How to make Professions viable

[Ashelinissa-proudmoore]

The biggest issue with Professions right now is that most of them become utterly useless late game, and bring nothing to the table with the exception of Alch and Enchanting.

My suggestion would be to break down the professions and make them more about enhancements rather than gear, for example.

Accessories Specialist - Leatherworking can already makes drums of war, but that is meh, as they are almost never needed except in 5 mans. but why can they not make other accessories for raids/dungeon groups? For Example A mound of Hides that can be placed on the ground and gives groups a 5% damage reduction buff if they click on it, like the random ones that LWer’s can find throughout BFA, or something that can Bind a player or NPC like a hogtie, giving more classes the opportunity to get another CC if they lack them, Hell, bring back Saddles to allow more than one person to get on your mount.

Weapon Specialist - Leatherworkers should be-able to make different types of Hilts that can add to weapon speed, or other unique properties that enchanting can not do! Letting you chose between the two professions, or if you have two weapons use both.

Armor Specialist - Items that allow you to add sockets to leather or mail pieces, or you can make patches to improve durability mid fight (can work on weapons as well) so if a weapon or piece of armor breaks mid fight and you get Battled ressed, you now have a way of repairing that piece to continue the fight.

Or worse comes to worse, have bosses drop pieces of the current expansion and allow the profession makes to stick those pieces into a tier set piece or something.

[Wormsworth-emerald-dream (Wormsworth)]

These things can and should already exist.

What you’re talking about is no different than sharpening stones from vanilla blacksmithing. There’s no reason these things shouldn’t already exist.

[Canadiana-gilneas (Canadiana)]

I think what it comes down to is the devs don’t want to deal with such enhancements cause they will have to do more number crunching for gear and instance mobs/boss fights.

Look at what enchanting was before and is now. A gutted profession that’s almost totally useless.

[Felsavior-zuljin (Felsavior)]

I’d be happy with just being able to upgrade gear.

Remember that green quest axe you got? Well for x ore and x flux you can upgrade it to a blue axe.

Make the cost reletive to the ilvl upgrade or something. Plus make it something you can do for other people like enchanting.

I will say though, I have no clue how to make inscription and jewel crafting relevant again. Maybe give inscription real shoulder enchants or something.

[Shádôw-ravencrest]

@Shádôw-ravencrest

Professions – Some people like being crafters of their servers. They focus on gathering, selling and crafting some of the most epic, awe inspiring pieces in the game. Add, deep profession quest lines, return profession passives so your characters performance will benefit a certain way when you become a master, return/add profession specialties (i.e. goblin vs. gnomish engineering). Add levels of profession mastery (not based on character level) but rather how much you train/level your profession. Add high level, super rare patterns that require you to travel/explore all of Azeroth to find, run dungeons/raids to obtain. Return to more mounts/pets being able to be crafted. Make the gear that is on par with high level Mythic that takes rare, exotic materials and is BoE to sell to the community. Have these pieces inspiring and cool sets that players want to get just to Tmog. Have your secondaries compliment your primary professions (i.e. you can find ancient rare crafting patterns via archeology). Have your catchup mechanics by disregarding the earlier expansions crafting tiers but add incentives to going back and collecting patterns and leveling those, that could improve your mastery and potency of your passives. I could literally just go on and on here.

Here’s some ideas I threw out on professions a couple days back. I only skimmed the surface, there are many more things they could do here