We’ve all been there. You bought or farmed the materials for a craft and found a crafter in the dreaded trade chat spam scroll, all to get a Rank 4 piece of gear back.
Or; You’re a crafter, but you missed the initial cornering of the market, and now you just can’t compete based on skill or just availability of services. After all, who has the time to sit in Valdrakken all day long scrolling through boosts hoping to finally find someone who wants something you can’t guarantee to their quality?
PRESENTING: “All Mats, No Fear, Just Gear”
Premise: If you have the recipe unlocked you can craft the same ilvl gear that anyone else can with whatever mats you have available. Got 3 star materials? You only need 10 to craft. 2 Star? Maybe 20. Only 1 star? 50. (Numbers subject to change of course)
This kills 4 birds with 1 proverbial stone that currently plague the crafting profession.
- It returns value to gatherers by no longer harvesting worthless materials if they are less than 3 stars. All materials are valuable just incrementally more so. Since a 3 star item may be worth 50 gold, a 1 star may only be worth 10 since you need a lot more.
- It helps players by simplifying the crafting process and no longer wasting mats hoping for a rank 5 piece of gear only to get a rank 4 back in the mail and now have to spend more materials to recraft. Lastly, it opens up the ability to submit orders via the public order system without having to worry about quality, you send the mats (or tip) and we’ll send the gear right back.
- It enables crafters to process and create the same gear as anyone else granted they have the recipe. This is reminiscent to WoW of days past but still allows for the new talent trees to become more resourceful and able to produce gear with lower tier materials at the same item level as someone with less skill needing to use higher tier materials.
- It also opens up the public order system to take a LARGE variety of new orders as players no longer NEED to find a crafter to craft the gear they want. As an aside, I am very excited for the NPC crafting order system, but I would also like to see players be able to order as well without fear of getting garbage back.
I invite you to submit your comments and suggestions to refine this idea and hopefully we can get some attention from the devs and see this system integrated. It gives more power back to the gatherers, players, and crafters and opens up an often unused public order system that has so much more potential.
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And we would be back to what professions have been before DF when everyone could make everything.
If everyone is super, no one is.- Syndrome
I don’t feel like the quality system is really the issue in general. It’s really really easy to max out crafting in a particular area (I would say the outliers are LW for lack of skillup options early on and things like weapon enchants where your spec looks like a graph solution to the traveling salesman problem).
I think the bigger issues are:
- making sure all specs are simpler (fill out all the nodes to the thing you want to max) which they have seemingly mostly done for TWW so this is good if so.
- making sure each tab get a pattern that can max to 100 skill without needing BoP items. That gives a money path for folks wanting to skill up vs a time path. I think this is important for making sure if you start down a path you aren’t stuck farming rep or going for work orders to skill up. The new NPC order system is nice mind you, but it is so random that it so far (in beta) hasn’t been very consistent for skillups.
I’ve been mostly happy with the idea of the new system for professions. It set up a nice fantasy of being a specialist early on in the expansion. It gave goals each week so that professions weren’t just one and done on day one.
It definitely has some areas it could improve though. So I’m hoping TWW continues to iterate on it.
I’m also weird though in that I think it is good that people who spend more time in something should be able to have the best results. That person who spends all day watching trade chat should definitely be able to corner the market on something versus the person who puts in an hour here or there. I like that there is a correlation to effort (not a perfect one, but this is a new system, so iteration is needed).
Always make sure to specify a minimum quality with that person you found in trade chat. I tell my own customers to set the min quality just so I don’t make a mistake like forget to add the insight.
Should being work from home/unemployed actually be the path to success in crafting? I’d hard disagree.
Dragonflight was only missing a few things to make it absolutely perfect for crafting.
Daily limits on private public, and guild orders to hard gate supply. Race to the bottom crafting is bad design.
Ability to filter based on full materials supplied. Absolutely ridiculous they took so long to add that to soft block scammers on the work order board making it a pain to interact with.
Lack of time gated mats, and lack of good resource sinks for common mats, caused race to the bottom in gathering far faster than it should have. Legion’s every 3 days cooking/mining/herbalism world quest kept gathering professions lucrative for the entirety of that expansion.
More rep gates, or even BOP mats that you can only get from Max level pve content like legion boe legendary boots would have been great too. Force investment beyond maxing the profession, and you lock out low effort crafting alts, which is a good thing.
You can get success in crafting with very little time spent. However, putting more time into it than someone else should matter for crafting, regardless of your home situation. There are plenty of people who work at work and that are employed that are able to enjoy it.