Leatherworkers got a real short end of the stick on patterns to give rank.
Looking at the Profession Equipment patterns and comparing them to equivalent Blacksmithing patterns, LW has a massively larger grind. Everything in Leatherowrking requires specialty Hides/Scales (that require large amounts of Awkened elements) plus the special mats from skinning specific types of monsters and other kill drops. Blacksmith crafted equipment just requires ores acquired by mining any node.
How did anyone with a reasonable mind look at that and think it was balanced? Some in the Development team completely failed to do their job.
Reduce the material demands on Leatherworking patterns and/or have Strange Stomachs drop rousing elements instead of the junk they drop now.
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Gathering nodes are a lot harder to come by than grab it all and aoe it down, rinse and repeat. Skins, scales, and essence - this is the way to go. Some of the forced spawns specifically are kinda nutty on how much material you can get in an hour.
The work order system was a lot friendlier to leveling up when people were actually making the gear. Now lariat is dictating 1 of the 2 embellishment slots for new toons on most classes and specs. The weapon usually being the second craft for everyone. Those slots are just so strong compared to other options.
Not being able to convert crafted epics to tier was super unfortunate. Even if it was restricted to just a single piece, it would have been better. As it is, LW is basically relegated to a handful of useful items with a crap load of competition.
I’ve made okay money doing LW though. Went into xpac with ~450k and I bought up material and patterns at peak and dropped to ~80k. I’ve built back to 560k now and do very little farming. That’s dragon races, world quests, AH flips, and crafting order snipes.
I’ve been working on my leatherworker alt and really annoyed by how hard stuck the leveling process gets around 60. I just hit level 70 and have to continue grinding faction rep for more patterns, in order to get the points needed to increase my knowledge to make specific armor.
At least my main hit max rep so my alts can catch up quicker, but it’s still a pain in the rear trying to level professions.
And of course there’s never any public orders/nothing I can make being ordered.
Not really looking forward to trying to level any other alt professions…
I don’t disagree that LW is rougher, but BS also does a lot of awakened elements. each skill point on the upper end came from Master’s hammer which cost on average 5 awakened elements (including awakened order) in addition to lots of rare Khaz’gorite ore. I ended up just buying stuff off the AH because farming it was taking too long. Again, not saying LW was easy, but BS definitely required more than just the ores.
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Gathering nodes are a little harder to come by, but for miner/bs, they don’t have to do anything extra. Just mine as usual and the materials will fall into their laps. No separate focus needed and can get from just mining as doing other stuff without much need to focus farm.
For skin/lw it’s get hides/scales from normal play, then focus farm specialty items, then have to separately farm elements, and decay is a big one needed that is annoyingly hard to farm and does not come at all from skinning.
And this is to craft analogous items.
While we’re fixing LW, we need them to give us something to make that every class can use on a regular basis. Like:
- Inscription: Draconic Treatises, Buzzing Runes, Howling Runes
- Alchemy: potions, phials
- Blacksmithing: razortones, weightstones,
- Engineering: panic button stuff like goblin glider kits, etc.
- other stuff I am not thinking of
What consumable type items can LWs make that people need every week?
One of the easier patterns to rank with after skill 60,
requires 8x https://www.wowhead.com/item=193226/stonecrust-hide
Get 2 per craft so 4 crafts to get the 8 at 1 Awakened Decay and 1 Awakened Earth each, total of 8 Awakeneds needed to get 1 skill point and none of the Awakened come from skinning.
0 Awakened needed, Khaz ore is a little annoying, but will drop from any and all mining activities. Same skill range, same skill point earn, massively different farming grind.
Blacksmithing has it a hell of a lot easier.
Artisan mettle is major problem with these two items.
I just skin everything I come across that I can skin and mats have almost NEVER been an issue outside of brute force levelling skill.
we don’t generally level with those. not enough artisan mettle. we use master’s hammer. I was responding to the comment that BS only requires ore, which isn’t the case. There’s other mats there that are the limiting factors. Again, I’m not saying LW is easy by anymeans and i think LW is harder than BS to level. Just saying that BS isn’t just ore to level.
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