I am just going to touch on the core professions that everyone could have and the gathering professions.
Archeology:
No content for SL, I just don’t understand why, would it have cost us a raid tier?
Cooking:
Very limited variety of dishes for SL.
One can get all the recipes from the trainer except for one purchased with Revered reputation from Court of Harvesters but that is all.
Maxing out cooking takes almost no effort and then you are done except for farming materials.
Fishing:
Again limited variety, 6 in total. No special rare catches, no neat fishing goals, only a rod you can purchase at rank 1 a temporary bobber and a key for lock picking but only if you are a blacksmith. Remember all the cool things for fishing in Legion or WoD or Mists of Pandaria well this is what we get for Shadowlands.
Mining: Only 6 ores but wait there is a + 10 mining pick to take up bag space, and maybe give you a couple extra ores/100 gathered.
Herbalism:
Again 6 plants also has a +10 herbalism tool but why when you can farm any plant at rank one and with rng there is really no obvious increase in numbers by being 10 higher skill especially at max skill something achieved almost on the first day.
World quest: Cooking you can only get Aethereal Meat, same with fishing only Lost Sole, mining only Laestrite Ore and Herbalism only Death Blossom of course these are the items that everyone has a ton of so really not much a reward.
I am quite sad about this, Shadowlands in terms of professions has to be without a doubt the worst, laziest lamest expansion ever.
I really hope Blizzard adds something more in future patches, right now it is just pathetic.
8 Likes
I feel your gathering frustration. I unsubbed a while ago (6 month sub so still 2 months left - lul), so I’m not pushing anything. Thought I’d just kick around with my crafters and make things for each of my toons. OMG. It’s absolutely the worst experience I can remember.
gathering example: I can fly over to the Banewood and farm TONS of ore, skins, and herbs (don’t care about the herbs though cuz I’m trying to craft leggos for my toons). It’s ridiculously easy to farm sinvyr ore. Callous hide is stupid rare. IMO, Heavy Callous Hide should be the only drop and be as frequent as Callous hide (minus the multiple stacks on one skin).
Anyway, Sinvyr is like candy in the Banewood, but try farming Phaedrum in Ardenweald. OMG! There’s only one area in the north east with a high concentration of nodes, but the area is densely packed with mostly useless enemies that cannot be skinned, and the terrain is terrible. You get funneled into very specific paths forcing to into combat. Phaedrum = pita. Sinvyr = tripping over the stuff.
prospecting essences is ridiculously random and stingy. I could mass prospect sinvyr 5x, and I’d end up with 2 Essence of Torment. I could mass prospect synvyr another 5x and walk away with 12 Essence of Torment. There’s no rhyme or reason to it at all.
crafting is pointless. every single pattern is useless. you don’t even need it as leveling gear. so all crafting is good for is leggos. 15 leggos per rank when the mats are so uneven to farm is insane.
I like to craft. I do. I like to level my own crafters and grind my own mats. But this grind is pretty silly. Making these leggo shells should be more akin to making a leggo in Legion where you could make ~1 per week, but you didn’t spend all your game time grinding the mats or spending more on the AH than the gross GDP of the US, China, and the EU.
3 Likes
I actually think they said who cares to WQ in terms of this. All those quest rewards are garbage and its still not fixed or changed. They don’t care about Quality of life for us they just want us to buy Tokens which is fine but I can imagine other don’t necessarily feel good that way.
3 Likes
Sinch,
I think that there is more to it that just buying tokens, but I may be wrong.
I buy token but with in game gold, I don’t understand how/why people buy them with IRL money but that is just me.
My real question and purpose of my original post is why is there such a lack of attention to professions?
It all seems so lazy and misdirected, I enjoy working on side quests and achievements for example for fishing, but alas there is no opportunity for that in this expansion.
1 Like
I agree : professions just suck… and trying to gather herbs while others team up from other realm and invade my realm just isn’t right…
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There was much fervor from the player base to make crafting matter again (back in the day ~wotlk, you could craft great stuff). however, we’ve also reached a point where ppl complain about the inaccessibility of mats and the inequality of crafting (e.g., back in wotlk, you could only craft the good stuff if you were an end game raider).
So SL attempts to address two convoluted issues with crafting:
- how to make crafting matter
- how to make crafting matter without catering only to high-end raiders
Their solution seems to be to turn crafting into an “end-game activity” in and of itself. depending on your server and when you started crafting/offering your services, this worked out ok, but mostly it just catered to
- players who were insanely rich and just bought all their mats off the AH at majorly eye-gouging prices or…
- players who managed to put their (now worthless) ranks 1 and 2 shells on the AH in the first few weeks when soul ash was capped fairly low and no one could use higher ranks anyway.
imo, this attempt (and I don’t fault blizz for trying) has only succeeded in making gathering professions profitable (particularly mining and skinning – herbing kinda got left behind in the demand category b/c it’s not required for legos).
I do fault blizz for not making these shells either
- vendable or…
- scrabbable so that crafters could recoup significant portions of the mats used to work toward new shells or items of similar mat requirements
Something I think would be really cool is to borrow a page from the early SWTOR crafting book and make it so crafters could “DE” (RE - reverse engineer) gear made by their profession in order to learn new schems/patterns and recoup a little bit of the mats.
I kind of disagree. In general rewards should somewhat reflect the effort put in. The profession world quests are easy. I mean 15 seconds to maybe a minute easy. Usually right by flight paths. Lets take the profession world quests for what they are. Nearly free profession level boosts and a means to easily add progression to callings.
I love the updates to professions. I have more control than ever. It can be improved but we got really solid new bones. No required dungeon grinds no required rare drop quests just simple mine herb craft. No doing mythics or raids for rank ups that don’t really improve the gear just make it less expensive to craft and able to give more skill ups. Also they are useful. I have unlocked mark 2 and my plate wearers hit max level and are in effectively heroic gear right off the bat.
I would make more marks that require mats from mythic+ raids etc and raise crafted gear to that level but I love this new implementation. You update the item level with an item that is locked behind some progression system. We can even control the secondary stats. Blizz can take that further to make it so mythic+ dungeons based on the bracket 0-5, 6-10, 11-15 as a concept, or raids based on LFR, normal, heroic, or mythic, give different materials from the last boss or throughout and some number of those maybe 5 (less if only from last boss of raids) or so and you have enough to make a mark that will make a crafted piece that is that item level. I mean we have to be careful about making the items too common or too rare, but it would make it so effort leads to guaranteed loot that you choose or sell.
Even without that though we can craft legendaries. No more randomness we decide what we get and even have some say in the item slot. If you have trouble getting a legendary power conduits give them out. I will give you that getting power conduits to that point takes time.
Yeah those with gold found the most effective way to make gold with professions. How is that surprising? Different people have different playstyles and some just like to make gold. I would think it unfair for everyone to be equally capable when these people basically live to make gold and put exponentially more effort into it. Its like complaining that top tier mythic raiders actually clear mythic raids while most casual heroic raiders don’t.
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Personally I’m finding professions something to do when there’s absolutely nothing else to do. Unless you have a character that has no real way to heal themselves (Arms Warrior). Though in nearly every other respect is pretty much just a waste of inventory space.
As long as they dont recoup any ore, herbs or skins…sure. Otherwise all you are doing is taking away from gatherers.