I do like the current profession system in DF. MMOs have always been about player progression and interacting with other players. This DF profession system is still player progression in my opinion, better crafting over time and effort rewards better player progression as time goes on. This system fits the MMO game style perfectly.
2 Likes
Nope.
Because it is so easily brick your entire progression, they make it impossible to fix this so you have to tough it out for weeks to get to the point you can progress again and at this point in the game, you are so far behind what everyone else can do that it’s pointless even to try.
3 Likes
It was pretty hard to brick your build beyond repair, unless you went fully into an AH build and expect to compete with people on crafting orders, in which case, that sounds like a skill issue.
And even if you did, you weren’t as far behind as you probably believed, as there are a finite number of points in the tree. After a weaponsmith spends, for example, 90 points in the sword tree, he will never be able to spec better into swords, you will only ever be catching up to his sword making prowess. Compound this with the fact that something like shoulders aren’t going to be as popular to craft as boots or belts or swords, and the people who were ahead started to run into diminishing returns as far as their gold per point spent.
I made plenty of gold in 10.1, which launched 6 months after the start of the expansion, which was more than enough time to get most of the way through (or even fully complete) most profession trees. Your lack of success with the crafting system can be solely attributed to your lack of effort, and not because you "brick"ed your build on December 3rd 2022.
2 Likes
It was pretty hard to brick your build beyond repair, unless you went fully into an AH build and expect to compete with people on crafting orders, in which case, that sounds like a skill issue.
My engineer stalled out at 50 with nothing new to craft or recraft. Turns out you had to skill 35 points into Explosives to unlock the Suspiciously Silent Crate to allow you to get 1 skill point per day. Except I didn’t know that, and I had spec’d into making ammo and scopes instead. So it would take a month of grinding to get to the point where I can progress my engineering at the rate of 1 skill up per day.
It’s not bricked, per se - but it’s so time gatedly slow that I just unlearned engineering that day and picked up herbalism instead. You can’t botch your progression there since skill points aren’t tied to either getting a lucky recipe drop, spending mountains of gold to brute force your way past green and yellow levelled items, or screwing up your specialization.
4 Likes
Or you could have spec’d into the profession gear or combat gear nodes directly to the left of the ammo node, you only needed 15/40 in the middle node to pick the 2nd subspec. The profession gear was 3 points every time up to 90, and then 1 point up to 100, and the bracers/goggles were 3 points up to 100!
The 30 points you put into ammo is 3 weeks of points, which isn’t all that long. Even still, did you just not do any of your first crafts for knowledge. Assuming you put the full 40 points in the center node (which wouldn’t have been wasted points), that’s still only 70 point spent, which was a decent bit less than what you should have had by the end of a couple of weeks.
Or you could have spec’d into the profession gear or combat gear nodes directly to the left of the ammo node, you only needed 15/40 in the middle node to pick the 2nd subspec.
So, I’d have needed 40 points instead of 35, taking the grind up to 5 weeks instead of 4. That sounds far better.
The profession gear was 3 points every time up to 90, and then 1 point up to 100, and the bracers/goggles were 3 points up to 100!
Great. But I’m not going to bother spending 5 weeks grinding to get skill ups if I’m not going to spend 4 weeks to do it, either.
The 30 points you put into ammo is 3 weeks of points, which isn’t all that long. Even still, did you just not do any of your first crafts for knowledge.
It seems reading comprehension to suit your narrative is not something you’re good at:
My engineer stalled out at 50 with nothing new to craft or recraft. I had done everything to get knowledge and mettle that wasn’t time gated, rng drop, or locked behind renown progression. And it wasn’t ‘3 weeks’ worth of points. I’d been playing for about a week and a half at that point.
At this point in time, I’ve stopped bother to work on any profession that isn’t gathering because the reward for the time spent just isn’t there. There is no benefit to me doing so that cannot be obtained easier from some other method.
1 Like
Exactly, lack of effort, not due to any shortcoming in the system.
The maximum amount of points you could have spent in function over form and not had anything you could craft for skill ups would have been 89. 29 points in the middle “function over form” node, 30 in utility, and 30 in gears for gear. We’ll use the 2 weeks of knowledge thing again, so you get 20 points from the 2 weeks of weeklies. You get 10 points from the very first, easy to access, consortium vendor. 4 points from the first dragon shard quest. 6 points from the treasures. 5 for the profession master. There’s at least 41 first crafts you can obtain with those 89 points. So we get 41 + 20 + 10 + 4 + 6 + 5. So that’s 86 points, which is 4 less than you’d need to get “unstuck” if you had literally intentionally done everything incorrectly. Dragon shards had a pretty good drop rate at the start of the expac and everyone was farming rares, so 4 from that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
tl;dr: no, you almost certainly didn’t do “everything to get knowledge and mettle” in the first couple of weeks.
Exactly, lack of effort, not due to any shortcoming in the system.
Oh, right. It’s my fault that I was stuck needing to spend 4 weeks not levelling my engineering to level my engineering. Totally my own lack of effort and not at all the game deliberately time locking progression at all.
The maximum amount of points you could have spent in function over form and not had anything you could craft for skill ups would have been 89
I don’t remember how may knowledge points I had at that point and it’s not like I can check since I deleted engineering and I refuse to go back to it again. But the situation is I would need to spend the next 4 weeks taking explosives from 0 to 5, then to 30 to get silenced bomb crate and frankly, at that point after being told by the game that I would need to grind out a month doing nothing in order or progress slowly, I decided my time and money was better spent on other systems with better rewards.
I capped out herbalism within a week and have made more money from that and mining that I can comfortably commission any piece I need made and not worry about the costs - and in most circumstances, I can provide the materials needed without needing to use the AH at all.
We’ll use the 2 weeks of knowledge thing again, so you get 20 points from the 2 weeks of weeklies. You get 10 points from the very first, easy to access, consortium vendor. 4 points from the first dragon shard quest. 6 points from the treasures. 5 for the profession master.
Engineering only gets 9 points from weeklies, not 13 like other crafts. Not that I did the weeklies, since I didn’t even know they existed at that point. So your ‘89 possible points’, should be in reality, 69 (nice). And at that point, I’d already sunk all 69 points into Function Over Form and Utility - something which takes 70 points. So I had 70 points into the system, and nothing worth crafting to progress further.
Dragon shards had a pretty good drop rate at the start of the expac and everyone was farming rares, so 4 from that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
I wasn’t here at the start of the expansion. I started in October, towards the end of Season 2. So your assumption is baseless.
But, do go on, keep on defending the multi billion dollar company and telling me how I’m playing the game wrong and how it’s all my fault. Blizzard is absolutely perfect and I’m just the horrible scrub who knows nothing, right?
1 Like
You completely missed the point. You didn’t need to go into bombs. You could have done bracers, which you unlock in the function over form tree, to get points past 50.
Since reading comprehension doesn’t seem to be your strong suit, I’ll spell it out a little more clearly. Those 89 points are not the expected earned knowledge points. You claimed you earned every single point you could get, and put them into the function over form tree. That 89 is the literal maximum you could earn and not mess it up. If you spec 90 points into function over form, it is impossible to be stuck at 50. 30 points in utility completely fills up that node + 30 from gears for gear to completely fill up that node + 29 from function over form to get as far as you can without unlocking Gear. If you invest the 30th point into function over form, you unlock the bracers, which gets you past 50.
Engineering gets 11. (Technically 12 if you count the forbidden reach rare) 2 from the order quest, 2 from the instructor quest, 2 from the “go out and do stuff” quest, 2 from the dirt pile drops, 2 from the mob drops, and 1 from the treatise.
Oh, even better, you would have had access to the engineering treasures down in zaralek caverns, which would have made it literally impossible for you to get stuck at 50 by putting your points in function over form, even assuming no dragon shards past the 4 you get from the intro. There are 8 engineering treasures in Zaralek caverns for a total of +24 points.
- 41 from first crafts
- 20 points from 2 weeks of weeklies (I’m assuming no treatise or forbidden reach)
- 10 points from the consortium vendor
- 30 points from the treasures (6 + 24)
- 5 points from the profession master
- 4 points from the dragon shard intro
That gives us a total of 110 possible points gained in 2 weeks, well above the 90 threshold for being impossible to get stuck. Again, you didn’t do everything to get unstuck, got easily frustrated due to your lack of knowledge or willpower, and quit. It’s the equivalent of the people in WoD who failed silver proving grounds because they refused to keybind their interrupt, but expected to still be allowed to queue for heroics.
Utter crap!!! Way too complicated and layered and gated. If you like the profs you don’t like playing, you like working. And spending lots of time outside the game researching what should be simple and obvious.
It’s interesting to see how easily mindsets can be manipulated by bad design to be compliant to crap.
5 Likes
The epic pieces that were recraft-able, some of the embellishments, and many of the toys have been the best implemented they ever were in WoW.
The vast majority of the system could be improved further for sure. Looking at the PvP/Levelling gear and various commodity items outside of alchemy that need to be elevated to those levels.
Then there are the systems that are on the cusp of greatness, but I’m sure they are nightmares behind the scenes. Work Orders are so close to more broadly being functional as a marketplace, but have been relegated to a kind of deployed prototype.
The are victories. Like personal orders and being able to browse the entire library of craft-able goods in the game. I’m actually not opening up WoWhead or flitting through TSM, there’s the somewhat immersive walk over to the artisan market that lets me search and browse for item recipes.
I missed the entirety of season 2. Doing perfectly fine with my character progression for Druid, Monk, Rogue, and Warrior.
Same here, It only took me till last month, Dec. 2023 to figure out smoothly how the crafting order system works, and that I can fill my OWN rep with Consortium between my toons by crafting for myself. Mailing to the Enchanter Alt for DE mats to craft enchants for my 4 mains, etc, I made a good recyclable system for KP as well!!
Love the profession overhaul, some observations:
-If they go forward with this in War Within, they must let you be able to preview the trees ahead of committing to a spec within the professions pane
-Allow a ‘refund skill points’ option at the trainer, give it a gold cost. In case a tuning pass early in the expansion makes one embellishment dead or bis from one reset to the next.
-Altar of Decay type workstation can’t happen again; example, the looms and the shadowforge are great, they’re in the open world, and might require clearing some mobs, that’s it. The Altar of Decay should have been in Brackenhide open-world, it’s not like it’s easy to land there anyway.
-Elemental Lariat recipe was a mistake, it’s so difficult to farm, getting the recipe is akin to finding a golden ticket
-Engineering feels extremely bad to have if you’re not a hunter, and even then…explosives should have been usable in instanced combat; I know engi has always been the odd duck, but I came real close to dropping it this expansion
I have capped and have an overflow in BS, JC, Inscription, Alchemy, Mining and herbing. Almost done with engi, for all the good it’s done my paladin, working on the other four (Lagging on LW because I don’t have mail-wearers, and have barely touched my tailor/enchanter)
Not many people wants to go to BH, thats why Altar crafts hold its value, less competition is always welcome, just keep m0 lockout extended.
Kinda neutral on this, never had recipe, never bothered to buy or farm it, doing just fine w/o it. In general, rare things were always motivating people, from Sulfuron onwards.
Engineering is useful in open world, has some usefulness in instanced content, but it just cant be useful too much (working bombs). It would be mandatory for all m+/raiders and Blizzard want to avoid that situation, for good reason.
1 Like
I’m like, 80% sure you could since the beginning. At worst, wowhead had a tree calculator up at/near expansion launch.
I’m split 50/50 on this. On the one hand, they’ve only really majorly nerfed embellishments between seasons, and part of the skill in gold making is identifying the markets before/more accurately than others. On the other hand, I wouldn’t put it past blizzard to majorly nerf them. Maybe instead of having it cost gold, it costs 10% of your accumulated knowledge points, so if you really think you messed up, then you have a way forward, but without it being able to be infinitely respecc’d.
This also fits neatly into the new professions being more concerned with time investment than capital investment like a gold respec cost would have. Any gold amount that would be a hindrance to a dedicated goblin would be out of reach for normal players, and having it be an amount that makes regular players think twice is just a cost of doing business or non issue for dedicated goblins.
I hard disagree on this one. Other crafters not being willing to make the trip or keep an alt out there is exactly why decay crafters are able to charge a premium. The portable decay cauldron also exists, which you don’t have to step foot in the instance for, only the alchemist that crafts it does.
Having a super rare drop recipe is fine, the issue was that it didn’t update to the new world events as patches went on, so it became increasingly ethereal over time. If it had dropped from zaralek caverns rares and dreamsurge boxes or something, it would have been a lot more manageable.
Yeah, engineering has been in the gutter since they nerfed it from being mandatory in previous expansions. I’ve always liked the idea that alchemy potions could be the longer form consumables, and engi bombs could be shorter form. For example, if you need something to pop during bloodlust, then a 45 second potion would be better, but if you neeeded to burst down a pack in 10-15 seconds then engi bombs would be better and differentiate consumables that way. Or have alchemy pots be for single target and engineering bombs be for AOE. Just some way of having each them be different, but best at some general situation.
2 Likes
Throwing it out there - make cheap explosives be that, cheap, piddly damage.
The good bombs worth taking into a dungeon, make them have an extended cd (like heroism) AND also require a lot of mats. Like, a lot a lot. It still runs into the issue though, of it being op. Hmm.
Make it share a cooldown with potions so you’re limited and need to make a choice: do I heal, or do I use this for extra damage?
Absolutely hate Dragonflight crafting.
5 Likes
The entire experience was tainted by ‘exploit early and exploit often’
Many folks got so far ahead in the first couple of weeks that there was never an even playing field.
It ruined the entire ordering system as no one could compete with the few that found the exploit before blizz nerfed the drop rate on dragon shards of knowledge with NO way to compensate for normal players.
4 Likes