We need a crafting overhaul. I mean a straight up, ground up rework of everything about crafting. Take it back to the drawing board and do it again, because what we have is frustratingly limited, unimaginative, lackluster.
I recommend something “discovery” based. Maybe you learn to make leather vests of varying quality to “skill up”, then at max level you start experimenting with items you find, or buy from other professions, maybe sewing in giant sinews to your vest makes it more durable, giving you increased stamina. Maybe soaking it in liquid gold let’s you use electrical attacks a little better. Maybe infusing your weapon with void juice gives you some extra leech. The possibilities are limitless.
The more complex the requirements for a recipe, the stronger the item. And every kind of content can drop its own cool, unique mats. Maybe world quests let you make gear with gold find (stat I just made up) and m+ mats let you gain movement speed or lower interrupt cd. Maybe you can team up with other crafter to make exceptional armor and weapons. Just a thought.
But we have to leave this boring, outdated system behind in totality. Who’s with me?
If I wanted to play Monster Hunter, I’d load up Monster Hunter.
This is a terrible idea. If discovery is random, that’s more RNG in the game that isn’t needed. If it’s not random, then it will be datamined and just pointless to have no information for in-game.
This is a great idea. This game does not have enough RNG. We need to boost up the play time metrics so next year we can show FFXIV and ESO our awesome numbers.
I just want a more complex, deeper, more difficult and more useful profession system. And I don’t think that’s asking too much from Blizzard. But it’s all about “accessibility” right?
There are things about the current system that are good. For example, I like the separation of expansion skills, as it sort of represents different disciplines of a profession’s craft.
There are a lot of things that are dumb as dirt, though – notably, mats being BoP. That has never made any sense to me.
Don’t get me started. Bop mats, 24hr CDs, random procs for new recipes etc. Honorable mention goes to that incredibly stupid idea of hiding the 2 person dragon mount behind RNG arch resolves. Not gonna even bother attempting that nightmare.
While I agree that crafting, which is one of the top three reasons I play any mmo, in WOW has just become a boiling pot of poop, I really want to remove any RNG from the game. It is a really bad mechanic to base anything, but worse when it is used in crafting. WOW did use discovery based crafting before and it was the worst thing that happened. Took forever to learn certain recipes, and for some people, the expansion ended and the next one came along before they ever learned all the recipes.
You have to think about crafting, especially for the big FOUR professions like tailoring, leather working, inscription, and blacksmithing as pattern-based learning. If the pattern/recipe exists, you should be able to learn it and not have to expend thousands of mats to “discover” these new recipes. I can see that with alchemy and enchanting, where trial and error with mats yields unusual results, but not the big FOUR.
I’d like to see crafting return to Vanilla levels where there is a set number of patterns you learn as you increase in skill level. At endgame, perhaps more recipe drops in heroic and mythic dungeons, but not base recipes. You should NEVER have to enter a dungeon or raid to get base level recipes (these are recipes for your profession that yield xp or profession level up).
Other than that, not sure what can be done to improve Crafting.
I didn’t mean discovery the way we had it before, I meant more like, crafting doesn’t have a set recipe, and you can try out different mat combinations to find new things. Or convergent things, maybe quicksilver and gold both give conductive properties, or something like that.
And I kind of like the star system, in that it makes sense that the better you are at something, the more efficiently you can make it, but I feel like that should progress based on repetition instead of recipe. If I Make 1000 mana potions, I should probably be an expert at it, despite my reputation with some faction.
This will result in set recipes located only on Wowhead. The number of combinations with usable results will be datamined and a list of mats made available on third-party sites. That’s all this would result in – recipes but without the convenience of having the necessary materials displayed in-game.
I’ll admit, I do like how you can learn a new profession and jump straight into the current expansion skillset. No more power leveling and spending thousands of gold to level up through old useless recipes that you can do nothing with but vendor or send to alts, because they have no value anymore.
You can protect it against data mining, or have it change and evolve over time. Or just straight up have it decided by algorithm, so that the number of combinations becomes huge, and it becomes about mixing properties instead of items.
Just because “wowhead will tell you eventually” doesn’t have to take the discovery out of it.
You really can’t – it’ll get datamined on a PTR/beta game client.
This will only frustrate people and result in having to reference third-party sites more.
Have to? No, of course not. But it will nonetheless, because people leveling professions or attempting to make items/enhancements will always, always, always seek the most efficient means of doing so. If that means isn’t displayed in-game, then you’ll end up with a guide showing which combinations of items have yielded which results with which percentage of the time.
Believe me, I like where your head’s at, and what you’re describing could work really well in an offline single-player game. It might even work on an MMO with a smaller playerbase. But it won’t work with WoW, due to how quick and easy it is to find/share information in this community.
Yeah, I dislike any implementation of discovery… it is still based in RNG and I don’t want to deal with RNG with something that I enjoy. Two deal breakers with ANY crafting solution are…
RNG (discovery).
Dungeon runs to complete any task or recipe while I am not at max level or max crafting.
![:woman_shrugging:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/woman_shrugging.png?v=6" ":woman_shrugging:")