How do we make professions a core feature again?

Community General Discussion
61

Disagree. In WoD, I was selling gems easy for a couple thousand a pop all the way to close and then I’d just send that gold to the toon who would buy my wow tokens, mounts, pets, etc on.

I find it hard to believe that everyone simply just switched to JC and now the supply is so high but then again, I haven’t leveled my lock so I don’t know if JC is easy to craft/lvl or not which would also affect that market.

Either way, if there were only 3 gems of my preference listed at 7k, I wouldn’t buy them and I’d walk around unsocketed. If I had a lot of gold, I would have no problems buying them at 7k.

I’m not saying that there isn’t a bloat in supply, I just disagree with supply being the only factor producing current results.

62

They dispensed with the garrison concept so easily! It was a waste of developer time. They should’ve turned it into a farming profession! If you liked it, go for it but it takes up a profession slot! If you didn’t like garrisons, just pick a different gig!

People, we need to be sharing our ideas and ideas we like, not debating others’ ideas.

63

Forums are a place of discussion. You CAN have a discussion while exchanging ideas. They are NOT mutually exclusive.

1 Like
64

Easy answer. The community figures out the best profession for dungeon and raid content. Everyone does the exact same profession.

65

Unpopular opinion but:

I don’t really know why professions are even a thing in ANY MMO. Or rather I do… gathering/crafting are easy to code time sinks that players have grown accustom to over the decades these games have existed. And every game has one because older games had them ergo - players expect them.

But really, is running around the world collecting beaver skins or whatever that exciting? Does anyone get fired up for skinning x 1000 beavers? Or creating 200 pairs of slightly magical pants? Really?

I’m not saying ‘we don’t like making money’. Course everyone likes a way to get cash in the game. But this is just so… meh. Professions are bad now but they were ALWAYS bad. At best ones like engineering helped in pvp.

This stuff doesn’t exist in the fore-runners of Wow. Not everquest but Dungeons and Dragons/Lord of the Rings. You don’t have Strider or one of the hobbits turning around on the way to Mordor and spending a week gathering herbs ^^. D and D has skills but they were never things you invested too much time in. Why? Because it’s not particularly heroic. Fantasy is normally an escape from real life. Few of us want a hero/ine who’s also an accountant or carpenter on the side.

I’m not suggesting we abandon hobbies or ways of adding non-combat value to a character. I’m just saying the present way is… terrible.

Imagine wow where:

  • You can learn a musical instrument. You travel the world speaking to people and collect songs and get better at playing. Maybe some quests can only be unlocked by charming a crowd or influencing a ruler.
  • You learn to build a boat - not ‘boatbuilding’ but a special boat made of enchanted heartwood that takes you into a ruined fey isle you can claim as your own.
  • You learn to create something of value, a form of art. Every once in a while a challenge is given by a mysterious mage to dazzle her with a work of true beauty. Your efforts spent creating a single thing are compared to other players across the realm and prizes and rewards offered.

If its money players want to earn, rewards can be given for undertaking adventures, slaying beasts, discovering rare treasures, helping restore ruined castles or… anything. Just not selling those magic pants on the AH. Which simply makes me thing ‘we can do so much better than that’.

66

No, it’s because there are fewer gem slots. And fewer BOE items. 20 osmenite will net around 6-8 gems. While I realize you think I’m focused on JC, I’m using it only as an example. Go check out the going rate for any type of cloth. I’m sure tailors are feeling pretty useless these days as well.

You seem determined that I am arguing with you, so I’ll let it go because that’s not the original spirit of this thread. I agree with the OP that crafting needs to be made meaningful again so that this over abundance of mats can have a use, and people like me don’t feel like keeping my trade skill is a waste. I still feel that your idea of using mats for other things is a great one.

I haven’t seen gems listed at 7k for more than a day or so for any patch, but the current 97g each (and it’s the same for enchants and other gear related stuff) is laughable, and it’s directly due to an overabundance of supply. Again, at the start, gems sold equally as quickly at 3k+ as they did at the current rate.

67

Unpopular opinion but:

I don’t really know why professions are even a thing in ANY MMO. Or rather I do… gathering/crafting are easy to code time sinks that players have grown accustom to over the decades these games have existed. And every game has one because older games had them ergo - players expect them.

But really, is running around the world collecting beaver skins or whatever that exciting? Does anyone get fired up for skinning x 1000 beavers? Or creating 200 pairs of slightly magical pants? Really?

I’m not saying ‘we don’t like making money’. Course everyone likes a way to get cash in the game. But this is just so… meh. Professions are bad now but they were ALWAYS bad. At best ones like engineering helped in pvp.

This stuff doesn’t exist in the fore-runners of Wow. Not everquest but Dungeons and Dragons/Lord of the Rings. You don’t have Strider or one of the hobbits turning around on the way to Mordor and spending a week gathering herbs ^^. D and D has skills but they were never things you invested too much time in. Why? Because it’s not particularly heroic. Fantasy is normally an escape from real life. Few of us want a hero/ine who’s also an accountant or carpenter on the side.

I’m not suggesting we abandon hobbies or ways of adding non-combat value to a character. I’m just saying the present way is… terrible.

Imagine wow where:

  • You can learn a musical instrument. You travel the world speaking to people and collect songs and get better at playing. Maybe some quests can only be unlocked by charming a crowd or influencing a ruler.
  • You learn to build a boat - not ‘boatbuilding’ but a special boat made of enchanted heartwood that takes you into a ruined fey isle you can claim as your own.
  • You learn to create something of value, a form of art. Every once in a while a challenge is given by a mysterious mage to dazzle her with a work of true beauty. Your efforts spent creating a single thing are compared to other players across the realm and prizes and rewards offered.

If its money players want to earn, rewards can be given for undertaking adventures, slaying beasts, discovering rare treasures, helping restore ruined castles or… anything. Just not selling those magic pants on the AH. Which simply makes me thing ‘we can do so much better than that’.

Thanks for this well constructed post. I think that the end goal of professions should be the creation of many variations in experience. The profession system could one day just be a more generic typing. Simple questions that steer your path along your journey (outside of class) such as:

which book did you steal from the great library?
-dabbling in the arcane opens a talent tree for runecrafting, inscription and enchanting capabilities
-dabbling in tech will opens a talent tree for alchemy, engineering, and masonry

did you go to great lengths to solve all the threats of your home town or did you heed the call of adventure?
-the citizen opens up a talent tree for farming, barding, brewing, and cooking
-the adventurer opens a talent tree for archaeology, cartography, dungeoneering

These would be early game decisions that help you to ground your character in the mythos and help you to hone in on your desired fantasy.

They should make gathering more flexible. Give us a gathering tool slot or two on our character screen. The tool is easily interchangeable in most towns. Basically this would abolish gathering professions and allow anyone to gather any node as long as they carry the proper tool for it, while at the same time throttling any one individuals’ grinding efficiency.

With all that being said, I think a reclaiming of first principles is necessary with WoW’s professions. While the old system was/is dated as hell, it did successfully simulate meaningful work for so many. That base system needs to be reclaimed, and the RP elements must be evolved upon as you describe.

68

I’m a tailor and an enchanter on this toon. Weapon enchants make a couple thousand and sell better than the caster ones since there are a lot of DW specs out there. Rings make ok money.

As a tailor, my profession seems useless because by the time I can gather the mats to craft/upgrade the gear, the gear is pretty much useless and doesn’t sell for much. Basically, its relevance is outpaced by regular gearing.

I didn’t get that impression. I thought we were having an amicable discussion fleshing out our perspectives on professions at hand but if you feel that way, we can just agree to disagree.

On my server in WoD, it was this way so I made a ton of loot. Each server has its own economy so there won’t be uniform results.

69

I don’t like seeing specializations used to narrow our crafting ability, though. It’s similar to how I hate Blizzard creating 3 specs that are often related in name only, rather than 1 class with 3 flavors. If I’m a smith, I’m a smith; my ability to craft axes shouldn’t take away my ability to craft armor, even if leveling the two sub-skills takes twice the work.

I also don’t like the idea of professions having such negative effects that you would never pair them together. Different synergistic positives and negatives per pair, maybe, but not something like your example of mining and tailoring, where it’s all negative. You might as well say if you take mining, you can’t take tailoring at all.

1 Like
70

The other reason we’re seeing supply with no demand is because there’s no reason to bother with most of the professions, and even if you want to level something, you’re probably going to be bottlenecked by a lack of expulsum or one of the other soulbound mats. Making crafting professions worthwhile would do a lot to absorb the supply surplus, with no other adjustment to the rate of supply.

1 Like
71

Yes. I spent many happy hours in MoP farming turtles for their skins. Sometimes, a Horde mage would come to the location and mass-murder the turtles; I suspect he was farming them for motes of harmony, as there were 20+ turtles in a small area and they respawned as soon as the last turtle died. So on those days, he would murder the turtles, loot them, and leave them in a big pile for me to skin.

And I had fun, skinning those turtles and crafting gear. Not everything has to be about smashing your face against a raid boss or pulling bigger deeps.

4 Likes
72

I liked when they felt needed.

My BM hunter saw no other route, than being an Engineer (this was starting back in Vanilla, with ammo and such.)

Another reason I had Engineering, back then, was unlocking Lock Boxes. Blizzard seemed to nerf, then unnerf this, as far as Engineering goes. Then finally, with Legion (skipped most of WoD, so not sure about that), you can’t unlock them and instead it is now Jewelcrafting and such (then with BFA they move it to inscription… WHAT?)

I hate that with Legion, she finally dropped Engineering. She picked up herb and mine, like this character, then we bought every NPC mount in the game and every AH mount, both of which were sub 500 K or so gold. We just made that much gold, in Legion, just from Herb and Mine.

BFA isn’t working out that way, for us. So if they HAD improved Engineering she might have picked it up again; All of the stuff she has, which did NOT become toys, are still in her bank. I still have hope that I’d want it, someday, so then Jeeves/etc will come out.

73

Totally agree that something must be done. I switched to Herbing/Mining/Skinning on all 50 of my characters in BFA. I used to enjoy having all professions covered on all realms in WoD and before. But they really started going downhill in Legion.

1 Like
74

I think you have some good ideas here. Unfortunately i don’t think Blizzard is going to do much with it. They put a Developer into doing professions in Legion i think it was, but maybe WoD i can’t remember and it was…hohum to say the least.

They either don’t know or don’t care about making professions have depth. They continually toss aside even things from the past like old ore’s which could change the whole landscape of things if you had to use vanilla bars like gold or truesilver in current content.

They don’t seem interested in revitalizing old markets at all and just retread the same ideas they have had since vanilla. One or two new farmable items for each gathering profession with 1 or 2 new specials/rares, followed now by items in dungeons to force people to do them to get that particular item to make gear that is quickly replaced by raiding/pvp epics. It has been this way for the entirety of the game and i don’t see it changing. They don’t have a developer to really fix/create anything new with professions and they seem only interested in removing things that at least added SOME value to items for time like ore->bars, so they took the easy route and now it’s just ore for whatever garbage reason.

Long story short, don’t hold your breath, this game has never had compelling professions and i doubt it ever will. Even slam dunk professions that should have been in the game long ago like a woodworking profession along with lumberjack have never been added. Other things that would be a slam dunk for professions like player/guild housing and have been asked for almost since the inception of the game are still not a thing and probably never will be at this rate. WoW is so late to the table with player housing (no garrisons was not player housing no matter how Blizzard want to spin their half baked implementation of even their own ideas, yes lots was not done with garrisons that was promised) it is hard to even imagine now that it would move the needle even if they did.

2 Likes
75

What if we just left it to the people who actually work on the game to solve all of its problems without providing any additional feedback or assistance?

I mean… that seems like the best solution at this stage.

Not a real solution, mind you… but the best.

1 Like
76

After the monstrosity that is JC rings, I rather not have Blizz try to make professions relevant again.

They simply don’t get it.

77

Indulging my inner armchair dev and trying to think up new approaches is too much fun :slight_smile:

(That said, I don’t really have a coherent vision for professions at the moment, just a bunch of itches)

78

The game has no soul because when you want to do anything in this trash can of a game you just hit a green button on your ui and get a group that you won’t socialize with because why bother

2 Likes
79

Professions, another good thing ruined by the min-max crowd.
In my opinion Blizzard will never make professions relevant again because that would just upset the raiders. Theoretically, they would be ok in BfA with the 2 good pieces of BoP crafter gear and the other BoEs, but with the BoP mats only available through raiding there’s no point. And look at the Benthic pieces, one or two good items and raiders went nuts complaining about “broken progression” and “total invalidation” of the whole tier. Imagine the outcry if there were something like the old BC weps (Stormherald anyone??) or the upgradeable chestpieces??
At the end of WoD professions were almost ok, but obviously “fun” was detected and had to be destroyed since it wasn’t related to Normal+ raiding.

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80

My guild consists entirely of my alts and my wife’s alts, and we used to take real pride in having a self-sufficient guild that covered all of the professions (this was started by my leatherworker’s need for belt buckles in order to skill up; solution, roll a blacksmith). Nowadays, the only things that get leveled are gathering professions, alchemy, and cooking, and the cooking is only on one toon because the mat requirements (and rep, and cost of recipes) are too ridiculous to bother on more than one.

Luckily, we’ve got a good group of friends to raid and run mythic+ with, but instanced content isn’t our primary interest. We’d both rather be out in the world farming materials and doing dailies/world quests, which was 90% of how we made our own fun in MoP, but the game is steadily moving away from those things having any value.