Patron Orders are BAD

Community General Discussion
21

The idea of having to make hard cost-benefit choices while not yet knowing how quickly the catch-up mechanisms will kick in or what benefits might lay ahead makes it difficult to make rational decisions.

I have my experiences with DF to guide me, but I don’t have spreadsheets of how exactly all the stats interact and I’m not expecting to ever encounter many orders from other players, so I’m basically just doing all this for my own warband and entertainment.

Also the simple fact that I badly want to craft is probably driving a lot of very inefficient decisions right now. I’m crossing my fingers that this current experience is just early-expansion, low-skill baby steps paying my dues, not how the system will feel all expansion.

22

This is why I dropped crafting in DF. The new system is horrible and I can’t believe they stuck with it. That I was Herb Alch and Alch is by far the most tedious and obnoxious thing in the game. I got mad and dropped it in DF week 1 because I thought they just messed it up, lo and behold apparently I somehow got so unlucky that I didn’t get a single one of those things that removes the arbitrary debuff from experimentation FROM A WHOLE WEEK OF CRAFTING. And that’s still in the game for Alch btw, so yeah no thanks.

23

I’d say you have been fairly lucky if you completed 75% of your Patron Orders. Almost all of my Blacksmith orders are expensive, some to the tune of 30-40k+.

My tailoring alts are getting Patron Orders for Dawnweave/Duskweave bags for which I would have to provide all the Mats.

My Inscription character this week had all his KP orders tied to Quality 3 missives which since I did not specialize in at all, I have no way of completing.

Almost all my JC order require me providing the materials, most of which require 30 Crushed Gemstones.

1 Like
24

It’s really good, crafted gear actually is relevant for the entire season and expansion.

It’s max ilvl is 3 ilvl below Mythic Raid gear and you can add embellishments and have it supplement your gearing with pre-determined stats for a pre-determined slot.

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25

NPC work orders were heavily requested… no, DEMANDED… by people in Dragonflight.

Generally people who don’t understand how crafting works.

I said it was a bad idea at the time, since those same people (a) wouldn’t be satisfied, and (b) just make additional demands, right away.

And here we are!

26

Weren’t patron orders conceived as a response to player feedback on the DF work order quests?

1 Like
27

Agreed with everyone else; Patron orders with barely any mats supplied and the absolutely inconsequential 60g “”“”““tips””“”“”, and the demands that I make Epic 4-star gear that reqires 150 skill points to spec into, and 16 hours’ worth if concentration, and even if it were possible for me to make this item, and I was willing to sink 30,000 of my own gold into it, all I’d get for my trouble would be 2 skill points and 10 Acuity. What an absolute joke.

It almost makes all those no mats/no tip public scam orders from DF seem reasonable.

7 Likes
28

A mix of that and that bonus profession knowledge was entirely RNG with the scales that dropped rarely, and we had basically no way to craft a lot of the purple gear without wasting sparks. Most people just asked friends for crafts as well, so there was almost never public orders in the system after about the first month.

Now, you can get the knowledge eventually from the embellishments/crests/random gear that no one will craft as it’s not BiS, and your extra knowledge is deterministic with a catch up mechanic, and the options to buy books from various vendors. Missing out on an order just means you’ll get an extra order on the next refresh until you catch up, so it’s not a huge deal.

The orders are bad solely because they don’t provide rare and expensive materials and give a pittance of gold in return. One should not have to spend 30k-50k on an order just to get all of 10 acuity and 2 knowledge points. It’s poorly thought out in that regard.

2 Likes
29

My approach to them so far has been just to pick and choose which one I will and will not do. The bulk of them are impossible for me to make though given the quality is set so high. So that to me is a bit of a botch, but the ones I typically can do offer the knowledge points so I guess it balances itself out a bit in the end.

30

It sure would be swell if they requested anything I can make! And I’m not getting anywhere near a three star with the mats I have now

1 Like
31

Then you were incredibly lucky.

I have all professions, as I did before, as my guild’s main crafter. I never struggled as much in DF with keeping up but now I find myself being unable to craft half the orders even if I wanted to put gold into it (which would be a million a week, half the time, for all the professions, if not more).

Take blacksmithing, which is my main profession and it’s always been expensive to start with. Last week, I had 3 knowledge recipes I couldn’t make at all since I never specced into them, and 3 that had no mats and cost a total of 600K to make if I wanted to try it. I’d also have to spend concentration on them to get them at rank 4. They provided no materials. I managed to scrounge enough to make one at Rank 4, but couldn’t even get the others with no knowledge in it.

This week, I once again can’t get any BS points because 2 of my recipes I don’t even have as they’re drops, and 4 of them are at Rank 4 with no materials attached.

The situation is similar for me for other professions. At best, I managed to get 50% of points of all of them because I either don’t have recipes, or won’t invest 200K+ to get the knowledge because that’s a ridiculous amount to ask for.

Not to mention, half the time they’re asking for rare reagents that barely drop.

The system is awful and based on pure RNG. If you’re lucky, you’re allowed to be a crafter in TWW. If you’re not, forget professions exist and move on with your life.

Knowledge shouldn’t be locked behind RNG, AT ALL. You can try lock some acuity behind it but not knowledge.

Though, I suppose it’s their way of forcing those who want to keep up to buy gold tokens if you can’t spend your whole day being a degen on the auction house to keep up with spending 500K weekly on getting your measly knowledge.

1 Like
32

If you’re only crafting for yourself, that would be fine.

However, if you exploited early and got all the acuity already anyway (since they didn’t fix that exploit) and now can craft anything, you’re golden. Don’t forget if you specced into Herbalism to exploit it for acuity, too. Or mining. Or skinning.

Or exploited the ability to infinitely spawn patron orders with an exploit.

Patron orders won’t be good because of the fact that they will never catch up to the exploited levels of crafting some got during the first week. Blizzard fixed none of it, and punished none of it.

It might equalize in Season 2 and onwards, but early game crafting, you’ll be locked into the whales who’ve spent the gold/money to reroll professions, exploit crafting order spawns, and exploit herbalism.

As per usual. It’s worse than the dragonflight launch with infinite shard farming.

33

Tell me about it, as an eng all they seem to supply is the scrap.

34

I tend to think they’re a poor band-aid for the fact that the economy isn’t designed in such a way that players are submitting enough crafting orders to reliably provide work for artisans, so they have NPCs fill the void.

The weekly Treatises are probably a step in the right direction. They’re a recurring thing you can only get through crafting orders. That’s exactly what would need to exist to get people using the Crafting Order system more.

Maybe players could farm weekly items for temporary weapon augments, flask-like effects, vantus runes, etc, that are BoP and can only be used on Crafting Orders, so every week anyone pushing any hard content will be posting orders for weightstones, armor polish, flasks, runes, etc, giving work to smiths, alchemists, scribes, etc, regularly.

The second issue then is how many people just do Crafting Orders with their own alts or within their guilds.

35

It’s always going to be easier to just do crafting with a preferred crafter/guild or send yourself crafting orders for the weekly. There’s almost never going to be a need for public orders because most people know a crafter who can make something for them right then and there vs. waiting and wondering about quality of the craft they will receive.

Public orders have no quality requirement, so will never be used for that, and there’s very few items otherwise that can be useful crafting through them. Treatise might be the only one since it has no quality, but even then, I personally go to a crafter I know has multicraft vs. someone random.

36

The only thing bad about patron orders is they don’t respawn often enough.

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37

Right now the Patron crafting orders as they work now are a total farse. They are meant to mimic public or even personal work orders so even people not sitting in the insane scrolling trade chat for hours can grab some and do some crafting. Right now they are completely failing at that since no crafter in the world ever in any situation would accept an order with few to little mats providing a meager 60-70g tip and be willing to dump 10-15k in mats of their own. Needs a serious overhaul and if nothing else a cap of one of the materials randomly not provided by the npc so its not quite so ridiculous.

38

Yeah. I feel like they took something that most people hated and just ran with it.

39

They are really bad considering they’re meant to be our main source of Artisan’s Acuity for the expansion. Spending 20k gold for 10 acuity is awful.

2 Likes
40

I guess I got lucky with engineering, my patron orders have been rather good.

Craft the knowledge reward and first time craft orders, ignore the rest.

Maybe some professions have worse orders, would be helpful to list what prof everyone has and if they love/hate/don’t mind the orders.