I felt this way for awhile as well. But then mid-expansion we had someone leave for personal reasons and our guild needed an alchemist, so I switched professions. I was dreading it because “no catch-up mechanics.” But by mid-expansion we knew better what things our guild needed most and how to spec to max craft that, so that’s where I focused knowledge first. Between first craft bonuses, all of the knowledge books from all of the renown groups, artisan’s group, and all of the world crafting treasures (there’s like 12-15 per profession available now) AND the weekly sources of knowledge, I was able to start with enough knowledge to get us back in business for our needs pretty much immediately.
Is that alchemist completely maxed out (every node) today? Nope. But over time I’ve gotten more than enough knowledge to max craft all the things I will ever need. Now I still put in points as I do things each week, but I’ve already maxed all the nodes I need to be successful with the specific crafts I want. The rest is just icing on the cake.
TBH, people who returned late or took a break and came back may feel like they can’t possibly “catch up” but… they also got the bonus of learning from the early bird’s mistakes. This was hard for me to understand in the beginning, too, but… you don’t need to max every node of your profession to be successful.
No max quality set on public orders were explained so many times, it just had to be that way.
FOMO is present in all activities in Mmos, be it raid lockouts, season currencies, everything.
Just go check Cata classic, we had to login everyday for JC daily quest to earn currency for buying recipes, same with transmutes.
These days we have it as weekly which is big fomo relief.
No quality on public orders was one of the few ways some players COULD level their profession. I spread out my points to unlock all of the weapon/gear/etc recipes so I could only guarantee rank 3 and 4, but even right away at the start of dragonflight majority of players only wanted r5. Thankfully I was able to grab a couple public orders on the professions I was lagging behind in, to get those skill points and knowledge points since quality couldn’t be set.
how exactly do you imagine it would go if you could just walk up to the AH, buy ingredients, craft, and then list stuff for a profit?
you think maybe everybody would maybe do that too? maybe it would even drive the prices down to a zero margin possibly?
you make money with multicraft/ressourcefulness and gathering your own materials / get them cheaper from guildies and even then you’re competing with THOUSANDS of other players that literally have infinite ressources on their hands too - how do you think that would affect the market?
If car dealer could decide to not add an engine and all 4 wheels after it’s been paid for, no one is going to that dealer.
Needing these types of craft to finish leveling your profession was probably another issue. Every single crafter I leveled I had to feed them crafts from alts, there was never enough public orders.
Time is money.
If sitting there crafting is 100g/hour profit, sure, someone might do that.
The thing is, I used to farm herbs, turn them into flasks/pots, then sell the flasks/pots.
It’s easier to move a finished product than base materials.
DF was the nail in the coffin for me and professions. I had alts with every profession and have levelled almost every one in every expansion. The highest non-gathering on this one is 85 engineering on my main. I have never seen a public workorder available on my server or any other. I have done quests where I manually put in every workorder sent to an alt and it was incredibly painful and time-consuming. I thought there must be a bug or something that the standard levelling through workorders that every NPC explained didn’t exist, only to find out it was and continues to be by design.
I’ve levelled fishing and archaeology to max all along and done the related achievements p[previous to this expac. I’ve been severely disappointed with the new archeology. It took me some actual out of game research to figure out what I was supposed to do with archives and its still buggy, clunky, and left to RNG quests showing up.
I thought the fishing improvements were pretty awesome, it just fell flat for just about everything else.
I gave up on getting nearly all gear crafted for my toons this expansion. I was just too fed up with the entire system. My reagent bank is brimming with soulbound crap.
Mats should be cheaper next expansion for those that stick with it as I imagine a lot less players will be grinding professions.
Now this quote is hilarious. The DF crafting system killed crafting. The most people who enjoyed crafting do now is gather. I’m guessing the new system was for people who didn’t enjoy crafting before.