Hey everyone, Blizzard has listened and engineering has received a fairly major revamp from the patch on June 25th. I will have a post later in thread below and will keep the original post here unedited beyond this point.
Over the past several weeks I have gone over and thoroughly tested all the crafting professions multiple times. On live, I do every profession, have every recipe, and have done thousands of crafts for people, so I will be coming at it from that angle. Most professions are in a workable state, but there is one profession that feels completely off from all others, It is engineering.
What feels off about engineering?
⢠Time consumption: It is incredibly time-consuming, the scour through scrap takes hours upon hours as itâs a unique 1. That means you cannot scour all as if you do, you will craft 1000 times, use 5000 scrap and only get 1 single prototype. So anyone who uses scour all will get burnt badly and lose everything they they progressed for. Thus the only method is carefully watching with scour all or craft 1 at a time for thousands of crafts.
⢠All recipes learned through Notes: Itâs an interesting design theory. It makes thematic sense for engineering. It is not implemented in a way that makes it competitive or fun like other professions. Itâs a great idea, just takes a long time and feels clunky. The notes do not feel rewarding, there is no targeting for what you want. If you want profession equipment, it could be the very last item you learn after investing dozens if not more hours into engineering.
⢠Invent: 3-day cooldown for learning a singular prototype of a recipe. It is not an actual recipe. Itâs just something you disassemble for 2-8 pages (30 pages for a recipe). It costs 75 scrap for that and Scour is 5 scrap per. It is more likely to find a prototype from scour for cheaper than it is invent. Invent is also an extremely long cd for no real reason, at most it should be daily and give more than it does. It also averages out to roughly 1 recipe a month if you rely on only invent which seems incredibly off. (Assuming you do not invest fully in inventing tree which might allow you to get 2 recipes a month)
What are the current problems associated with the profession?
⢠Limit 1 Prototype: On top of what was talked about in the first bullet point. If you have a prototype anywhere on your character, in the bank ect. If you use invent, you will not receive a prototype and it will go on a 3-day cooldown. Thus wasting the 3-day cd and a bunch of materials.
⢠Pilfer through parts: To learn this recipe. You need to hit skill 25 in engineering and invest enough points to go into Parts in the middle of the Inventing specialization tree. Now this feels off as scrap is the main material needed for advancing the profession. But to get the source of gathering scrap inside the profession. You need to of already used a bunch of scrap to learn recipes and advance to skill 25 in the profession then invest all the knowledge you earned to reach it. The recipe should be learned baseline when learning the profession.
⢠Learning Prototypes: If you learn all the prototypes instead of scraping them for notes. You can eventually run out of prototypes. Invent will do nothing, and you can scour a thousand parts and never find another blueprint. It breaks your entire profession. This is intended currently as you only learn the prototypes you do not know. So if you do not scrap and instead just use them to learn them. The profession is bricked forever till you unlearn and redo the entire profession.
⢠Inventing specialization: 40 points are whatâs needed to start gathering notes at a decent rate. A decent rate is still many hours of scouring and scraping prototypes to gather notes. It just means your note gathering is noticeably increased. If you want to be more stable with scrap and get even more notes, you will need to invest 140 points. In order to gather 140 points, itâs most likely gonna take a month if not a bit longer. If anyone goes into another specialization first, itâs going to be way longer for them to unlock things. Itâs a large investment just to start learning recipes at a rate thatâs not incredibly rough.
⢠Time: As talked about in the first bullet point of this post, the need to scour thousands of times and assuming even infinite materials and fully maxed in inventing. You are looking at 5-8 hours depending on luck for constant crafting to unlock all recipes. As live will not have access to skips on the beta. The grind may be much longer than that.
Suggestions to give an idea of where improvements could take place.
⢠Remove unique 1 Prototype: Allow multiple of the same prototypes to be crafted to allow for craft all to work, to prevent the bug with invent giving nothing and to make sure people donât lose a massive amount of materials without realizing the constant crafts wonât give you any more notes till you use your unique prototype. This will also make it so you cannot brick your profession when you know all the prototype recipes.
⢠Notes: Increase the rate of notes via successfully using them and learning prototype recipe (maybe gathering 2-3 notes?), or failing to learn prototype recipe (gathering more from failure). Other sources of notes would also be incredibly beneficial to cut down on the grind.
⢠Vendor recipes: Including more recipes on the trainer and lowering notes you need to farm would dramatically lower the grind, and time consumption and make the profession feel a lot better.
Final thoughts on engineering.
Overall, engineering this expansion is a very interesting concept. If done right, It will be a unique and new take on how to do a profession. Sadly, it needs a fair bit more love and care to get there. In its current iteration. It will be the only profession in several years that I do not touch. I hope that it gets the care and attention it needs and fixes several of the main issues such as prototypes, time and notes.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this post and I hope you have a wonderful day.