One thing that is being brought to light by the new system is the huge difference in playing experience between high and low pop servers. Stormrage is one of the highest. A lot of the people complaining loudest here are on very low pop servers.
A lot of server population - related factors used to “wash out” with professions - e.g. on a low pop server you had fewer customers but you also have fewer competitors so it balanced out. But this new system basically divides us more. Instead of “Blacksmiths” there are Axesmiths and Macesmiths and Helmsmiths and Beltsmiths etc. On a high pop server that can actually work out, dividing giant markets into manageable medium sized markets. But on low pop you get the issue where it is now sliced so thin there is no market at all.
I do think they should have considered server pop as a factor more significantly in the design. Unfortunately I can’t see an easy way for it to be accounted for. I suspect ultimately the extremely difficult way it will be accounted for is the much larger, scarier but probably inevitable global market merge, regionwide AH on all items and regionwide work orders. But that isn’t going to be any time soon and we just have to suck it up till then.
You make a great point that I hadn’t considered. I do think this would be the case with professions generally rather than Inscription specifically.
It may also be possible that some are looking at the profession redesign…the way Blizzard is not intending the game to work now. When I see people say things like “if you are using the AH for the mats in question this will cost something in the order of 600K gold to get those last 35 skill points,” that tells me people are hoping to powerlevel professions the way you could in the Cata days by dropping gold in the AH until you hit skill cap.
That’s just not the way the profession redesign is intended. It’s meant to be a long grind by design, and not speedrunnable to skill cap. Also, early in the xpac, prices are sky-high the first few weeks, but then start to drop substantially after that. If you spend all your gold on mats to try to speedrun a profession, you are going to be spending gold at the peak of the mat cost and building up a lot of inventory you will likely have to sell over time…and that inventory will sell for less and less as time goes on as we drop from the early xpac highs.
I don’t think this is true. The profession design seems to rely heavily on filling orders to max out a crafting profession. It looks like we were intended to get to 50 or 60 quickly, then craft lower quality gear through orders for skill ups and that gear would eventually be re-crafted to max quality. But with so many people being able to make R4 or R5 gear by week 3, this went out the window.
Now many crafters are stuck in a catch-22: they need orders to increase their skill so they can make high quality gear, but they don’t get any orders because they can’t make high quality gear. And they can’t unlock other specializations until they hit 75 or 100 in their profession skill. So people are looking for work arounds, like crafting dozens of rolling pins or weapon enchants at a huge loss just to get out of this trap.
I totally agree. The cost of Runed Writhebark is pretty rough and largely indicative of the leveling imbalance between professions. The costpoint for every rolling pin (read that again: rolling pin. Say it out loud. Rolling pin.) is arguably more daunting than the mettle costpoint of other profession equipment, and the costs to level other professions just aren’t comparable.
Earlier today, I blithely leveled Blacksmithing from 65 to 100 with repair hammers, totally stunned by the way in which the recipe stayed orange through 100. Each hammer might have cost me 2,500g, less 100g when vendors the spare hammers. Powerleveling Inscription (or, I shudder to think, Engineering) in that same way would cost hundreds of thousands of gold. I think some of that disparity accounts for the fact that you can sell rolling pins, but still — ???