As I understood it to be, the concept behind the professions system for Dragonflight was solid; provide depth and scope to both crafting and gathering professions, in order to make them much more interesting and engaging for players as they progressed through all of their profession’s levels, abilities, and recipes. However, the redesign seems less than half-measured. I believe it has generally failed to achieve the positive impact its changes were professed to achieve, due to multiple reasons.
Adherence to the MMORPG Power Creep Gear Progression System. Rather than there being a path for old equipment to be actually remain useful beyond mere appearance via transmog, everything from a past expansion is thrown away in a never-ending cycle. Not just the Heart of Azeroth, or our Legendary or Artifact weapons… everything. It’s truly sad that there has been no expansion-to-expansion use, modification, or upgrade, to previous “borrowed power” gear. It’s questionable game design to force the most powerful equipment we use for an entire expansion to be routinely discarded by design. Throwing in a line or two in lore, doesn’t excuse it.
Professions for previous expansions remain effectively abandoned, and were not redesigned or factored to actually be useful into the new system. There is simply no incentive for crafting professions to be truly unique in their offerings. This is basically the same Power Creep Hamster Wheel issue, just focused solely on professions. Every recipe is for a generic item. There are no longer any unique special named pieces of equipment we can make, with specific capabilities. Worse, we cannot make what we can craft truly unique, with any enchantment or modification that other equipment may have had in past expansions… just what this current expansion allows. That will in turn be thrown away as useless, with the next expansion, or even the just next power creep released into the current expansion.
Crafting remains bound primarily to the Auction House for most players. Public Orders? Where are they? Why can’t we take orders for anything and everything that might be within the purview of our profession? Why can’t we take orders for gear from previous expansions? Why are there never any public orders to fulfill for the vast majority of crafters? With rare exception, there has been no long-term perceptible change to crafting profession activity and profitability from any previous expansion.
Here’s a few idea on how to have a real impact on professions in World of Warcraft:
Eliminate BOP from everything that can be equipped, across the board. The only purpose it serves is to annoy players.
Eliminate BOP from ALL CRAFTING REAGENTS. Provide a path for non-dedicated end user raiding guild members with no life outside of WoW to actually participate. Allow everything to be sold on the auction house.
Provide upgrade paths to legendary and artifact-level gear. It would restore some of the focus of the game towards story and content, not just being a hamster on the wheel of Mythic+ uberl33t raiding…
Make ALL older expansion craftable items useful and desirable again, by item scaling according to the user.
Allow us to apply a much wider variety of enchants or effects to all item recipes, even from previous expansions.
Allow us to actually craft legendries and artifacts… with three or four enhanced effects.
Increase auction house fees for craftable items to 20-40%, with the potential exception of crafting reagents that are dependencies for other crafted goods. The objective is to really kick the public crafting order feature into high gear, rather than allowing it to be concentrated to a select few crafters from dedicated high end raiding guilds.
There are no public crafting orders, or even private ones, routinely from major factions. A completely player-driven economy is unrealistic… and it would be nice to see factions getting involved in the profession system.
Those are just a few thoughts on how to improve the game. Nothing I suggested should impact the majority of the player base, but its time that the game started returning to being playable by everyone, not just How Do You Kill That Which Has No Life…
Therein lies one of the largest problems with World of Warcraft, and specifically Blizzard’s development of World of Warcraft… perception.
Perception IS Reality, to most people.
Blizzard is well aware of this, and many decisions have been made based primarily on perception. That’s why we got the level and stat squish… twice. As you say… people like when numbers go up… but they also don’t like it when they get too large… they effectively become meaningless. Blizzard acted to try to return perceived meaning back to gear progression. Unfortunately, the Vertical Gear Progression system, every few expansions, is a hamster wheel.
BOP/Soulbound system was implemented later. Why? Because people exploited a lot and the game was just AH.
Just like Diablo 3 quickly became a boring and abandoned game as everything shifted from rewards from gameplay/trading to rewards from AH.
But the part from previous professions, yeah. They should start adding those to the work order system. At 1st I was thinking that I would finally start crafting some old rare recipes (at least for transmogs) that people will only know that you can craft by spamming forever the chat.
But no. I’m sure it’s probably because they need to do some work behind the scenes to add those items and we’ll definitely see if that’s the case for next expansion. If the DF recipes will stay or be removed from the order system.
To be honest, I think that they should shift almost everything to the order system and leave AH to just BOE drops, consumables/materials, etc. anything that you can’t craft, but can sell.
the entire system got flipped on its head and now you need to put 10x more effort into professions to be able to do the exact same thing we’ve always done: open our profession book and click craft
the profession system rework would have at least made sense if they reworked crafting to be like it is in ff14, but its not.
now you just have 17 different hurdles to jump to be decent at crafting
and the whole rng aspect of crafting feels pretty bad. if im maxxed on a profession and im given max quality mats i should be able to guarantee the highest quality item
and looking at engineering, 4 of its useful crafts is rng gated behind making the goggles that not many people want. if you dont buy peoples sparks for those crafts you may as well give up on the prospect of discovering the bracer patterns
Cant say I share your sentiment - new reworked professions are really engaging and I really love it.
Yes, even the rng part, inspiration proc gives that nice rush of dopamine every time.
I have all crafting professions on alts and can earn gold of every single one of them, yes even engineering.
Yes, it takes more effort than before, more learning, but this was huge rewamp and learning was needed.
People always have resistance to new and unknown things, this is normal, but will embrace it with time.
You can’t reset your spec trees if you messed up in S1. You can only unlearn, and lose everything. Maybe the ability to reset once per patch? Heck, even only 1 or 2 times total. Even charge gold for it, like 100K or something absurd.
I’ve already given up, as MY OWN mistakes have came back to bite me, and now I simply cannot be bothered with doing it all over again.
Additionally, XFACTION Trade Chat!!! Like why is this still missing? We can craft both sides, why not trade chat? There are other instances in which xfaction chat works(raids/dungeons,etc), so it’s not a major hurdle…
Very annoying to have to change toons on the same server to find a crafter for another toon.
Aside from that, i find it more interesting, just don’t like that should someone make a goof, then its toast for rest of the xpac, unless you wanna redo IT ALL from scratch. /PASS
I think there are some good points here. And my 2 cents:
I’m a big fan of crafting in FF14, and would love WoW to improve crafting towards crafter progression.
RNG recipes such as and on the level of neck felt really bad. I still don’t have one in my JWC.
Progression progression was largely tied to Reknown and I believe we very taxing to have to rep grind instead of craft and gather grind.
I believe a few of these issues may be solved with warbands and account wide Reknown, but still left with many recipes as RNG lottery bound, looking at you as well alchemy.
I believe that if WoW wants to implement RNG make it fun and a puzzle maybe? Mixing and matching potions as a mini game rather than a drop sounds fun and community driven rather than luck based that we had in DF.
Crafter gear appearance. These didn’t change and wish there were different looks based on crafter level / grade similar to FF14 tools.
I didn’t really get to interact much with the crafting orders system but would like to see the changes towards npc orders and not tied exclusive to player player interaction. Some of us have odd schedules but still want to use systems for progression.
The min max mentality with professions and wanting to create a pseudo classic wow forced communication and you feeling like your some go to for crafting is horrible and feels bad.
This system revamped has the potential to be something that gives us gold goblins , crafters, things to work on in the new zones also but the way it has been done… I feel like the people defending it the loudest are the ones who no lifed, or exploited , and who think you have to sweat, work etc … they’ll even say how it is fun and alt friendly.
I agree with the few points in thsi thread but I would have hoped they would have been more upfront with professions when exploits happened… handled it better… and not also ignored professions after they launched.
The task you are requesting is no small feat. It is going to take time as well as some of those older world effects were deemed broken or underwhelming and would require them to assess with the current game’s multipliers and nerf or buff those effects.
Making crafting material non-BoP would be a decent QoL change. Not sure if they would do it with Artisan’s Mettle unless they put a tag on it that made it BoA.
With the Artifact Weapons and Legendaries, they have added talents that do the same thing. Personally, do not see them adding these to professions.
The reason why for the change in crafting orders was so people were not ninjaing items crafted after getting traded the materials to craft said item. However, having both tradable and crafting would be the answer to both complaints. The only thing I wouldn’t want to see is the Epic items for trading and AH.
There have been several threads asking for cross-server personal crafting work orders ever since cross-server trading was allowed. That would be a decent QoL feature. I personally have not had an issue seeing daily public and personal work orders come in through the crafting tables.
The one thing that I think needs to be changed is requiring Artisan’s Mettle and Rare-Epic materials to be sent in all work orders to prevent people from ripping off the crafters.
Selling mettle is legitimate business.
Say you want 2 different tools crafted and you have no mettle, why not just order them without mettle, supply all mats and pay for mettle.
Crafters are protected by being notified that all mats are not supplied and they need to click to agree.
Sometimes im buyer and sometimes Im crafter and I see zero problem with that.
There was a guide I saw at the beginning of the expansion that recommended players to drop one or both professions and save them for last. They then grabbed every other production profession to fly around collecting all of the production profession treasure which in total gained over 1000 Artisan’s Mettle. Not saying it is fun but it is an option. With it this late in the expansion it would be absolutely annoying to get skill points. However, I do believe the profession books that restore deleted professions give you back all the points accrued.
The main issue I have with it is for most crafting professions (leatherworking for sure), it is impossible to get above ~60 skill points without crafting orders. Other than the 3 points a month from the Darkmoon Faire.
And, well, noone is submitting crafting orders. So maxing out most professions is impossible now.
Yeah I think LW is the biggest offender out there. It actually doesn’t require work orders to do (I levelled a 2nd LW alt without work orders), but it does take a lot of time/money if you avoid work orders (Some rep farms to get specific patterns…which on an alt does go faster with the rep bonuses, but still a bunch of time). If you have the money, you can get the 5 free season 1 sparks from the quest chain for 5 free points. Hold onto those as long as you can stand and then get your 5 free skill points and then do the recraft dance on them over and over fishing for additional skill ups (like a 1/10 chance…fun). I tried to save the DMF quest for last to push me over the top to 100
in my mind, I feel like every specialization tab should provide one pattern at the end of a node that you can easily use to skill up to 100 (given enough mats) without any BoP mats like sparks or time limited mats like mettle. Something similar to Master’s Hammer for blacksmithing.
You can use them on any of the epic crafted gear your LW can make (even on items your alts cannot actually equip), like Flame-Touched Cuffs or Life-Bound Bindings. You have them make the order to your LW toon. The gear will have terrible ilvl since it is season 1 sparks, but they are easy skill points essentially. On my LW toon I had the sparks on him, so I didn’t need to do any work orders but since you have the sparks on diff toons they can put the work order to your LW.
Important part:
The first craft is a guaranteed skill point. Recrafts are like 1/10 chance for a skill point.
I farmed up some other mats (like rousing elements) and sold on the AH to buy the mats I needed for my recrafts. I’d recommend just using all your old sparks on alts to get a guaranteed skill point for each craft. Once you run out of alt sparks, then if you have the gold and RNG luck you can recraft it over and over again fishing for more skill points (I did this on my first LW to 100, but it is low % chance … so this can be costly).
Oh I see…I don’t have any epic crafting recipes yet. I’m putting points into mail armor crafting now but I’m not quite to the point where I can get epic recipes yet.
