Remove gathering professions or change how they operate

Community General Discussion
1

It’s 2025 now. Flapping around clicking nodes for hours on end is not gameplay. Of course you could space out and listen to some audiobook or have something going on a second monitor (if you use one) or play in windowed mode, but that’s the opposite of what I want to do in WoW.
Blizzard realizes this, and that’s why they’ve fully embraced the bot automation of gathering, and fully expect and perhaps even encourage it. Gathering needs to be reworked entirely, but I doubt that will happen as Blizz seems to like either their paying sub fees or their selling the mats to buy tokens to operate the accounts, and remove gold from circulation.

WoD had the excellent garrison system that allowed one to harvest nodes conveniently, and this is of course the sane option for housing as well. From classic to TWW there’s videos and posts of botting being a huge and blatant issue, and the reason is quite simple: No one wants to do it. The material yield is low, the time spent is high, and I don’t use the AH. In Minecraft people will go to extreme lengths to build huge and complicated automatic farm systems to avoid manual labor. With WoW, we should just be able to send our serfs and tenants on our housing property to collect herbs for us. Bring back mission tables for houses. I should get all the Bismuth and Orbinid I need from that.

If you absolutely want a manual gathering system, change mining to “prospecting” and have it work like archaeology but without the clicking on stuff. Mark out a rich section of ores, and have some dwarven miners or goblin walkers/shredders come in to collect everything for you. For herbalism you could bring in some Cenarion Circle druids to collect stuff in flight form. “I will make botting open, and available to all of us! YES. TO ALL OF US!” -Clu, if he played WoW.

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I didn’t mind garrisons, but a lot of people complained that they had no reason to leave their garrisons and go out into the world. I suspect this is at least partly why we haven’t seen a system like that again. Maybe housing changes that. But, I also don’t mind just going out and farming ore/herbs on occasion. It’s actually kind of relaxing when I just want to turn off my brain and listen to music.

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Most of my time is spent either sitting around waiting for ques in Dornogal anyway. For most people there’s hardly any reason to go out into the world anyways, as people just buy the materials they want from the AH.

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It’s buried deep in there, but in the end this is a subjective post. You don’t like something so the entire system should be changed?

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With respect, this is baloney. If you are trying to build a case to create change in the game then do just that. To double down, “I don’t use the AH” and we are now at the point of not listening to you at all.

Gathering works for a lot of people.

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I quite like flapping around clicking on nodes. It’s relaxing at the end of a long day. I just wish they weren’t so stingy with the rewards. (C’mon blizz, I have maxed out skill and knowledge, why are you giving me one bronze-rank flower?)

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7

So what did Argus dream of?

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I’m with you there, I really like turning off my brain. It is hard to do. One of the things that work for me is the truesight flask with the 30-minute timer, otherwise an hour might go by!

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9

par the course for the forums.

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10

I like how the gathering professions are - it is a nice relaxing way of playing. Not everything needs to be aimed at pleasing the sweaty people.

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Farming materials for my own gear adds immersion. I am going out into wilderness to harvest raw items like it would be done in actuality.

Once you have acquired all your items and had received your gear. That item feels more rewarding as you helped build it.

Gather makes Azeroth feel like a tangible world that lives.

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You would never do anything remotely like this in actuality.

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Please explain this dumb statement. I need more info on where your mind is at.

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14

You know WoW is set in a medieval time frame? It’s not modern mass production like it is now.

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Yes it is. Just not the kind of gameplay you favor, obviously.

Um, what? Botting is still against ToS if I remember right. I doubt the company would deliberately encourage it.

That makes it entirely a “you” problem.

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16

I miss the garrison mine and garden.
I miss my farm in Pandaria.

Sure, I’m getting some enjoyment out of the current gathering model, but I’ve just never been the biggest fan of WoW’s sparsely distributed low-yield nodes where I feel like I’m competing with bots.

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17

Garrisons were cool. Guild garrisons would be cool. Maybe make it feel like an mmo again instead of a coop game.

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18

make every mine an EZ Mine node, that will spice things up.

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think it should work like fishing, and arc, you can pick 1 free gathering prof as well and still have 2 main prof

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It should take two people with the same gathering profession to gather a single node. Make the game an MMO again :upside_down_face:

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