If you want to collect the wax for extra skill points, that’s going to add a lot of extra time as well.
But that wasn’t what I was saying though. We are a half year into the expansion and we are STILL doing this every day. I just don’t see why it’s taking so long. To that, there isn’t catch up mechanic.
I think it’s clear that this really discourages players from doing professions. Just listening to friends talk about it. They don’t do them because it’s too much. Cost. Time. And so on. It’s not just two minutes. It’s everything else.
They can immediately change the impact of cost for professions in a lot of different ways.
- increase drop rates for specific materials.
- reduce patron orders that require to provide mats.
- or just reduce the mats needed to craft some items.
I don’t understand this argument. I have done blacksmithing for ages. What we have now is costing 10x of past expansions or more. There are days that I still see 30k+ costs for patron orders. Regardless, the professions should be SOMEWHAT similar relative to cost. If BS is going to cost a bit more, fine, but it’s so far past everything right now that it excludes players from even doing it and relegating it to players that already have gold.
That’s not good. I don’t see how anyone can argue that’s good for the game.
If you want to grab the PVP recipes, which I have, it’s still well over 150k-200k on most ‘PvP’ heavy realms. 7500 honor is ton of games for just one recipe. 0 reason it needs to be that much considering how many of them there are.
Also, understand it from a PvP player vantage point. We have 9 sockets for PvP we need to farm. Even if we buy the vicious gems, that’s still 45k honor. If we do farm the honor for the bloodstones, it’s 112,500 honor. Lots of us like to be able to craft our own gear… that’s kinda the fun of the game. Now, it’s almost not possible. You’re looking at another 75k-100k honor if you want to farm recipes. You might get lucky and get some from crates or you’re working to buy them.
Regardless, it’s a massive investment and it’s really deterring lots of casual players from contributing.
Because the task of logging on, just like every other daily, is a player reward for doing the thing. It’s no different than any other daily. We have made gold in the past from doing profession dailies. Why does that need to change?
There’s a lot now. The game is really leaning heavily on the players having knowledge from previous expansions or seeking external guides. There is a lot of grey space. Like even if you understand how much a copper quality item compares to a gold item, it’s not obvious.
But there is so much more. The treasures, the skill ups from the vendors, understanding the skill trees, and so on. For the casual player, it’s a ton of stuff to get your head wrapped around. Even for me, I was still watching videos and reading guides just to get the basics. Profession equipment? Equipment enchants? Ingenuity? Some profession DON’T benefit from multicraft? The trial and error is costly.
Why not give us the ability to redo our profession trees? Even if it’s just once a week or something.
Where is this explained in the game?
There are orders that are up for 12 hours. If I don’t log on before 7-8, I will miss these orders.
I really think people are not seeing the frustration the general population has. This is obvious in a few ways. The cost of crafted items is high. That botting has become a key parts of crafting on big servers points to other issues. If you post for something to craft on tich or illidan during peak times, you might get 5-10 responses instantly. It’s the same for the public work orders.
There are lot of areas that could use improvement, but for me the biggest one as I have already said is cost. For players like me, it’s not a huge problem, but this is what I do and it still annoys me I’m forking out so much gold. For casual players, this creates a huge barrier and that ends up just driving up the cost for everyone.
I do not understand the pvp example. The ones that provide the pvp recipes in AH ARE the PvP peoples. And they set those prices all themselves.
Ever craft for a pvp customer? I dun hav g. Can yous provide mats?? Why didnt yous use concentration with ma r1 mats an 400g fee?? So I have very little sympathy for the casual pvper. I don’t even bother to ask for a price with those folks, its pointless. Just list your thing and move out of the trade. Feel free to feel insulted there for your people, cause I have been quite often with those city dwelling paupers.
And SJW for the casuals? Should I quote you on it?
Casuals know where the forums are, they can voice their grievances themselves.
I just want to point out that Vial of Kaheti oils was very cheap at the beginning of the expansion. Around 5g iirc.
That is a delve drop just like profaned tinderbox.
So why were vials 5g and tinderbox 7000g at three start of the expansion?
Because there was something fancy in that delve that everyone wanted so everyone was doing it.
Sanctified alloy could have cost a few hundred gold if it had taken vials instead of tinderbox. Or if the fancy doodad everyone wanted had been in the tinderbox delve.
Blizzard responded by allowing tinderbox to drop more from more sources, allowing you to exchange various mats and currency for tinderbox. But by then it was too late. That early delve rush was over. Tinderbox values crashed but not enough I guess. The prices have been creeping up due to less people doing delves (or playing in general).
But why did this happen? Players did it with their choices.
Blizzard has a new patch coming out with more delves. Pretty sure they’re banking on that to increase interest in delves, which will bring down tinderbox prices.
Prices are actually really hard to predict! I made a lot of predictions in beta that were right and a whole bunch that were wrong. I don’t know if you’ve ever made a game before but players do things you absolutely were not expecting them to do.
To be fair, if the vials had been the mats for those alloys instead of the boxes, they would have been at 7k 
. Weapons… Tis all about weapons. I had bought a nice stack of cheap vials myself. Thought Id corner some market for the depth enchants, boi did that one crash.
The box ARE an example of Blizz stepping in though. Prices WERE indeed very much too gross for the demand. The drop increase, the coins shuffle and the exchange. It pretty much crashed the tinderbox economy. Its stable somewhat now but with S2 on the horizon… Hang on to your britches!
The other factor that people are forgetting is that a lot of raiders are not playing right now.
Because they farmed the heck out of delves in the beginning of the expansion, there’s a LOT of delve currency in the hands of players that are offline right now.
If blizzard makes the new delves drop more mats or the currency starts getting dumped into mats or if some popular streamer goes “omg I made so much gold turning my undercoin into delve mats” tinderbox absolutely could crash again, demand for weapons not withstanding.