This is a pretty big topic but I’ll do the best I can (although it may require multiple posts as I think of more stuff). I’m not sure what the overall community feeling towards the new systems is beyond the usual “some people like it, some people hate it”. What’s clear is these systems are not going away anytime soon. So, let’s try to make them better.
I’m fully spec’d out all the crafting professions except for LW (where I’m working on a handful of remaining mail armor sections and Shear Mastery of Leather/Bonding and Stitching) and Engineering (where I didn’t bother to do the explosives sections). So, I feel like I can comment on a lot of the good, the bad, and the ugly of these systems. I’ll go down the list, profession by profession, and then do some general commentary on the crafting system as a whole and then I will talk about the work order system.
*Caveat: I’m on a small/lower population server cluster so I may not encounter some of the same issues with the work order system in particular that people who are on high population clusters encounter.
Alchemy:
The good: I liked the variety of phials and potions. Prior to doing the DF alpha I didn’t think there would be that many varying types of phials and potions including ones you could use after you died during a fight. I don’t remember Alchemy being particularly bad to level (although others can correct me on this) so we’ll call that a “good”. The phial cauldron having every single phial the crafter has access to is great although the cost to make them is pretty expensive (~10k gold per with no procs). Getting big multicrafts always feels nice as does having x2 duration of phials. Introducing a speed phial was a big plus for people who run old content and/or just generally like to zoom.The bad: The cooldown for backfiring on phial/potion experimentation was fairly annoying, as was having to reclaim concoctions to have alchemical solutions for them and for phial cauldrons (60 per phial cauldron is a LOT). I don’t know what I’d do to replace the alchemical solutions other than just use some other reagent that doesn’t require crafting it and then unmaking it. Also, by the time I had enough points in phial/potion experimentation to get to the advanced option I had already discovered everything (And I did this for three characters that had alchemy)
The odd: Because there was hardly anything that needed to be crafted via work order I would end up with a lot of unused artisan’s mettle and presumably this was also the reason why alchemists didn’t get a weekly work order quest (which deprived alchemists of skill points every week compared to other crafting professions). Also, I’m not sure why Alchemy didn’t get an epic quality profession tool/accessory like some other professions. The philosopher stones’ /equip was slightly better this expansion but I feel like no one really used them once they hit level 70. As the only wearable piece of equipment from this profession, maybe we could make them better?
The ugly: Having to either to run Brackenhide Hollow or pay to have a Cauldron of Extracted Putrescence just to craft toxic phials/potions. This and the similar specific required crafting locations for Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, and Tailoring were major pains in the a**. I beg of you not to do anything like this again.
Blacksmithing:
The good: A long of list of items that you can craft as per usual with Blacksmithing. Proc’ing resourcefulness on someone’s crafting order often rewarded expensive mats (like Obsidian Seared Alloy) you could flip on the auction house for an addon to your commission which always felt great.The bad: Getting to the leveling point where you need Obsidian Seared Alloy doesn’t feel great as I recall. The Blacksmithing embellished armor was pretty meh. I’d suggest maybe having a couple of Blacksmithing-specific embellishments that could be added to any crafted BS armor/weapon piece to add flavor to the profession and embellishment flexibility for plate wearers.
The ugly: Nothing I can really think of.
Enchanting:
The good: Similar to the speed phial, speed enchants (as well as leech and avoidance) are a nice addition. Wasn’t terrible to level until you got to the weapon enchants.The bad: I feel like Enchanting just doesn’t have enough variety compared to other professions and you end up adding things like illusions as fillers to make up for it. I don’t think you need to have as much variety as there is in Alchemy but adding some more possible enchants (or at least equipment slots that can be enchanted) would help with that. As with Blacksmithing, I’d suggest possibly adding a couple of Enchanting-specific embellishments that could be added to a variety of equipment slots for flavor and added flexibility.
The odd: Not having a weekly crafting order quest (at least you don’t if you are pairing Enchanting with Tailoring). No epic quality profession tool/accessory.
The ugly: Not being able to guarantee a max rank weapon enchant even after using an Illustrious Insight. Even with having a +5 Enchanting skill from the Blood Elf racial I can only max out my crafting skill to 412 with an Illustrious Insight and the recipe quality for rank 3 weapon enchants is 425. As these are the most expensive enchants you can do, you end up wasting a lot of mats if you don’t get an inspiration proc. The rank 2 enchants sell for nearly half the price of a rank 3 one so there’s the potential to not even be able to cover the cost of the mats if you get a rank 2. In the case of crafting this for someone else, you end up fronting the cost to do a recraft yourself or tell the customer “Sorry, I didn’t get an inspiration proc, you’ll need to send me a new order”. Either way it’s pretty crappy.
Engineering:
The good: Quirky as ever, with funny embellishments like the Healing Darts. Portable crafting stations were definitely a nice perk. Great toys.The bad: Finishing leveling up by crafting the epic goggles (as always) was expensive.
The odd: Another profession without an epic quality profession tool/accessory. I didn’t end up spec’ing into explosives. Didn’t seem worth it, didn’t really grasp how the scrap stuff worked, and since some of the explosives stuff is on a 5 minute timer I’m going to assume they shared a cooldown with combat potions. I also didn’t initially really understand how tinkers worked. I figured it out eventually that they were basically previous expansion gear addons (like parachutes, etc) but in the form of a “gem” slot. But because of my confusion I never utilized them (also, my Druid is my engineer so the main tinker I might’ve used, the battle rez, wasn’t needed).
I’m not sure why the weekly work order quest only rewards 2 skill points where all other professions with a quest (except Inscription) get 3 points.
The ugly: Nothing I can think of but, as I didn’t fully finish spec’ing out this profession, I might be missing something I’m unaware of.
Inscription:
The good: Fairly easy to level up until you need Darkmoon cards. Contracts, Treatises, Missives, Vantus runes, weapon runes, and druid & dragon mount customization items are a nice constant source of work.The bad: Having to use multiple pigments and lower tier inks to create the various inks is pretty tedious. I’d still like to have a “mill all” option (the same for prospecting) to click one button and mill everything I select instead of having to do them individually. That would be in keeping with (I think it was) Ion’s previous statements about wanting to respect players’ time in the future.
The odd: Another profession I ended up with a lot of unused Artian’s Mettle on. No epic quality profession tool/accessory. I never dealt with making or using Darkmoon cards this expansion. So, I really didn’t understand on a practical level the various things in Archiving like Sigils and extracting awakened elements from the cards but that’s just a me thing.
Like with Engineering, the weekly crafting order quest only awards 2 skill points instead of 3.
The ugly: Nothing I can think of.
Jewelcrafting:
The good: About what you expect from Jewelcrafting. It’s one of the crafting professions where you constantly have people needing your services (so much so for me that I ran out of Artisan’s Mettle in order to max rank gear and epic gems weeks ago but more on that later). The addition of major/minor rare quality gems added some nuance to your gearing with consumables which has some benefit when it comes to finding your optimal secondary stat levels.The bad: Probably more than any other crafting profession, Jewelcrafting currently suffers from reagent bloat. With all the various lesser and major gems, glass, clasps, lenses, filigree, crumbled and glossy stones, ores, etc. it’s very easy to max out your reagent bank if you’re a serious crafter.
It can often be hard to find the rare quality gem you are looking in your profession tab. While in some ways, categorizing gems as air/earth/water/fire makes sense because they use those elements as reagents it’s not very intuitive when it comes to what stats are on those gems or the color of the icon used for the gems. I’d suggest adding a way to filter gems by their major>minor stat which would make it easier to work with (IE: search for all gems whose biggest or only stat is mastery). Likewise with Tailoring, a “prospect everything at once in one click” option in the future would be greatly appreciated.
The odd: Yet another profession with no epic quality profession tool or accessory. I didn’t figure out until recently that for the Tiered Medallion Setting, you only have to buy one of each rank to get the 3 gem slots in your neck piece. Prior to that I had just been buying 3 rank 3s because it wasn’t clear how it worked. That’s something that could be explained better. Also another profession whose weekly crafting order quest rewarded only 2 skill points instead of 3.
The ugly: Like with Enchanting, it really annoys me that at max skill level and fully spec’d into the profession I can only get to a skill level of 361 and where the recipe difficulty for an epic gem is 375 which requires you to have to use an Illustrious Insight to guarantee a max rank craft. I really think this shouldn’t be the case. As stated above, I ran out out Mettle/Insights weeks (both from public orders and being one of two max rank Jewelcrafters in my guild) and because my guild’s other Jewelcrafter was busy with work, we had no one in the guild who could fill orders and guarantee max rank crafts. So, they ended up having to get strangers to do them. I’ll address this more in the Comments/Suggestions section below.
Leatherworking:
The good: Profession with the most unique embellishment gear. Shadowflame-Tempered Armor Patch is a very popular optional reagent/embellishment. Crafts both leather and mail gear, leading to a lot of potential work order opportunities. I think the balance/variety of things you can crafter between armor/ reagents/toys/profession equipment, etc. is just right. This is another profession that could benefit from profession-specific embellishments.The bad: Honestly, I’m not coming up with anything worth mentioning.
The odd: Another profession with no epic quality profession tool/accessory.
The ugly: Nothing I can think of.
Tailoring:
The good: Unravelling to create spools as a crafting reagent was an interesting concept and kind of cool (although it’s essentially just a different version of prospecting). Tailoring was one of the easiest professions to level, so that’s a plus. A ton of possible things to craft, especially once you add in PvP gear recipes.The bad: The set bonus for wearing Azureweave/Chronocloth embellished armor should’ve only counted as one embellishment instead of two since you need to wear two pieces in order to get the bonuses and the bonuses themselves didn’t seem overly powerful.
The odd: The Explorer’s Banner of Geology/Herbalism were really nice except for the fact that you couldn’t use them in Zaralek Caverns or the Emerald Dream which seemed really odd.
The ugly: Having to go to the Temporal/Azure Loom in order to craft Azureweave/Chronocloth.
General crafting profession comments/suggestions:
Having to go to the Earth-Warder’s Forge, Azure Loom, Temporal Loom, Altar/Den of Decay, or the Fyrakk Assault area to craft items (as mentioned above) is really, REALLY annoying. Especially with Brackenhide. At least until Follower Dungeons went live, if you saw a crafting order you wanted to do, but didn’t have a Cauldron, most likely someone else would take that order before you could get a group for the dungeon and finish it. And especially after Brackenhide left the dungeon it became even more of a pain. I get that from a thematic/RP point of view it makes some sense but practically it does not. I’m sure it sounded like a nice experiment but in the future if I want to craft something I don’t want to have to leave the standard crafting table/area to do it. And beyond that, the alternative (using a cauldron) costs 30k gold just for the reusable cauldron item plus the mats you use each time to remake it which is prohibitively expensive for some people who aren’t as savvy with making gold. /end rantPattern drops: I never figured out where the draconic messages in a bottle came from (never bothered to look it up) and most of the recipe drops are so incredibly low chance that it took many weeks of farming to get them (if I got them at all). The recipes from Algeth’Ar Academy and Azure Vaults became nigh unobtainable outside of the AH once those dungeons left the dungeon rotation. I’d suggest increasing the drop rate and creating more ways like the spoils bags from Djaradin raid bosses to get recipes from previous content.
Artisan’s Mettle/Illustrious Insight: Please only make it so these are used optionally when leveling up your profession to try to reach the next rank of quality. If you’re at max skill level and have spec’d into all of the traits that increase your skill level there is no reason you should have to use an Insight to guarantee a max rank craft in my opinion. Maybe if you’re using every possible optional and finishing reagent on a piece of gear but other than that…
Excess skill points past maximum: If we are going to keep Artisan’s Mettle going into the future, it would be nice if for every 10 excess skill points traded in that you got enough for one full Illustrious Insight (trader’s currently give 25 Mettle and an Insight costs 50).
As I put in some of the profession categories above, you could add profession-specific embellishment reagents to add more variety and flexibility to that system.
At one point early on in DF I believe Ion was asked about the possibility of being able to reroll your profession points and I believe he said it was something that could be considered in the future. I think this would be a really good idea, especially for early on in an expansion. At start of DF i started spec’ing into some tabs that I later regretted because I didn’t fully understand how things worked at the time. And with how long it takes to full spec your profession out, small mistakes early can feel really punishing.
Finishing reagents: I don’t know how much these get used since they increase the recipe difficulty and (at least to me) it’s always more important that I guarantee a max level craft then crafting speed, multicraft, etc.
Gathering professions
I’ll just combine all gathering professions into one group here. All of these seem OK I guess. With crafting materials now being a global commodity, I don’t know if anyone uses the “refinement” option to upgrade their mats as it’s just not worth the cost when there’s barely any difference in cost on the auction house between one rank and another and they’re all so cheap in the first place.I didn’t use the bait/lure systems from skinning much. I’m guessing the best value it would have had would have been for Dense Hides early on in the expansion and in Zaralek Caverns if you were farming Obsidian Cobraskins.
Work Order system:
It’s not entirely clear how it was decided what profession items required being down through the work order system and which could be crafted yourself on the auction house. For example, epic gems require a work order but none of the enchantments do (including weapon enchants). I think some standardization for consumables would make sense while still keeping crafted gear strictly done through work orders.Because of the issues with skill level to recipe difficulty I previously mentioned work, if someone wants to put up a public work order but they want to make it a requirement of the order that the item be max rank, in a lot of instances that doesn’t work. Because you need to use an Illustrious Insight to guarantee and rank 5 weapon, for example, the work order system won’t recognize that you can do a max rank. So, the person putting in the order would need to require any rank up to rank 4 to allow the crafter to take the order and make the weapon.
That just seems like a massive flaw in the system. People already very hesitant (at least on my server cluster) to put up public work orders for fear of having someone not be able to guarantee a max rank and then they’ll have to find some other person to do a recraft.
I also think a tutorial for how to use the work order system along the lines of Exile’s Reach with a step-by-step guide with over-exaggerated arrows and a quest that has you place an order for a grey quest item and have an NPC “craft” if for you would be greatly beneficial. At least three times this expansion I found someone in trade chat that wanted an item made but upon whispering them discovered they had just back to WoW after a long break and had absolutely NO idea how the system worked until I walked them through it myself. I think all future expansions’ work order areas should have a repeatable quest that walks you through this tutorial so that all future new players could learn how to use the system no matter how long the game runs into the future.
At least on my server cluster we have a problem with scumbags who put up a bunch of work orders while providing no mats and giving basically no gold as a tip in hope someone doesn’t realize they’d be providing their own materials. This happens for both gear and things that could then be sold on the auction house. So far, the only way I’ve dealt with it (and encouraged others to do the same) is to put these people on ignore so they shunned by the crafting community. But my ignore list has gotten so large from this I’ve had to use an addon just so I can go past the default ignore list limit. I’m not sure what Blizz could do about this but it’s toxic af.
That’s all I can think of for right now and it’s almost 4am so I should probably get some sleep.
