They are currently nearly dead so here are some ideas to fix them.
Remove/Break AH mods like TSM, this represents far too much automation.
Increase recipe complexity across the board.
Remove scrapping or any type of materials loot outside of having the profession. There are far too many sources for materials now. This should have never made it out of Legion.
Remove ranks on recipes or at least remove the material reduction part.
Make crafting gear relevant to end game. Ie more constant updates. Ie when Heroic whatever is being cleared by everyone, make the base Ilevel for gear higher equivalent to the normal raid -5 ilevels or something.
Remove profession only gear, make the recipe hard to acquire, have high material costs and limit it to one piece per craft.
When a new tier of the profession comes out, ie flask -> greater, require ALL the mats from the lower tier + new ones for the upper tier. This is specifically to make old mats still just as valuable in the new tier as the old. This would really help keep prices up across the board.
A node has two hits at most in it. Supply needs to be way more limited.
Sockets on everything, gems much weaker, seriously JC get so screwed.
Add rare, and I mean rare, procs to consumables, ie 200 strength flask or a blue 225 strength flask. This would not apply to enchants or anything permanent.
Unify any outstanding specializations in crafting. I think engineering still has the lunacy of goblin vs gnome.
Also go back and add all recipes, that came from quests, to the trainers for any previous expansions or make sure the quests are always repeatable or the scroll is BOE. I know engineering still has a few outstanding once only quests for stuff and I suspect other professions still have them as well.
TSM is fine, I’d rather not spend literal hours posting to make my gold, which I need to do to play, since I’m rather poor and can’t afford $15 a month on top of all my other bills. Transmog is the best way to make money, but posting hundreds of items one by one would take, as I said, hours.
Kinda would like less complex recipes, or at the very least, recipes that didn’t need an arbitrary mat like expulsom or bones for leather working, Leather and thread worked fine before, maybe some drops from elementals, but these other things get in the way.
Ranks on recopies would only benefit if they reduced material cost, but agree, just make the patterns hard to find / acquire again.
I thought Nodes were like 5 people could gather in 30 seconds, and nodes need to be up in the zone so people can get the mats at all, not sure why you’d want to limit them?
I don’t know about the rare procs to consumables, it would mean high-end raiders would just craft hundreds upon hundreds of flasks and what not to get that tiny boost, cause it’s still a boost, and then the market would be flooded with the lower quality ones.
Just bring back BOE for crafting high iLvl gear is one of the biggest steps they could take IMO. I can craft some personal stuff, then the rest is irrelevant outside of TMOG.
I just want that jewelcrafting get a “Prospect: X” besides the mass prospect we all know, like “Prospect: Copper” and all the rest of the ores, I don’t really want a mass prospect, just a regular one for all ores so I can prospect from my reagent bank
Have the professions be relevant past just yourself. Gems are a joke at the moment since sockets are based entirely on rng, making them incredibly unprofitable. Crafting professions can’t make relevant gear to be sold past leveling odds and ends, and after that you’re just making subpar gear for yourself, which isn’t very satisfying.
Have the recipies require items cross professions, which allows there to be more value for items. Skinning makes barely any gold, since it’s only used for leatherworking, which doesn’t have any value past making gear for yourself, and once you do that, you may as well unlearn the profession and pick up a more communally profitable profession like Alchemy and Herbing
To be honest, most of your ideas sound less like wanting to improve professions, and more like you want to make it easier to corner the market for yourself, with limited mats and harder to find recipes.
Personally, I’d like to see an end to the soulbound mats (unless they’re from daily cooldowns, like imperial silk in MoP; no more of this expulsum RNG or mythic+ farming for cores) and a return to crafting BoEs that are worth wearing, at least for alts. I’d like to get back the ability for my enchanters to combine dust into crystals, rather than having to farm purples even though I have five stacks of dust. And I’d like to see more cross-profession reagents, no matter how many bad memories I have of trying to get belt buckles for my leatherworker (I finally leveled a blacksmith).
According to the Wowhead datamine, it seems like that is coming back. You can fuse 3 dust into a blue shard and 3 shards into a crystal. They also still have datamined recipes for shattering them too.
I don’t ever want to see this back again. Why should you have to spend GOBS of money on the AH or beg people to make things for you to operate your profession?
I’m going to assume he has lots of alts and has crafting on each of his alts. So he wants this back so he can make more money selling reagents to casual crafters with no access other than through the AH.
It was never possible to corner the market for a profession. When JC can out you could make some additional money if you got one of the first rare recipes (tended to be BOP) but it was not like you somehow cornered JC.
Also the reason for rarer mats is to make the sources require gathering thus keep the prices up for mat and the resulting crafted items. Bliz badly overdid the “get gold out of the system” and mats from everywhere was part of it.
I generally agree with all of this, especially BOP mats, those are poison.
I think one of the best things they can do is to REMOVE HEIRLOOM GEAR. Heirloom bonus experience buffs can be provided for alts instead. This will create a major resurgence in professions demand.
Get rid of scrapping and that silly expulsom stuff.
DO NOT create more overlapping of professions.
Make rare/epic-level recipes BoE, not BoP so we can make money man, damn.
make crafting profs alternatives to dungeon and raid gear and starting gear you can get first thing.
not haveing to go into dungeon or raids of any difficaulty just to get mats unless you want to. going out into the world to collect stuff should be sufficiant to make the gear you need
How would you suggest they make the gear epic-level then? It sounds like the mats would have to be totally RNG-based or something. If it’s epic gear, the mats should be very difficult to obtain. However, at least some High-level gear (like my 470 legs) should be BoE.
I thought WoDs system was pretty good. You got an essence type mat from herbing or skinning that you collected to make a item bump. You could also sell or trade it, so if your herbalist didn’t need so many you could send it to your leather worker or if your skinner had too many you could send it to your scribe, or whatever.
In my opinion, WoD completely butchered professions. I hated it! Please DON’T bring back that system. Couldn’t even make money off professions. Not to mention that Garrison idea was a major failure.
Epic fetch quests chain. You go all over the world and kill this to collect that. Make an armor just to disenchante it to give the item to this other person that gives you an item you need. Then you are told to go to outworld cuz of some items.
After that you need to drink a water breathing pot to go into the ocean and collect some things. And when it’s all over you have your personal epic armor and then you discover epic crafts have 3 ranks so you do it all over again to get to rank 3.
After that you get a quest that does another fetch chain that turns it legendary and when you and make it the stats are almost godlike and maybe it has a equip effect for 2/2 4/4 and full set that you picked out.
I think I made more money in WoD than any other expansion. I am not sure how you could not make money in WoD. Even as late as 6.3 all you had to do was run a herb/skinner through Tanaan jungle and you could make gold all day selling those green things that dropped.
It was definitely the least enjoyable experience I’ve had among all the expansions in terms of professions. I like the traditional format like back in pre-MoP. The Garrison and the professions were among the major reasons why I quit WoD after a few months and didn’t return until BFA.
The traditional non-time-gated stuff is NEVER coming back. Given that reality, WoD had arguably the best time-gated system for professions. Everything since has been worse.