Improving the crafting experience

Community WoW Community Council
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Crafting in Shadowlands has arguably produced the most tedious and time-consuming crafting experience across all expansions. This is in part due to the MASSIVE amounts of subcrafting that is needed, whether it’s enchanted materials, heavy leather, inks, ground herbs, etc. This was only made worse by the expansion not introducing a Shadowlands Crafting enchant to speed up the crafting process.

I would like to propose that a better “Create All” experience be implemented within the game. One example could take the form of a single crafting cast which creates the total crafted amount. Another could be the existing system, but massively increasing the rate of crafting. Shadowlands has required crafters to spend hours doing subcrafting just for one reagent and the result of this is that players are either queuing up subcrafts across multiple accounts, or queue them up before going to bed or stepping away, because it’s not time efficient to do this by other means. This is especially the case for ink crafting, or legendary/crafter’s mark crafting this expansion.

I would also like to see the return of crafting enchants. When they were introduced in BFA, they were great and it was a massive QoL to have. I’m not sure why they weren’t reintroduced. Maybe they were forgotten? Please consider bringing them back. They save a lot of time and were desperately needed this expansion.

Mass prospecting and milling have been great additions to the game, but are needed for ores and herbs from past expansions. Anyone that’s tried to craft the JC Panthers has likely needed to prospect Kyparite or Ghost Iron Ore for the gems via clicking a macro hundreds of times for an hour+. This example is one of many recipes which have the same issue and require the same process.

Ink traders are also a great addition to have and I’m glad to see they were introduced in Shadowlands. I’m only mentioning this because they were missing in BFA and made inscription crafts very time consuming without any alternatives. Don’t forget to include one next expansion!

I’ll also include some other suggestions I’ve seen. I’ll update this list as I think of more:

  • Remove profession tools (arclight spanner, mining pick, skinning knife, jeweler’s kit, etc).
  • Modify Engineering recipe lists to be aware of the chosen specialization (gnomish vs goblin)
  • Alchemy specialization should be relevant with current expansion crafts
  • Enchants should consume a vellum automatically to allow multiple crafts without a manual click, or remove vellums entirely.

This isn’t a comprehensive list but hopefully it’s enough to get a conversation started and I’m looking forward to hearing other ideas and feedback!

4 Likes
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I think all of these ideas are great :> I want to write a lot more about professions in the future, but here’s some initial thoughts:

I can definitely understand why these were removed. You’re either going to add yet another enchant to your gear that you’ll probably have to replace every time you get a new item for that slot, or you’re going to keep an extra item in your bags just for this enchant. It’s a little cumbersome. I think there’re other great solutions to this, which I’ll come back to later, put a pin in that. You could, alternatively, just make crafting faster in general.

I like these a lot, but I’m not very fond of the implementation. It’s a recipe in the profession journal instead of a better version of the prospecting/milling ‘spell’. I wish they worked more like the scrapper in BFA did, giving you an interface that you can fill up with stuff to prospect/mill, and I’ll also throw disenchanting in here too. We need a mass disenchant option.

Back to my pin, I’m halfway in agreement with the removal of profession tools, much like they did for mining and skinning, I think it’d be great if we could craft all these things without requiring the correct tool to do so. At the same time, these tools are pretty important for the fantasy of professions, so I don’t think outright removing them does the trick. How about we instead make it so that profession tools replace the enchantments, and if you have the appropriate tool, you would simply craft faster? And if the problem then is that it takes up a slot in your inventory - which is the annoying bit of them already - I have two suggestions: profession equipment slots or a toolbox interface. The former is just a slot every profession would have, where you put the tool you want to equip into it (for example a regular pickaxe, or the Krokul Mining Pick, whichever). The latter (which is my favourite) is kind of like the heirloom collection, that allows you to create temporary tools if you want it. And this would be account wide, so if you collect a rare fishing pole or pickaxe, you can use it on your alts too.

I want to write more about this in another post, I think…!

Is this for the “learned” and “unlearned” section? If so, I agree, and I think all unavailable recipes should be removed from this, including recipes that are no longer obtainable and those that only drop for other classes. (remove class limitations from the recipes pls)

It’d be great to have a toggleable option in the enchanting interface that would let you automatically enchant vellums instead of targeted items, which would then allow you to create multiple in one go!