I leveled and maxed out most of my professions months ago. Most were pretty cheap and easy to level just had to do the work every week. but Im on Sargeras and it definitely paid off and was well worth it. I love how I can make so much gold sitting in valdrakken between qs or waiting for my mythic key group to fill up.
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BoP needs to exist. They didnt have that in Diablo 3 and that lead to insane inflation of a flood of items.
Crafted artifacts and artifact upgrade items is a good idea. Crafted items that can make drops BoA for alts would be cool. Crafted appearance items and sets are a good idea too. There are a lot of options for crafted stuff that isnāt strictly progression but could make the professions more useful. A crafted item that resets the cooldown on dungeon portals would be a valuable item even at a fairly high cost. They could also do a respec thing similar to Path of Exile where you use currency/reagent or a crafted item to reset a number of skill points, node, or branch.
If you got in late, filling out your trees is a nightmare and the time gating feels absolutely awful (1 week cd on the crafted knowledge tomes, the item drops are on a weekly reset, dragon shard drop rates are awful, etc.). It makes perfect sense to somewhat gate/tie catching up on a profession to people who have already maxed the profession, having 1, 3, and 5 point knowledge tomes that are crafted by the respective profession using excess mettle could be a good option, maybe have it be a capstone that unlocks after you invest āxā points into the profession or once you fill out the tree. There needs to be something more. A pipe dream, but they could make a pretty substantial resource sink item that resets those weekly caps or even one that resets weekly legacy dungeon/raid lockouts or something. I find one of the most frustrating elements of professions to be the lack of constant demand items that donāt massively deflate as each patch progresses and people get geared and flasks, pots, feasts, etc. become less critical. Focusing on some more ever-green items would be really nice.
I know there are a lot of reasons this may not be a good idea but Iād also like it if we could learn more professions, even if it was grouped. e.g. 2 crafting and 2 gathering or 2 crafting 1 gathering (warbands might actually make this work, e.g. a max level node that lets any toon in your warband use the profession as though they had learned it, still have to learn it and max it on your alt but you can craft or gather on your main once you do, just donāt gain the profession knowledge or get to use the profession specific items or something). I like having crafting professions but I generally end up with only gathering professions for the characters I actually play because I like to farm when waiting for groups to fill and what not. Crafting professions really lack any sort of comparable mellow activity similar to flying around and farming unless you just camp in trade chat or the crafting window, which isnāt exactly engaging in the same way. Hard to say what the impact on the economy would be for such a change but it would be nice as someone who really only ever has one or two active characters at a time.
Also, just a personal annoyance, but the crafting order station and auction house should be merged or at least next to each other, the running back and forth is just a nuisance. They also need to make a menu you can open anywhere to view the crafting window so that you can peruse items and materials without physically being at the crafting order station (its fine if you have to be there to actually place an order).
The last huge thing I think professions probably need to really feel good is a huge crackdown on bots. The time investment for gathering professions is really painful these days and the profit margins are insanely narrow on things like consumables. I donāt see things getting better until there is far better control on this. It just wildly skews things away from being worthwhile on a reasonable timescale when the market is flooded by resources from people multiboxing gatherers 24/7. I canāt imagine it would be that hard for blizzard to track the major farming paths and identify these behavior patterns, but it still need a human touch which probably isnāt worth the cost in labor or loss of subs from the bot accounts. The existing answer to this has just been to use BoP items to regulate but an over-reliance on that approach seems to have really let things get worse in terms of anything that isnāt BoP reliant. If something doesnāt use sparks or mettle, it is dictated by the flooded raw material market making it pretty pointless. Things have always been this way to an extent but it feels worse now than I remember it being in the past. In previous expansions making flasks as an alchemist was pretty profitable and they were worth enough to make the double duration bonus feel really substantial but now it feels like a waste of time across the board.
I donāt know how to go about it, but a crafting material that is farmable but not easily farmed by bots could work. Something akin to crests that let you craft BoE items at a higher ilvl or that are used to craft an item to make an item of their corresponding level BoA, maybe eliminate the BoE boxes for flightstones and bake that into crafting instead. I guess this is overlapping with some of the warbands changes but I could see some room for interplay there.