Impossible To Fill Crafting Orders The Failure of the System

Community General Discussion
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It is a pillar of endgame play. Crafters who want to make things for other people get their wish (which Blizzard tried in Shadowlands with crafted Legendaries, but there were lots of complaints).

There will NEVER be a gameplay mode where you can craft top-end gear without overcoming top-end enemies, though. To do so would violate every rule of good game design.

But as for Dragonflight, the overwhelming majority of 418+ gear that exists in the game right now (and there’s a LOT of it in circulation) is crafted gear. Therefore: Pillar of endgame play.

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To be fair to the devs the crafting order system would be fine if it was for the rare super awesome item from raiding/mythic+/Gladiator but they integrated it into the whole core structure of crafting. This is a mistake they keep making, taking as inde that would be fine on it’s own and trying it to something inappropriate. They did the same with torghast by tying it to the legendary grind thus killing any potential it had as a stand alone activity.

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That does not meet any normal definition of EndGame pillar. For somthing to be a pillar of play it needs to be somthing that can be done repeatedly by that player fairly much at will, maybe with a little scheduling for raids and high end PVP teams. Currently the crafting completely fails to meet this commonly accepted definition.

Edit: It does meet this definition in other games where your inputs (mouse clicks, timing, order of operations) do impact on your outcomes so you can express personal skill AND there is a chance you mess it up because you the player lack the skill so you get solid risk reward. However in the binary craft/no craft cannot fail model of warcraft crafting this is totally missing.

Any normal player hearing “Crafting will be a pillar of endgame play” expects that they personally will be able to regularly be able to engage in meaningful crafting. Not that they might occasionally buy something crafted from a random dude shouting in trade.

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264

Well, raiders are out of luck due to weekly boss lockouts, but M+ players can certainly farm Concentrated Primal Focus in unlimited quantities. So there ya go.

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That is NOT crafting as a pillar of gameplay that is just gear grinds. The closest you could call this to crafting is to call it gathering. Again getting somthing made for you is not turning crafting into a pillar of endgame play because the vast bulk of the players are not doing the crafting themselves.

What you are saying is the same as saying crafting was an endgame pillar of Shadowlands because everyone had to buy the base items for legendaries!

There is functionally no difference between placing a crafting order for the item you farmed mythics/raids/PVP for and giving the same mats to an NPC to buy the item directly.

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Well, the Shadowlands ones were largely a “one and done” deal, except for the occasional upgrade when a new patch came out. And it was only 1 slot. You can deck yourself out in 418 crafted stuff everywhere, a few weeks from now.

For the person getting the gear, probably not. But crafters said they wanted crafting to be important, so Blizzard made it important.

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there is alot fo skill and time put into it. on my sever there is one lariat crafter that everyone wants to use because he guarantees r 5 in chat and is well known. how did he get known? by advertising himself for hours at a time. he put in the time and is now being rewarded with max crafts everyday

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Which I did do to finally complete the weekly by using an Alt. However it doesn’t address the other problem which is getting too 100 JC and being hard stuck. Also the problem that the system is so failed you “NEED” to use an Alt.

That’s the problem. There are no solutions except wait for the Devs to fix the issue with Crafting orders, and profession progression. It’s a heavily flawed system with no work around. The Crafting order system is bad and lack of being able to re-talent your professions is exceptionally restrictive. To the point where if you mess up midaswell just quit playing DF.

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I have been following this thread with interest. While also poking along with my Engineering. (Yesterday and today.)

Here is my learning from the thread, and my ~2 weeks of trying to level Engineering. (Yeah, I started late.)

My preparation before starting:

  • I read stuff On the Blizzard Forums. Both GD and the Professions Forums.
  • I spent maybe 30 minutes on icy-veins.

Last week I sat down and started to work on it.
The first ~50 points were no problem. Just motored along like usual.

Then, came level 50. I knew to concentrate on something and not just spread points around. I had about 20? so I spent them.

Then I faced the how am I gonna level to 100 problem. Because all I had that gave points were the Eng helms. I did one for my Shammy and proc’d a wrist recipe. Then… I figured I’d have to use Darkmoon Faire and the weekly Eng quest…

So:

  • Start fishing in guild for orders. Put a "Weekly Quest/Craft Night on the Calendar. First night had 4 or 5 people. So not bad.
  • It was DMF week so that was good.
  • Had my Pally, the only other level 70 I have, send me a personal order for bracers. (Oops pattern was for leather, and Pally wears plate. Wasted a spark but got 3 points. I was so excited I could make something… I… ugh… didn’t read the text… lol)

So with all that I made it to 65?.

Kept reading the forums… Found this thread and others…

Part of what I had to do was:

  • Give up getting to 100, right away. For this expansion it isn’t that important.
  • As others have noted in this thread, the Knowledge Points, beyond level 50 have more impact and are more important. It took me a couple of days and some careful reading to come around to that.
  • From this thread and by reading the crafting UI text carefully, I paid attention to First Craft. Then went through and crafted everything I had a schematic for that I had not crafted. Carefully spent the points.
  • From this thread I got the idea to go to the AH and buy patterns that I didn’t have. I overlooked the AH, because I thought the only patterns I could get would be locked behind Renown. Doh!

First Time crafting and AH patterns got me almost 15 Knowledge Points. By carefully spending them they have made a huge improvement in ability to craft components with higher quality.

Did I spend gold? Yup. Went into DL with 82K gold on my Shammy. Sold a pet and made it to ~106k. Sold a PvP DL Pattern that dropped and made 8k. Been buying phials, potions, and enchants. Along with a full set of the crafted PvP gear to get started doing Epic BGs. With my AH pattern spend today, I’m sitting at 47k gold. So schematics cost me about 26k today? Not sure. Personally, I don’t think that is out of line. [1]

This is probably easier for me because my Pally is double gather, and the Shammy has Mining. So I have plenty of mats to do stuff.

I honestly think there is a lot of overreaction to the changes in DL. Just because you can’t get to 100 in a few days isn’t the end of the world. It thru me for a loop when I ran into the wall at 50, but I stopped for a bit and I think I an work past it. (With a solution that works for ME.)

Is this the best iteration of this system? No, it has a lot of problems. I’d like Blizzard to address them sooner rather than later. We’ll see how it goes. Though as another person noted I don’t think lowering the unlocks is really going to do much to unblock folks.

[1] Not a big AH guy. I know how it works. One of my chars left SL with a whopping 180k gold. Some people make that in a day. Usually my chars float between 50k and 100k. Enough to buy enchants, flasks, vials, cheap pets and make repairs.

Edit - Grammar

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It really did take professions and made them so convoluted that few want to bother… I’ve never hated alchemy more then now. Mats cost more then the product and they require too much lol it’s just icky.

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Youre not really hard stuck. I ran into the same issue being a prospecter.

Grabbed a crappy absorb embelished necklace recipe for 150k on my server and made it. It took me like 25 recrafts to get to 91 and i just gave up and used the sparks on my alts. Its only 30 primal chaos and 1 spark.

Should mention recrafting does not require a spark or illimited diamond again.

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That’s because of how Herbs work.

Remember BfA? With Anchor Weed? Where the best way to get it was to go in a loop and pick the worthless junk over and over again until they finally spawned as Anchor Weed?

Dragonflight herbs are like that, except Bubble Poppy, Writhebark, and Saxifrage are ALL Anchor Weeds.

But everything spawns as Hochenblume. Until some kind soul clears out the WORTHLESS Hochenblume.

And then it might respawn as something useful.

(For somebody else who happens along.)

((Which is why people don’t bother.))

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No one put in the time this expansion…maybe a better way to say it is no one can prove they put in the time this expansion due to the first week(s) of shenanigans with the CD abuse and degenerative dirt pile/pack exploits.

People who had access to the beta found these quirks and exploited them
Other people got on board.
BOOM. High level crafters nearly out of the gate.

Do I believe there are people who genuinely put in a lot of work and didn’t exploit?
Yes. BUT
For someone to have been R5-ing for quite a while now? No. Not unless it was something like intermediate materials that don’t have the same depth of KP required to be that good.

This has been part of the complaint stream.

Have to agree…it doesn’t mill into much for Scribes even. And how many equipment Baskets are people going to make?

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This is a big flaw with the order system too. Most of the stuff is only done once or twice. Then you never touch it again. I think every crafting profession should have been able to craft some type of low cost consumable that would be used throughout the expansion.

Maybe purchasable from an NPC if you can’t find someone to craft it, but there for folks to kick start the craft order system. You’d have to take care to make sure it couldn’t be exploitable. (Maybe can’t be sold back to an NPC if you craft it?) Edit to add: The NPC version would be more expensive as finished product than the mats used to make the crafted version. Also make the mats to craft avail from the NPC as well. So no excuse about being locked out. So everyone has a path into the order system to supply something the economy needs…

Vials are kind of like that. Maybe if Vellums, Primal Flux and ??? could be crafted cheaper than you could buy from the NPC that would drive more orders into the system.

The DL crafting stuff seems like it was never thought of as an economic system. Across all crafting professions.

Overall I like what they tried to do. The implementation seems off and the effort/reward appears to be uneven across professions.

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It is only going to get harder as everyone has the base pieces they want and now are only looking for re-crafting and that isn’t even an option on the public system. Soon it will only be people working on their third of fourth alt.

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All crafting orders are gated by sparks of inginuity which are super rare by design. So far players have only has THREE of them.

The chances of players using these rare resources for a tier slot are nil. I made shoulders for myself and now I regret it, because I got tier shoulders.

People are only going to spend them on a lariat, weapons, offhands or a super rare pattern that’s not a tier slot.

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All WO are gated by sparks, so far people have just 3.

Sparks
Sparks
Sparks

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Bottom lining this: The CO system doesn’t work if the only long-term usage of it will be for gear upgrading.

Without day-to-day, the whole thing collapses back into what it used to be: find that guy who could the thing for your particular doohickey.

Everyone else might as well not even be there.

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Disagree. You shouldn’t need extreme recipes that cost several WoW tokens and the Crafting order system to reach 100. Most people don’t have this which presents a problem. I’m hard stuck.

I log in and can’t make progress which to me is hard stuck. I log out the same as I logged in. That feels bad.

How long should it take to reach 100 in a profession idk likely the same as mining or fishing. Maybe a week. The depth of the professions is the knowledge and talent trees. (which are awesome) Not being stuck leveling it.

It’s “ONLY” 1 spark, used Alts, and spent 150k (a lot of gold) and you still aren’t maxed!!! That’s crazy. You are using Alt and trying to figure out a workaround because “THERE IS A PROBLEM WITH LEVELING TO 100”

Despite your crazy efforts you still aren’t maxed. Come’on guys. This is a problem that will only get worse. So people are turned off right now and quitting or people aren’t buying DF do to convoluted problems like this that exist. Then a super restrictive system with no room for error.

You either got 100 the first week or you didn’t. That feels super bad and makes you want to uninstall.

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How do you check for orders?

99%of the time when i check there are none listed.

But if you sit, and wait for about 30 minutes, while spamming the search button over and over again - you’ll get an order that comes through.

But you have to click on it and then hit the start order button within a second, otherwise someone else will take it.

That’s at least how i got to 100 skill.