I know I’m a bit late to this thread, but this seems like a topic that deserves a post on the community council forums or in whatever other channels they give you community council players where there’s likely to be some decent chance of the relevant people at Blizzard seeing the feedback. I kind of doubt Blizzard ever looks at the achievement forum.
I’ve got a fair bit of feedback and hope you or any other achievement-minded folks on the community council have also got some feedback you’re sending Blizzard’s way. I do worry that when the next patch releases, they’re going to slip into ignoring this mass of achievements they stuck in.
Of course it’s good to have things be retroactive, and I’m glad the parts they provide retroactivity for are there, but in a bit of irony, this gave me a quick moment of demoralization because of how bad the Legion mining / herbing achievements are.
I played Legion extensively and had a single gatherer for each profession, all of whom were maxxed out on skill points. Other than infernal brimstone (which is awarded under slightly different circumstances than the other Rank 3’s), I didn’t have a SINGLE ore or herb at rank 3.
That was a bit of a blow. To know that I played that entire expansion and over the course of natural farming never got one of those Rank 3 drops. The commentary from other players who have spent time working on it recently is also demoralizing. Unlike most of the other achievements, this isn’t something where you can log on and make SOME progress at a somewhat consistent and reliable rate towards your next goal. You could log on, farm for hours and hours, and come away with absolutely nothing.
There are other things in the game like this (farming for rare mounts can easily net you nothing over the course of hours), but few quite as attention-requiring and afk-resistant as ore / herb gathering (if I farm low drop rate bosses, it involves a lot of afk travel time / RP that I can alt-tab for, whereas with gathering, I need to be monitoring the map and moving my guy at all times).
Usually Blizzard doesn’t re-visit drop rates, and I feel like there’s probably a small window of time for them to actually take a look at this and make any additional changes before they ignore things like Broken Isles mining / herbing for good.
But they really should revisit it now and if you or others can make some noise, I think it would be much better to get that noise in before they’re back to focusing on bigger topics with a new tier release.
The fix here should be easy for Blizzard. Up the drop rates for advancing the gathering profession ranks for Legion to match what they did in BFA. Those same gathering characters of mine had most of BFA mining / herbing Rank 3’s complete and none of Legion’s. They were played equally extensively in both expansions and had max skill points.
At the time, I remember thinking the same thing even without achievements existing. I remember playing BFA and thinking that they had “fixed” the harshness of their RNG for rank advancement in the gathering professions. With them having now added these Legion achievements, they should go back and up the Legion drop rates. BFA approach makes it easy to provide this feedback, because we can point to an example of what a reasonable fix is. It’s highly likely that BFA’s drop rates were selected specifically in reacting to feedback from Legion, so why not adjust Legion’s now that there’s an achievement for it?