[Feedback] - Professions, Patron Order System (POS) and Profession Bugs

Community WoW Community Council
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Introduction

It’s been now almost two weeks since TWW released, and I had more than enough time to tinker around with the professions and the new patron order system.

My first impression has been good so far, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done to make the system fair for all professions. Some professions require a hefty amount of investment with little in return or suffer from too many crafting goods you can specialize for, so you may end up with patron orders you can’t do. This will result in ppl not interacting with the patron order system as they should do, imo. as rewards feel unsatisfying for the most part.

Patron Order Rewards

Some scenarios I would like to suggest for the POS is having a clear Reward Structure going forward. This means, as the harder the order is to fulfill for the crafter, the better the reward should be. While I see potential, this may end up being a WoD Garrison Situation if it offers too good of rewards, it is def. atm. very unsatisfying to engage with.

Some possible solutions I would like to suggest is f.e. offer a portion of the invested materials as a reward in some scenarios or having profession specific benefits (f.e. giving some of the materials for the Crowd Pummler to Engineers or Potions / Flasks to an Alchemist).

Alchemist= Flask / Potions
Engineer = Crowd Pummler Parts/ Throw Potions
Blacksmith= Null Stone / Profaned Tinderbox (those drop way too rare)
f.e.

Additionally, the Gold Reward should increase a bit in my PoV. The hardest ones should at least reward 2k Gold, while easy ones should give 200 Gold.

Patron Order Requirements and the Skill Point Lottery

As it is currently is, Crafters have to roll a dice every time new orders pop-up in the Patreon Order System. If they are lucky, they can get Skill Points for almost no afford. If fortune isn’t with, you will see something like this:

Currently, my leather worker is specialized on mail bracers, yet I hadn’t any patron orders offering those to me. Getting orders I can’t fill out cost me around 10 skill points now as my LW wasn’t able to do these orders.

The POS should offer only orders you can fill out skillwise.

Additionally, the requirement and amount of epic orders should have a minimum and maximum per week. My alchemist f.e. had 3 orders for a flask cauldron, which required me to buy the vendor item for 57k gold (he also wasn’t specialized into flasks). This shouldn’t be the case and should be rebalanced.

Also, Items that may be content of another profession but are part of a recipe should be autofilled by the patron. So you as a Blacksmith won’t need to worry about getting LW Items from the Auction House to fill out an order.

Engineering feels not worthwhile in War Within

I was really excited about the new Mount for Engineering and had hopes it may be a good selling item for us engineers. Yet it is more of a shopkeeper than a good seller, making the investment of pilfering parts not really worth it.

Additionally, the profession doesn’t offer a lot of wanted Equipment Items besides some Profession Tools.

Googles f.e. have the problem since tier set have been reintroduced that they occupied a tier slot. It would be nice to have the possibility to turn Googles into tier items while keeping the special attributes of Googles.

Profession Bugs

Underneath, I will update Profession Bugs I encountered and that need fixing asap. - those have been reported, but yet haven’t received a fix yet (some have being present in BETA).

Blacksmithing:

Charged Slicer (bugged since Beta after Switching it from a Dagger to an axe in some Beta Build)

The Weapon doesn’t benefit from being an axe, despite being fully skilled into axes, as seen below:

Additionally, Finishing Reagents are being locked behind Short Blades Specialization.

As this is one of the most wanted items, a Blacksmith specialized into axes can produce and one of the few reasons you would invest skill points here, it should be fixed asap… Otherwise, any smith who invested into this is miles behind and Short Blades will be dominating the market as they can craft all most all wanted weapons a smith can produce.

This should be fixed before Raid Week!

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This and the absolutely pathetic gold rewards are my biggest gripes. Last week, I had seven simultaneous orders that required me to spec into things I A) had no interest in and B) had no possible way of achieving before expiry. And that’s just inscription on my priest. There were a bunch of others between my engineering on priest and inscription/engineering on mage as well.

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Hey great post :slight_smile: Few thoughts:

I think this is already the case, at least I’m noticing far more Acuity & knowledge rewards from the harder crafts (and those are the primary rewards of the entire system).

I don’t think the Patron orders are meant to be a profitable thing, clearly. I think they are meant to fulfill quests, do crafts, and spend gold to get more Acuity & knowledge. This is unlike player-to-player crafts where obviously the goal is to make gold. I think this delineation is helpful to the players, especially players on dead servers or when the expansion passes and people want to farm achievements for example.

I think the gold & rewards opinion may have some recency bias, mats are very expensive and as we normalize into the season(s) I think the patron orders will feel more balanced.

This is fair, I think there’s something to be said about seeing orders you can’t fulfill as something to work towards. A good middle ground is to just offer more filters, and offer some really easy crafts with more reagents fulfilled.

We’ve kinda’ had a copy-paste from what was in Dragonflight, I just don’t think guns/bracers/helm are “bis” for anyone so it’s less useful for sure… I think if we saw a resurgance of goggles being bis for PvP gear it would be neat (harkening back to TBC era gearing).

I pick engineering solely for all of the wormholes, it’s just so powerful and convenient to doing anything in the world(s). Having a wormhole to every zone and porting around saves a ton of time. I think this alone is very powerful for Engineers.

Being Toy and Mount creators is pretty fun, but it definitely has a short fuse… maybe engineer-only firework shows or something… more grand? Idk.

Agreed. Not to mention the mismatch between the crafting systems not finding reagents in our warband banks… Something Lenarius mentioned here.

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I think part of the misconception here is that we dont know what kind of catchup mechanics are in play, at what frequency, and at what skill levels.

To be dismissive of the current system because it doesnt ideally fit into the narrative for maximum completion for your character is premature.

Whether or not you as a player decide to throw down 10k-100k on a recipe to make a skill point reward recipe, is on you.
The system isn’t urgently requiring a rewrite.

I see very little validity as to genuine system changing reasons so far in this thread.

If you knew for a fact that in 2 weeks, if you left all the work orders along completely, you would earn every skill point and aquity previously available. From basic recipes you would have naturally leveled up with for knowledge/ overall skill.

Would there be any cause for concern?

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If there is a system that offers some kind of bad luck protection or rewards for abandoned patron orders, that would of course be great in two weeks. The problem is that knowledge points are most important in the first few weeks if you really want to interact with crafting or establish a market dominance, f.e. as a crafter. If you do crafting not any serious ofc. it doesn’t bother you.

So if there is a difference of 0-20 knowledge points because some orders cost a fortune and others get their points almost for free, that’s a problem.

I have 3 Blacksmith and each of them has started at the same day leveling the profession, yet one is far superior due to Patron Order Luck (12 points ahead) while the others have been gifted with armor smith orders I couldn’t fill every time a Knowledge Point Order came around.

The new Crafting System was always created with the intent to have people specialize in different profession topics. So the patron order system should respect that imho. - If you don’t like that, that is totally fine, ofc. . In my personal space, I see a lot of frustration, esp. when it comes to knowledge point orders.

I was never talking about buyable recipes. Those examples are all locked behind different areas of the profession.

A Smith requires currently f.e. way more investment to fulfill epic orders than a leather worker. It should be balanced around all professions to have the same amount of material investment for an order.

It is not dismissive at all, it just needs improvement in my POV - and with a new system any sort of feedback should be considered going forward. What would you do for the new system and what do you may dislike about it, f.e. ?

If they exist, it would be great to have those plans for catch up laid out, just like they did for the Legendary Axe.

Elaborate on that please :slight_smile: - I see a lot of pain points to discuss.

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I wonder how this is a problem at all.
Add on to this the idea that work orders need to provide substantial compensation for crafting an order that will in the end greatly benefit over time.

If a player is going through the paces to be angry they cant get every single mettle or KP. They are doing so, at this point in the expansion, to make oodles of gold with whatever specialization they are progressing.

The long term gains are being offset by these short term costs. These players, dont need excess consideration.

All the casual-esque players will have an easy time getting those extra points a week or two later with no sweat off anyones back.

I dont have much of anything that I see as flatout wrong with system. Do I have my own ideas of improvement, yes. Doesnt mean the current system is wrong.

bunch of grammar edits. Typed this up initially on the train with mobile

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I do think the gold rewards and the artisan’s payouts with a couple random materials are a bit lackluster, but that’s not why I do them. Either it’s a partially funded first craft, some KP, or some acuity. I don’t mind if some of them are going to be costly or if I can’t do all of them, but I would like some parity or a bit less randomness.

I have 3 tailors. My warlock specs into armor/profession tool slots while my two alts focus on special bolts and multicrafting. Now it’s still early and things might balance out, but I’ve seen some definite imbalance in the randomness as to what types of orders have the KP items and things locked behind them.

One of those alts was able to get 4-5 of the blue KP item rewards because they were locked behind easy things like the Pioneer’s cloth items, but the other alt was only able to get one because 3 of them were locked behind those profession bags that require acuity to unlock and some other epic armor that they weren’t specced into.

I know it’s RNG, but I would like to see it a bit more balanced because that felt bad and 8 KP is pretty significant early on in the first week or two of the expansion. I don’t know if the batch of 10-12 patron orders that come in could be divided in such a way that you’ll always get a couple of the easy armor crafts, a couple of the epic armor crafts, a couple reagent crafts, etc.

Increasing parity between the options that players receive would help balance things out a bit I think.

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