Professions Update: Concentration in The War Within

[Kaivax]

Greetings members of the Artisan’s Consortium!

As we reveal much of the content coming in The War Within, we’d like discuss a new system we’re cooking up for professions.

Inspiration

We added Inspiration in Dragonflight to try and capture the fantasy of critical hits while crafting. If you weren’t quite capped out on your gear and specializations for a given craft, or if you weren’t using max quality reagents to guarantee that max quality item, Inspiration was a way to get that lucky crit. It could save you some money (by using lower-quality reagents) and you could craft a better item than you would otherwise.

That was the hope at least, but it ended up (understandably) becoming a situation where crafters take this luck-based system, tell their customers that they would recraft an item an indeterminate number of times, and summarily charge a specific price per recraft until their Inspiration struck.

So we’re making changes, because:

• There’s a lack of decision making and agency for the crafter.
• There’s a lack of clarity for customers who just want items made.
• It’s based heavily in RNG, which was never the goal of the Professions revamp.

In The War Within, we’re removing Inspiration. In its place, we have a new ability for crafters to utilize.

Concentration

Concentration is a resource, and you’ll have a separate pool of Concentration for each crafting profession.

It represents your ability to heavily focus on your recipes and exceed your normal capabilities. You choose when you want to Concentrate using a button in the crafting window, empowering your next craft(s). Doing so will cause the craft to automatically reach the next level of quality, no questions asked.

However, such heavy focus can take a toll, costing you some of your profession’s Concentration resource. The cost is determined by how far away you are from crafting that next quality tier and is modified by a few variables such as Profession Specializations, Finishing Reagents, and whether you are crafting consumables, reagents, or actual equipment.

For example, if you’re incredibly close to being able to craft a max-quality sword, you won’t need to Concentrate too hard to finish that project. However, if you’re just barely able to craft that same sword at quality 3, you will likely have to devote most of your Concentration to craft it at quality 4.

For those who want to focus on ingenious breakthroughs when concentrating, we also have a new stat to support your endeavors. This is Ingenuity, which gives you a chance to refund the Concentration spent on a craft. The more Ingenuity you have, the higher your chance to get that full refund. Outside of these Ingenuity-fueled refunds, Concentration will also automatically regenerate over time when you aren’t sitting at its cap.

Our goal is to provide crafters with a more deterministic way to accomplish the original objectives and intent behind Inspiration. You can use it to shore up a lack of skill, gear, or max-quality reagents while still making higher-quality crafts. Maybe you just want to save some money by using lower-quality reagents in a craft you can otherwise guarantee at maximum quality. Either way, we want to give crafters more agency over their crafting, provide more room for decision-making in the professions ecosystem, and provide a resource that you can use without having to give your customers a full statistical breakdown.

Please note that much of this system is currently being implemented, and will become available for testing in future builds of the War Within Alpha.

Thank you very much!

[Adarel-sargeras]

I’m very excited to test profession changes, and I’m looking forward to seeing Concentration and Ingenuity in action. My feedback here is primarily about Concentration.

@Kaivax

So we’re making changes, because:

• There’s a lack of decision making and agency for the crafter.
• There’s a lack of clarity for customers who just want items made.
• It’s based heavily in RNG, which was never the goal of the Professions revamp.

Crafter Agency

I slightly disagree with the first bullet. I do have the choice of whether I use an insight or recraft until I proc. The agency is more about using the limited resource I already have - Mettle. The reason we have to recraft and confuse our customers (“send it as r4 min please!”) is because we are trying desperately to not run out of Mettle. If Mettle were not so rare, we could avoid the RNG and avoid confusing customers, and just use an insight every time. All three bullets would be solved. This would also be very boring.

Adding a new resource that is similarly limited will not change how much agency we have. I do like that Concentration feels more like a way to help the casual crafters perform, but if it is similarly required to hit Rank 5 and it is limited with no way to actively generate, then it will not address the current problem of why agency is so frustrating for us.

Crafter Resource Problem

I absolutely agree that the system needs to be clearer for customers. I think one way to solve this problem is to solve the resource problem. I am not sure why Mettle is currently so limited, as it means that a crafter feels like they should not craft for people sometimes. Mettle is the true currency of trade, but it doesn’t have a base value. Mettle for me or others who craft for the public everyday value Mettle extremely highly. Mettle for casual crafters is often nearly worthless. If the crafter market were truly open and all crafters were available all the time, then this would make sense and would reach equilibrium. However, what actually happens are the more active crafters are sometimes the only crafters online, often in non-peak cases, but they are incentivized to craft in the confusing way (“send as r4 min please!”) or not craft at all (in the case of diamonds).

I am not sure the original goals around resource limitation for crafters. For Concentration, I would strongly encourage the team to consider letting us have ways to generate it that are not based on simply waiting if it is required to hit rank 5. My assumption is the team wants to make sure all crafters have the chance to craft, but what actually happens is there may only be one or two crafters sitting in trade chat, and if you’re out of resource, you might as well not be playing. Customers wait longer, crafters have no reason to play, and the game overall suffers.

If you don’t need Concentration to guarantee max rank, then my thoughts are pointless. However, I think that kind of decision-less crafting would also be a step down and simply make this a more complicated version of the old crafting system. I do think that max rank should have some risk involved. I do not think that risk should be tied to a resource that limits how much someone can play.