Scarcity of Artisan's Acuity - What's the Purpose?

Community General Discussion
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Okay, so I love the Patron Order system in theory, and in practice, it works pretty well. What I don’t understand is the heavy reliance on large quantities of Artisan’s Acuity WITH intentional scarcity of Acuity.

With Artisan’s Mettle, we got a hefty chunk each week to work with. We don’t get that in TWW. Okay, fine. Clearly, they designed this to be gated with the slow roll of acuity.

Knowledge costs acuity
Profession gear costs acuity
BoP epic gear costs acuity
Recipes cost acuity

I’m a Scribe/Herbalist who cooks and fishes, so here’s my perspective:

Even the contract recipes cost 150 acuity each. You’d think a contract recipe with the Severed Threads would cost Kej and that the contract recipe for the Arathi would cost Radiant Remnants or Resonance Crystals…that the one from AoD would cost Globs of Wax or Fire Rubies. Nope. Artisan’s Acuity.

Each missive recipe: 150 acuity
Each contract recipe: 150 acuity
Each knowledge book: hundreds (plural) of acuity

Herbalism knowledge books: 900 Artisan’s Acuity = 45 knowledge points
Inscription knowledge books: 900 Artisan’s Acuity = 30 knowledge points
Yes, I am aware of the +10 knowledge books available for Kej. Those are not the ones I’m referring to.

Weaverline Enchant for fishing pole to use anglerthread and seekerthread : 100 acuity
Fishing hat: 300 acuity
Blue profession tools: 300 acuity apiece

So, for Cooking, you want me to spend 600 acuity (blue hat, blue rolling pin).

For Fishing, you want me to spend 700 acuity (blue hat, blue pole, weaverline).

For Inscription, you want me to spend 900 acuity (blue quill, blue magnifying glass, blue glasses).

For Herbalism, you want me to spend 900 acuity (blue hat, blue basket, blue scythe).

For each gear piece I buy from a crafter, you want me to spend another 300 acuity (weapon and/or armor).

For every single item on the above list, you also want me to accept early items that are not 5-star and then recraft them later at 20+ acuity per recraft.

And…in order to buy recipes to make all of this stuff, you want me to spend 150 acuity/per recipe.

That comes to 1,800 Artisan’s Acuity for profession knowledge, 3,700 Acuity for profession gear and two pieces of endgame-quality crafted gear + 600 Acuity for Contract Recipes + 1,050 Acuity for Profession Missives (ingenuity/finesse/multicraft/etc.).

I have access to roughly 100-150 acuity per week if I herb enough to find every petal/rose and if I am able to push every single patron order that comes my way (which I cannot) every week.

That’s a grand total of 7,150 Artisan’s Acuity + any I might want for recrafting needs over the course of the expansion’s current content. That’s 48 weeks of consistent acuity grinding - eleven solid months to obtain all of that at the current rate unless I raise up alts in various professions and steal all of their artisan’s acuity to feed my main.

Sure, when you google it, you see people discussing early exploits that supposedly net you a huge ton of it by acting the fool, but I mean with the system as it’s intended to function, I have patron orders and nothing else.

I didn’t realize this when we started, assuming it would be like DF with weekly quests to gain more. I spent that first chunk on fishing gear thinking I’d get more at reset or more when the season started. Nope.

So, I scrape it together in bits of 5, 10, or 30 from patron orders and deepgrove petals.

You have GOT to be kidding me. I need thousands of it and I get like 100-150 per week. What is the purpose behind this? What is it that gating acuity this hard is supposed to prevent or encourage? I don’t understand it, and it’s very frustrating.

I’m about to move, and so I’ll be absent from game for three weeks, and instead of thinking something normal for a WoW player like, “Man, we’re gonna miss three weeks of raid drops and M+ progression,” all I can think is, “How will I EVER catch back up in the acuity grind?”

If I am missing an obvious acuity resource, by all means…call me an idiot but then TELL ME what that resource is because I’d love to feel better about this system. Crafting feels SO MUCH BETTER in TWW than it did in DF, but the Artisan’s Acuity scarcity is exhausting and demoralizing, and I don’t get why frustrating the player is considered good system design.

If you want us to work for it, great. I will farm it…but you have to give me a way to farm it, first, and you haven’t done that unless I’m missing something.

75 Likes
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yes, the new crafting system is a terrible grindy mess and acuity is the worst of it.

Crafting may now be the most grindy and time gated content in WoW but a lot of people seem to like it? I can’t make sense of why.

It is probably great for people who can play all day and people who have lots and lots of alts that all grab one recipe each - the rest of suffer or ignore crafting entirely

25 Likes
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Being an artisan is feeling less acuity and more obtucity :frowning:

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I don’t even understand the point of acuity other then to make things annoyingly tedius if you don’t purchase mats…ohwait nvm I figured it out.

WoW tokens.

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How do WoW tokens or spending more time in the game get you more acuity?

you can’t buy it for gold. You can’t sell the recipes purchased with acuity for gold. You can’t earn more acuity by farming harder.

A lot of things in WoW could be purchased with the token trade, but not acuity.

The only way I could see this being fueled by or made easier by token purchasing/selling is the people doing shuffling to get their acuity, which is clearly an exploit and utterly outside of the intended gates of the profession system.

I won’t risk a ban over it, and my guess is that most players wouldn’t. A handful of goblins min/maxing gold profits via acuity shuffling is not enough financial incentive, I wouldn’t think.

No, they’re trying to prevent or encourage something else with this harsh scarcity of Artisan’s Acuity, and I don’t know what it is. The negative results are already starting to show.

  • There are ZERO public orders for blue quality profession tools/accessories, and I suspect that’s because each one costs 300 acuity.

Most of us don’t want to spend that much acuity on profession gear. People are saving it for recipes and Knowledge Point books for their own crafting. I think this is a direct result of the acuity gating, and I’ve decided to change course and invest my knowledge in missives/contracts instead of profession gear (my initial plan) because nobody is going to buy it. It all costs too much acuity.

As much as I love fishing and farming herbs in this game, I will not purchase the blue herbalism tools because I can’t spare the acuity. I have the blue fishing pole, but that was purchased before start of season when I still had hope they were going to give us other avenues to acquire acuity. I never would’ve spent it otherwise, and I would’ve stayed with the green pole.

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The WoW token is a gremlin living under the bed of many people on this forum. The wow token gets blamed for everything from typos in quest text to Blizzard’s foot fetish.

Keep in mind that Blizzard slashed the amount of acuity everyone gets in a last-minute change that went live during morning maintenance of the first day of early access.

As to why they did it?

They probably saw somebody making fun of them on twitter. That’s why they make most changes: Twitter.

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idk most of it just seems needlessly convoluted. thats how the new professions feel to me.

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Its the worst part of the expansion. Also, don’t forget, people who give up on professions cant earn accuity thus cant buy gear, so the people that do work hard for it on a weekly basis are now left with less customers, so the only reason to craft is now to make your own gear and then fulfill npc workorders.

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Having Mettle in DF made sense, you used it to help boost your skill and needed it to craft lots of high-end gear. You mostly used it to help mitigate Inspiration RNG.

Having Acuity and Concentration, on the other hand, doesn’t really make any sense.
You don’t need Acuity to offset Concentration RNG since Concentration doesn’t have RNG associated with it.

It feels like they threw in a “New Mettle equivalent for TWW” and then had to last-minute cook up uses for it. I’d say they didn’t do a very good job.

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Patron work orders, which cost you a good chunk of change and some reward acuity.

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I think the change that was made is that instead of getting AA for free, you now have to pay for it, if you want it. You can get some for free but the bulk of it will cost you Gold and sometimes Concentration as well, which is potential Gold.

It seems to be a Gold sink built into professions.

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I’m still looking for the weekly quest to give me some mettle… I mean acuity.

Makes no sense as to why Dragonflight, which has the same system, has a weekly to provide it but TWW does not. Why do we always get regressions with QoL? Every single expansion? Next Expansion delves are going to have Sporebits in every single one aren’t they?

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Skimmed through it and, there’s one thing you missed in your entire post:
You don’t get it all at once.

Professions are built as a progression system and as a real endgame activity to participate in, rather than to do it once and leave it by the roadside collecting dust. Which means that you get each one of these things incrementally over the course of the entire expansion (yes, expansion - not season, this is a system built to last us an entire expansion so at times the acquisition of acuity will feel slow and very low). So…

You get each one of these things in installments. If you have particular plan in mind with what you want to do and craft, you pursue those things first. My engineering main I just did the thing I wanted and I’m happy with my box of bombs I make daily.

On my alchemist alt I’m levelling now I’m going to make sure to actually specialize him in such a way to get as much skill as possible to make it as feasible to get rank 3 items to sell. Which means I’m planning on how to spend my acuity for that purpose. Which means getting relevant profession gear first before getting all of the knowledge. Or maybe I opt for the knowledge. I haven’t settled things yet. Need to run more numbers to see which one I get the most skill points from but I suspect it is the profession gear.

My point is this: break things down into installments rather than bunk amounts. At no point throughout all of TWW is it designed for you to have 7,150 Artisan’s Acuity. But it is built so you spend around 500-600 of it on a roughly bi- to tri-weekly basis. Yes, it’ll take you over 12 weeks to get all the stuff (haven’t run the numbers but it is easily going to be more than 12 weeks for the average player).
That’s the point.

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TL;DR version: it’s the 837,469th version of Timegating something in this xpac.

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I believe its to make sure no one can get everything everywhere all at once.
It helps crafters make profit early on by having them specialize.

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They’ll either lower the acuity cost of things (not likely) or they’ll give us free acuity each week, with increasing amounts as the expansion ages. Just like it was in DF

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At the expense of everyone else that comes after them. Same problem that we experienced in Dragonflight. If you didn’t get specialized just right int he beginning, by the end it was just another pointless thing to have.

Not everyone does Professions for the sake of making gold. I do them for myself and my friends. This kind of timegated convolutedness, really makes doing these professions hard and annoying.

Heck even Enchanting is now mired in the crap of having multiple levels of reagents, cause god forbid the most expensive profession there is doesn’t have that baked into it. Now it’s going to take 3 times as long, or cost 3 time as much, Probably both.

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there aint none. they need to just go back to old crafting and not
this overly complicated bs.

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Idk dragonflight later on it was a lot easier to get everything. Which makes sense since everyone else already had everything. I mean if you miss the intial boat thats kinda on you. I think the gating kind of gives the best of both worlds, by making things progressivly faster you can have people be able to specialize early on and for people who come later specilizations are less of a thing and gaining them is easier.

Because lets face it. If they forced specilizations (like goblin and gnome engineering) youd had the m+ and raid crowd cry about how they have to lvl 5 alts to be a black smith and blizz is forcing them to do that.

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It is also very lucrative as well.