How did professions become so bad in this game?

Community General Discussion
1

It’s quite astonishing that they could mess up the crafting system so bad in this game, especially since they built this game on copying the successful mechanics and aspects of other games. But in the last 10 years or so, crafting became gradually worse to the terrible cesspool of whatever it is today…

Dragonflight is probably the worst. They had such a good concept and idea to allow players to find crafters to fulfill crafting orders and allow crafters to match up with people who need something crafted… But then everything else after it gets exponentially worse. If you come late to the expansion or you take a break, there’s no catch up at all, so you’ll be really far behind and due to the time gated nature of crafting, you cannot possibly gain crafting points to level up your craft like you could in previous expansions. Furthermore, the crafting order system is really bad in the way that it doesn’t work like many people expected it to, and they did little to nothing to improve it over time.

Legacy crafting is almost entirely impossible without buying WoW tokens. I looked at the market for legion and BFA materials to try and level those up because a lot of stuff is BOP which means that you can’t directly purchase it. You have to go and make a character, level it up yourself, and craft it all on your own. Good luck doing that when there are 300,000 of the material that you want on the AH, but each of them costs 15g each, and just one stack of the material that you need will cost you 35k. As someone who doesn’t play this game like it’s my entire purpose in life, this was a huge struggle for me. Just to get some materials to level up blacksmithing in BFA, it bankrupted me. I had to use everything I had just to get the material, and even then, it doesn’t cover the explulsom which is completely impossible to farm unless you have hundreds of thousands of gold because it’s untradable, can’t trade it across your account or any of your characters…

Older expansion professions are even worse, too. Some of them are demonically, mind numbingly hard to obtain, like cataclysm. But the prices for them on the market are so steep that it is almost comical. I don’t even know how they can justify charging as much as they do for some things. Maybe it’s because it takes so long to farm it? I guess that would be one explanation.

But if you look at other games out there, the crafting in them is actually really fun, you don’t have to spend any money in the game, you don’t have to spend hundreds of hours farming out something that’s no longer relevant. Why can’t this game have a normal, meaningful crafting system that actually is maintained and updated regularly?

60 Likes
2

The devs made them ‘better’ to the point that I no longer do them on retail. Still enjoy them in vanilla though.

53 Likes
3

I think the dragonflight version of professions is a big improvement.

It has always been not very profitable to come late in the expansion and try to make gold from professions.

you can farm it a lot easier than you could when the content was current. If you liked professions so much why don’t you already have all these maxed out?

14 Likes
4

Agreed. I’m glad they seem to be sticking with this new design.

10 Likes
5

To each their own. Personally, I’m just glad that I’m casual enough that I don’t have to deal with DF crafting even a little bit.

20 Likes
6

Crafting in DF is inarguably the best it’s ever been. Other than cooking and alchemy (and jewelcrafting to a lesser extent) the professions have been mostly useless beyond making leveling gear. When have you ever been able to craft an entire set of mythic quality gear (with your preferred stats no less) that can be continually upgraded throughout the life of the expansion? DF crafting wins hands down

10 Likes
7

Pre-DF crafting was a snoozefest. Click, fill a progress bar, repeat. Inspiration, Multi-craft, Resourcefulness as well as missives and embellishments make the process more interesting and meaningful. Only wish they’d do away with the time-gating and also return to vanilla-style inter-dependency between professions.

2 Likes
8

How did professions become so bad in this game?

Professions are bad in most games. The one thing I’ve always disliked about professions in several games I’ve played is that when leveling up, the closer you get to the next level, the worse you get at creating the item.

So in this case, the item goes from yellow to green and you don’t get the same credit for it. That’s counter intuitive. The better you get, the more successful you should be at creating an item for which you would get full credit.

5 Likes
9

Corporate panicked at falling player numbers and decided to “meaningful choice” timegate hold hostage another element of the game, thus ruining it. They made professions a worthless waiting game meant to farm out sunk cost fallacy for waiting out subscription time while not being grind/effort based in reality. They tried to hide such and it initially worked, but eventually regular folks figured it out it was mobile game trashy.

Additionally players are getting bad mannerism’d by “falling behind” against “exploit early, exploit often” players who abused week 1 and 2 exploits, and bots that still slam every profession in this game more than ever before.

32 Likes
10

Just add some kind of knowledge point catch up or reset.

3 Likes
11

Same! It’s more RPG style.

Now, it could use some tweaks and fixes, but they’re on the right track.

4 Likes
12

It’s too late now, warfarin is launching by august/september according to the date the FOMO vendor mount that they put by the BMAH goes unavailable.

2 Likes
13

For sure. Adding a way to get content locked crafting patterns would also be nice, especially after the content is essentially abandoned…I’m looking at you lariat.

4 Likes
14

Assuming I didn’t misunderstand the complaint, this is the main reason I always make sure that all my toons are independently capable of gathering their main mats (well except the tailor who just gets mailed all the cloth); at least cross faction mail means I don’t have to double up on the important professions anymore

1 Like
15

Professions are one of the best part about the new expansion. The system is complex, fun, and most importantly has remained relevant throughout an entire cycle. There are some issues, but it’s the first iteration.

7 Likes
16

Just buy wow tokens, they are $20 bucks, its not alot of money… skip starbucks a few times and you can get a token

17

nice meme

/10 char

18

One of my fondest memories in Dragonflight was getting points in Azureweaving and making my own Azureweave set. I still wear it.

I did troll a bit at first with like 10 points in Cloth Collection before realizing it’s atrocious. They need to balance some nodes more. I did love collecting Profession Points though. It was one of the few things that made me want to go out and do stuff.

1 Like
19

Crafting should have been account wide like 10 years ago.

11 Likes
20

Sadly you are correct. Buying tokens is pretty much the only thing a legit player can do at this point. The players that support the botting community simply won’t stop botting and buying gold from other botters. Legit players will never be able to compete against this.

2 Likes