Professions, Portals, and Player Agency

Community General Discussion
41

Also true, no question. And the funny thing about this is, if the crafted items or the materials were not BoP, more of those items would be getting made.

My guildies use Breaths and Sanguicells to make feasts. Feasts, of all things.

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42

I really Hope blizzard will actually fix these problems next expansion.

Seeing the new profession items in 8.1.5 makes me feel like they are out of touch even more though :confused:

None of the new items benefits a group, and none of them really do anything special imo

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43

It would be beneficial to everyone if the raid mats were simply unbound, and so were the items that came from raid mats. From something as simple as being able to unlock both the leather and mail crafted appearances without needing to run two leatherworkers, to easing the pain of RNG for players with more gold than luck.

Raiders who have no interest in crafting could offset their weekly repair bills, if nothing else. And players with no interest in raiding, but who do enjoy crafting or even just playing the AH, would have more reason to stay subscribed.

It’s just a real shame that Blizzard would apparently rather soulbind everything and force disinterested players to run instances or be hamstrung in their preferred content, than loosen the reins a bit and return player agency an a thriving economy to the game.

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44

Most of me really chalks this mistake up to bad judgment, or maybe just stupidity at a stretch. But there’s this niggling little voice in the back of my head saying, “But what if they did want to force profession nuts into raids?”

I would think the feedback about Legion’s professions requiring dungeons would be sufficient to convince them of that being a bad plan, but… Maybe not?

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45

Obviously this isn’t the first time players have needed to run dungeons or raids for special materials needed for professions. I remember being a bit miffed back in MoP because I needed to raid to get Haunting Spirit in order to make something like a Falling Blossom gear item on my tailor.

However - Haunting Spirit was not soulbound so you could buy them. Naturally they were very pricey but they added to the game economy and gave people with more gold than time a way of getting them.

AND the items they made were BoE. So if I did put in that effort to obtain them, at least I could give them to a guildy or trade them or sell them.

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46

Legion and BfA both have an almost…parental feel to them. “Try it, you’ll like it!” seems to be the motivating force behind things like professions leading into dungeons, or open-world PVP zones scattered over the map (and in Dalaran’s sewers, where players were also sent by quests).

It really does seem like the developers think some players just need forced exposure to dungeons/raids/PVP in order to make them adopt those playstyles, while completely ignoring that many players have already tried those things an not liked them (or, as in my case, might like them fine on some toons but not on every toon - you couldn’t pay me to take my feral druid into a raid).

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47

I was genuinely okay with Legion’s profession design – entering into dungeons, provided they were not required to be Heroic or Mythic difficulty, seemed then and still seems now to be a small barrier to entry, at least in my opinion.

But there is a world of difference between a crafting material that must be farmed in Mythic dungeons or Normal/Heroic raids over the course of many visits, and a profession recipe that requires one trip through a Normal dungeon to obtain.

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48

I think that is Ohgodmyeyez’s point: not that there shouldn’t be rare mats and patterns/recipes in raids, but that those things shouldn’t be soulbound.

Normal dungeons are not a particularly difficult barrier to overcome, and by Tomb I was geared enough to take guildmates on solo runs through dungeons for professions. But I also know that there are plenty of people who choose professions as their primary playstyle because they simply do not like instanced content.

Agreed, though, that there is a world of difference between “do this one quest in a dungeon” and “farm instances for weeks on end, with the only real hope of gaining mats at a reasonable pace coming from heroic raids.”

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49

This, yes, absolutely. There are four wrist item recipes that drop in Black Temple, and crafting them required materials from Black Temple. Raiders didn’t make them because they needed them. They made them because they could sell them, funding guild repairs, consumables, etc. for doing content they were already planning to do anyway.

Materials can be soulbound if crafted items are not. Crafted items can be soulbound if materials are not. Both at once is bad design.

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50

I’m out of likes again: :+1:

For myself, since I only raid on two of my toons, I would prefer not to see mats bound at all, of course, or at least only account bound rather than BoP. But I would accept the “either one thing or the other can be soulbound, not both” approach, because as it is, crafting is just a glorified form of bad luck protection for raiders.

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51

Honestly, this is too charitable a description for it. It’s more along the lines of just being a window dressing. It looks good, but it serves absolutely no function.

Bad luck protection doesn’t happen to consistent raiders – if I need an item for a slot, and I raid consistently, even if my luck is bad, my entire guild’s won’t be. Before I can craft one of those items, I’ll have the item I want traded to me by someone who already has it or has better.

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52

This was the perfect long-form response to the CM’s post, well said!

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53

Wow, thanks. :slight_smile:

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54

This is such an obvious truth it makes my teeth ache that the developers responsible for professions cannot see it.

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55

Yeaaaaaah, not gonna lie about that particular point – somebody screwed the pooch with a jackhammer. It’s so painfully obvious that it’s mind-boggling how it could possibly be overlooked.

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56

You may not have any eyes but, you make a good post.

About the only thing that I disagreed with was about the size of the world. Yeah, leveling up we are aware of the size. But once you get to the level cap, the world shrinks and the players begin to forget.

Personally, I don’t know if I will adapt to the portal hubs or not. I have to see how it is living with it. But, I don’t see why people are so upset by it. Maybe there are too many ways of teleportation.

Without all the portals, I have an excuse to use those flying mounts that I have collected. Not that I am in the “I want flying NOW!” camp. But it does seem like a perfect opportunity to let one of my mounts stretch their wings.

Thanks for the post Ohgodmyeyez.

57

Good post sir

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58

I dig the idea. Fighting the medicine btw. Which gave me this idea to go with it. They are goblin and gnomish right? So they don’t always work?

What if you wanted to go to say I dunno zangermarsh and you chose it. Instead it teleports you to thousand needles. Throw a little debuff, say 60 or 120 seconds before you can use it again, and a lot of fun could be had. It is like mage portal roulette.

59

A lot of their apparent grudge against player agency seems to stem from the urge to prevent players from making the “wrong” choices. And, as game designers are prone to do, they tend to overdesign a solution. Or, in the case of portals, nitpick at something nobody else would see as an issue.

Another example is PvP vendors. the problem there was that new players would cap points in the first week and buy a ring or something, not knowing it was better to save up and buy a weapon next week.

But instead of a simple solution (like, say, have a quest at the start of each season to award a weapon then let us buy the rest), they give us the convoluted mess we have now. While this solves the “weapon problem,” it ironically forces us to into making wrong (well, null) decisions later when the arbitrarily selected items for the week are for slots we don’t need.

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60

Well, I don’t want to rip off any of the actual Engineering profession’s flavor, so I don’t think I’d do that.

I mentioned Goblins and Gnomes because, especially with Azerite in play, technology in general needs to advance, and it has – with tanks and mechs and junk. But you can’t tell me the Goblins who made the teleporter to Gnomeregan wouldn’t be chomping at the bit to see what they could do with their teleportation tech if only they could get their hands on a little Azerite themselves.

Maybe instead of random teleportation weirdness, just a chance to apply a cosmetic effect to your character for a little while, like a change in hair color, or something along those lines, that lasts for a few minutes and then fades away.

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