I’m sorry, but trying to raise a profession to be so useful on alts so late in TWW, and since it’s right there, DF, just feels not worth it to even try. The entire system for non-gathering, non-Enchanting KP gains feels busted and the catchup with patron orders will take to TWW’s end to even begin to cover maxxing it out.
I hope Midnight brings some sort of revamp to the system. Perhaps a system that’s just talent trees that you put points into over time. Maybe one a week with catch-up daily quests to earn however many points you need back to cap if you miss a week.
Unless you are doing every aspect of a profession on a daily basis, you do not need to max out your KP. A few hundred points, sometimes less, in the right places will allow you to craft whatever you need in a profession at max rank.
Using Blacksmith as an example:
120 KP gets you all nine slots in Armorsmithing.
130 KP gets you every possible craft in Weaponsmithing.
120 KP in Means of Production gets you Tools, Stones, Alloys, and Frameworks.
370 out of 865 KP makes you capable of crafting everything Blacksmithing offers at R5.
Initial crafts should get you about 70 KP.
There are seven books available from Renown or Acuity for another 70 points.
This is 140 KP, or one of the three tabs.
Your catch up potential is 21 KP per week.
Your regular gain is still 6 KP every four days and 5 KP every week.
Every 28 days has the potential for 146 KP. 84 catch-up. 42 from 4-day offerings. 20 from weeklies.
Although it will cost some gold, 146 KP is more than enough KP to meet the requirement for one tab every month if you do 80% of everything available.
In short, at most 60 days after starting a new Blacksmith you can craft everything at Rank 5.
So even while I do sort of agree that the KP gain, especially for DF since it is old content, should be faster, how much faster does it really need to be?
You could divide every current branch of each crafting tree by ten and then limit gains to a point or two a week, one from a weekly quest, one from a treatise. Faction reps can give a point as well.
Part of my hate is that each tree is more or less just bloat and then you get something every 5th point. It’s unsatisfying beyond the bit of dopamine from “number go up” you get to see the gauge fill. Whatever talent you pick could instead just be “Here’s A/B/C/D and also +X0 Skill.”
It’s not a perfect system, but it does allow for something to feel meatier while still letting people reach the end of the trees and also would make early expansion choices meaningful for specialization that DF/TWW has.
In one day, you can get enough points to max out one item completely. Not only that, you can use concentration to max out adjacent items.
It has never been faster or easier to get to a raid level crafted item. As someone who’s gotten master of all for every expansion, I can tell you that this is the case.
You do not need to fill out the entire tree. That does not mean that the rest of the tree is “bloat”. It’s just not the items you’re focusing on crafting.
What you think is bloat might be something I use daily. I have multiples of every profession. 5 alchemists, 3 blacksmiths, 3 tailors, etc. They’re all focusing on different parts of their tree. I have so many because it’s so easy to make a new one and be able to make one item at max level in one day. So why not?
I understand your frustration when it seems like there’s too much to fill out… But let me ask you a question: did you max rank all your shadowlands white items? (The ones that were the base items for the legendaries?) I didn’t. I don’t know anyone who did. Yet… No one was bothered by that.
Why are people so insistent that they must fill in the entire tree? Is it because they changed the UI from ugly drop downs to a pretty tree with circles?
In SL, you picked one or two white items to craft and you were cool not spending millions of gold leveling another one (ugh those stupid vendor items cost so much!). This is literally the same thing but with a different UI and lots less cost. You pick one thing and just don’t worry about the rest unless you want to. And even then you have the choice of a) spending a few minutes every day doing patron orders for a few months or b) rolling a new crafter that specializes in whatever else you want to make. Slow or fast. Your choice.
Edit: I realized afterwards that maybe you’re talking about the number of points in a wheel. So to break things down: other than your first chosen item, each secondary item that is non-adjacent from your first has a distinct “schedule”. In 1-2 weeks you can make a new item but you can’t max it. 1-2 more weeks means you can make the item at max level but with concentration and possibly without enhancements. 1 week after that, you have all the points in that item. The idea is the same idea you have in regular gearing every week the devs goal is to make you feel more powerful. That basic premise isn’t going to change. So how fast you can make things likely won’t change, whether it takes 5 points to fill a wheel or 30. It’s like you can measure your speed in kilometers per hour and see big numbers or miles per hour and see small numbers but your speed is not changed.
I kind of see her point on ‘bloat.’ Every wheel has a spoke every five points. The four points in between the spokes add +1 skill to whatever craft or group of crafts that wheel happens to affect. Therefore, all those +1s in between feel like filler or bloat because of the more significant bonuses and actions at each spoke.
Simply remove all the +1s and bake them in to the next spoke. Blizzard would then have reduced the size of the trees by ~80% and made each point feel more significant.
I’m not sold on whether it would have a broader benefit.
Reducing the size of the trees would necessitate reducing potential KP gains/earnings by an equivalent amount.
Instead of the 3 KP per day, 21 KP per week, catch up there would be days with no catch-up because players could only catch-up 4 KP per week. Because of the much greater numerical impact of each point, and now included RNG of when ‘catch-ups’ are available, all the people who already gripe about ‘missing’ days and ‘falling farther behind’ would then have a more significant point necessitating more redesign to try to balance that perspective and reality.
Similarly, periodic gains would have to be reduced to 1 kill, 1 chest, 1 treatise, and no more than 4 points from Patron Orders each week. Reduce the every four day offerings to 2 KP. Remove the weekly quest. Reduce DMF to 1 KP. And probably some other things I am forgetting to account for. Restructuring so all gains are weekly based only helps so much.
Even though the proportions will have remained the same, different people who liked the motion of individual points are then going to complain about ‘why is it moving so slowly now?’ and ‘why can’t I gain more points per week?’
In short, there is no way for Blizzard to ‘win.’ Only choose which segment(s) of their player population they are willing to leave unsatisfied.
I admit there have been times I agreed with Vasyrmalia about wanting to cut 80% out of the trees, but then I look at the math and the design issues and say ‘I’m good’ and continue plugging on.
As we’ve discussed in multiple other threads, I hope Blizzard re-looks at and tweaks the total time required to complete certain trees. Even though gaining every point is not necessary, there are enough players with actual OCD, or who imitate it with ‘OMG, like my tree isn’t filled’ completionist anxiety, and the less relevant each point becomes over the course of the expansion, that accelerating KP gains at certain intervals I think could help mitigate multiple gripes about the system.
I mean, if Enchanting can be fully caught up in a day by buying and DEing Darkmoon decks for the points, why can’t other classes have a similar means to do the same?
Honestly for me it’s because players shouldn’t have to have multiple alts doing the same professions to fill out an entire profession. Granted, I’m not saying that we should switch to FF14’s system where you can have one character do everything (And the host of other issues that system has), but you should at least be able to say “This character can fully do this one or two professions.”
Its because enchanting and alchemy are not primarily makers of gear that give players power. Alchemy also can be completed in the sense of being able to max rank all the flasks or all the potions very quickly (although you do have to pick one or the other). I can, and have, made a new alchemist and got them to the point of making flasks for the AH efficiently in three weeks. Note that the SL also has no white items for these professions.
Inscription and jewelcrafting unfortunately saddle the line and got the “gear-maker” treatment.
The catch-up thing is a separate problem imo. As it stands, once I figured out how the catch-up system worked and thus was able to get to 0 catch-up, I then had this issue where I had nothing to do for the vast majority of the week. I would run through my guys and there would be nothing to do to improve my character, but I had to log in to make sure the day got counted for the 4-day cycle. It would be like “login, welp concentration not refreshed, no patron orders to do, log out”
I agree that the 3 crafting orders of catch-up a day could be consolidated. But I feel that the “I’m so behind” crowd’s mentally is so divorced from reality that there’s nothing the devs could do. I regularly make new crafters. I just made a new blacksmith just a couple weeks ago. She can already make things for the AH. “Behind”? I’m not behind. I selected what I wanted her to do and she can do that three weeks later.
But in terms of making less tasks… when you have 0 catch-up, the 2-3 patron orders every 4 days, 2 treasures per week, 1 quest is already so small a set of tasks I can’t imagine making this smaller, especially when the quest is completed by doing the patron orders aforementioned.
Yet, you were ok with this in SL. Unless you were a crazy person and max ranked every white item.
Do you have all the cata JC recipes? Those were a pain to get all of them. Yet people were ok with that too. People don’t have a complete set of gems they can make for that and yet they were ok with that before.
Do you have all the WoD recipes? Those took a bit. At least you could select them rather than learning it randomly…
Speaking of …do you have all the pandaria recipes that you learned randomly each day?
Did you complete the void focus for every profession in BfA? All the way to the third iteration?
Did you get the recipes in vanilla that were only on one vendor that got refreshed a couple of times per day and had a limited stock of 1? (So literally just one person on your server could get it every time it refreshed?)
I don’t understand this “I must be able to make everything” mentality. People were cool with not knowing everything before.
I think the main reason isn’t because you suddenly have to pick and choose. You always had to pick and choose (except pandaria where you got random). The difference is that now this gear is raid quality for every slot.
Don’t know. I stopped playing Shadowlands about three weeks after launch.
Yup. Sucked, but I got there in the end. Same with Cooking in both WotLK and Cataclysm.
Yup.
Yup.
Yup.
It was a stupid system, but yup.
I am perfectly happy with professions being able to be used for raids and more systems to get people to content they want to do and to fill gaps RNG creates. It should be done more often. “Picking and choosing” is a goofy reason to not make a better method than KP in it’s current state.
I never said Day 1. I said that there needs to be a system to allow new characters late in an expansion’s life to be be more easily able to catch up to where characters made at or near the start of an expansion are currently at.
They get 2-3x faster knowledge acquisition with the current system.
Asking genuinely, how fast is fast enough, if 2-3x faster is not enough?
Edit: I will grant that the catch-up system could be less tedious. I am in favor of turning that 3 orders per day to 1 order per day worth 3 kp. I don’t see why new players have to do so many times more work than players who started early.
Give crafting professions the same option Enchanting has to catch up. Some BS item you can make that will give KP. For gathering, dramatically increase the amount of catchup items you can find as you go along. You still have to work for them, but the throttle on how quickly to catch up is on the player, not weird timegates.
If you’re willing to throw a mountain of gold at it just as it’s been since Shadowlands back, sure.
Hell, I’ll make it more fair. The crafted item can have Ranks 1 to 5 where it gives a 20% per rank to give a KP. This way, the actual level of the profession matters instead of you having 1 in the profession and just going ham on the KP gain. Gathers can be R1-3 at 33% chance per rank.
So you want the time gate to be how much gold you have, like it was in SL?
I definitely don’t like that idea. I crafted in SL and it was painful. It was basically “spend a million gold to rank up, hope people want your item or it’s a loss!” Yeah we tried that and it was awful.
But I mean if that’s what you want I will respect your opinion.
Again, it’s an option. Right now, Enchanting is currently in the same situation and it’s far less than a million gold to do it, even going back to the start of TWW because Darkmoon Cards have always been dirt cheap.
Point is, you could just buy it off or actually go get the materials yourself and spend time. I’d rather do option 2 than 1, but that’s up to the player.
Part of the gold cost in SL was the vendor item. But the other part was materials. Because everyone was busy making items–that you ended up trashing because no one wanted a Rank 1–material prices went through the roof. It was certainly a good time to be a gatherer. There was definitely gold to be made at the expense of people crafting.
Like I said, I can’t attest to SL beyond what little I know of it, and I agree that having extreme vendor gold prices is absurd unless it’s something like Engineering mounts.
I’ll admit my system isn’t perfect, but no system is without some loophole being found. I just a smoother ride for people and their professions.
There shouldnt be a need for alts with the same profession to get everything. I have 1 Leatherworker, this main and I am maxed out in EVERY single aspect of the LW. Each of my alts is a different crafter so I cover everything I need. 1 prof per toon.