People have a severe lack of understanding about how professions work in DF.
For starters, this isn’t SL legendaries, so get those numbers out of your head. We are back to more traditional profit numbers.
That being said, quality is king. The common concensus in our e-sport conditioned playerbase is that “it’s the best, or it’s trash”.
So to that end - how do you get the highest quality?
Your strategy will vary depending on the item and the profession. You can go max inspiration build and rely on inspiration procs to push you past the skill threshold to get the max quality.
Some items you can acquire enough skill to guarantee max quality by maxing out your base profession skill and specific builds within your profession tree.
Either way - knowledge points are going to be key for either the inspiration build or the skill based build. So understanding how/where/when to spend your KP, based on what you are trying to specialize in, will be key to your success.
Proper KP expenditure is the difference between profit or loss. Having access to what players want, or just the scraps for folks who don’t care about quality (not many).
I… I have no idea what you are talking about. I just want to make some cool stuff and sell it. Its not this hard in any other MMO I played, in fact, “New World” had a decent system, though the game was bad.
Professions suck, plain and simple.
They had a genuinely nice idea but really got so stuck in their classic, forced communication, make less gold, mindset.
I mean that’s an issue. This system does not really favor the ill-prepared.
So for example…
You really shouldn’t have enough knowledge points yet to specialize in both armor and weapons.
The only way to pull this off would have been if you basically spread out all of your points across both trees just to unlock the bottom node/recipe (assuming you aren’t relying on boe recipes). If this is what you did, it means you haven’t actually specialized in anything and cannot actually make the gear folks are spamming trade for - stuff with reagents, infusions, embellishments, etc.
Basically the jack of all trades is the master of none. In this system, you want to be a master. Eventually over a long time, as you acquire more knowledge points, you can be a master of all of it - but that’s months away.
No, I can only make 343 weapons.
My armor I can make is 384.
Now you say master of it all, what can I make that will compete with say a Glad? or top level raider? What will a top player want to come to me for if I say master Weapon smith?
I’m confused, isn’t this how professions have always been? They’re not a mess right now, they’ve always been a mess. Blizz tried something to make them less of a mess and it didn’t quite work. They tried though which is better than they’ve done in a long long time.
Just like every xpac, alchemy and enchanting make money, everything else is a gold sink
What I mean by master of it all, is that eventually, if you keep at it, you will get enough knowledge points to fill out the entire tree across all specs.
Until you are there though, you need to optimize for 1 item then continue on to the next.
So for example, become the best shield smith, once all nodes that help you make shields are maxed, then move on to breastplates, which shares a parent.
You could move onto something else with a different parent node, but it’s going to take much longer to become viable (for example helms which are under a different sub-spec than shields). An even more sub-optimal choice would be swapping to weapons, which shares nothing because it is under a different tree entirely.
Also make sure you understand that “all nodes that help you make shield” aren’t just what is in that talent tree. So for blacksmithing as an example, the “Hammer Control” node under Hammer Control spec, will improve your BS skill on every item you make, including shields. So that is still part of your “optimized shield build”.
My whole point is… All these different paths, all these different ways of being good at a specific job, that is all great! But again, when I master just one thing, like weapons, what would a top PVP player or PVE player come to me for???
Well people can get optional crafting reagents to improve that 384 to 395, 405, 418. But your going to need to have every skill point you can maxed into that item to have a chance of making it max quality. Which is time consuming and NOT intuitive.
Regardless, I just got a 405 weapon made for a raiding character who clears normal/heroic every week. Yes, hes using a crafted weapon, necklace, ring. All made by crafters who dedicated time and money to being able to make them at high rank.
Personally, as much hate as the new system gets, I enjoy it… then again, I miss the days of specific branches of leatherwork, the difference between old school armor and weaponsmiths… when gnomish vs goblin engineering meant something… etc. While the new system has a learning curve, I am looking forward to it being rolled backward to include older content as well
As someone who primarily does professions though, I feel like I traded in my character power chores for double the amount of profession chores (weekly, treasures, mobs, orders, books) per character for who knows how long.
At least choreghast was mostly just on my main for like 4-6 weeks and then done. These profession chores will be with us for the long haul.
I don’t even count renown, as grinding out rep has always been a thing for the crafter play style.
That is a free market… there are a significant number of players wanting to do exactly what you’re doing and make some gold. What is your advantage? Honest question.
make crafted gear for people via personal orders and make a crap ton of money doing it. idk. blacksmithing isnt the best money making prof either though, so there’s that.
And my honest answer is I don’t know? I don’t know how to get an advantage or if there even is one to get? I guess maybe I am thinking it was something it is not as I really never got into a profession before.