The epic fail. What's wrong with crafting and how to fix it

great feedback. Yeah, we have no way to consistently make money if we are crafting gear, the hardest part. And then again, the biggest money is in alchemy, so thats a good point on alchemy.

Perhaps this profession needs other changes too. Before ranks or crafting I know many who weren’t forced to main alchemy when they always had top benefits from their own flasks/potions.

I recently added up my costs for 7 weeks of potions/flasks. It hit 2.5m gold. That’s more than in DF where over 7 weeks I spent around 750k gold on max ranked flask potions.

Its a bit imbalanced.

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I have one page of my warband’s bank filled up entirely with crafting mats from TWW. Now bear in mind it isn’t a lot of mats, it’s just there are SO MANY KINDS of them that each takes up a slot and that alone fills up the damn bank. Not only that, but there are multiple levels of each crafting mat! Then there are the additional things, the additives, the bits and pieces of junk you have to buy from the crafting vendor next to the table. It’s ridiculous how much crap there is to sort through when it comes to crafting.

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All I want is for any crafted gear to get the last 3 ilvls that keeps it from being a mythic piece whenever you embellish it.

So you would have the two crafted pieces you want to use from crafting not weaker lvl wise than the rest of your gear.

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That’s a you problem. Game isn’t made to have more than 4 alts. Have 4 alts that craft and harvest and still have two slots of the warband bank empty.

I don’t hoard tier one and two materials I sell them in the auction house and keep tier 3 for my own crafts

I mainly dislike the feeling of going to the vending machine/ crafting orders to get an order filled. I’d rather go to the auction house. Buy the lower lvl BoE, then empower it myself by raising its lvl through crests, and sparks. I dont want to have to go to an NPC to do this. I want to click the spark and apply it, like applying a socket. Like our Circlet’s. This feels great. I loved upgrading this ring. Thats what we need for BOE crafts.

And it feels better.

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I dunno man. That circlet felt more like forced content than anything.

Complaining about having to talk to a different NPC is a stretch.

And if the crafting system ended at the base level with us doing the upgrading afterwards. Then what’s the point of learning and leveling crafting.

I rather have gear that came out ready to wear after I collected all the items which it does now. And I get to pick what piece to fill. Unlike our older sister which would default to two random areas for specific classes. And nobody used crafted gear as a choice. It was more like settling for an inferior product or a temp piece.

the other option is just to get rid of the crafting table altogether. Which I wouldnt mind tbh. But I doutb that will happen.

I really dislike the whole process from a customer stand point. Recrafting, requiring more mats. Having to open AH to buy mats (oops I didnt track recipe, have to reopen the crafting menu). Then needing to find someone to recraft. Getting 20 whispers from one post. Feeling bad ignoring most of them, having to negotiate price and mats. Its not a smooth process, doesn’t feel rewarding. Just something I have to do.

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You can shift click the item to keep a list on your quest log list. At the bottom of it.

You’re also able to open the crafting window and the trade window at the same time if one of them is turned into the smaller version.

This just sounds like you don’t want to interact with people. Don’t worry most people will take your silence as " he found someone else" or you can type on trade chat " found one "

As for negotiation? What are you talking about? People either tells you their tip price or just say " tip whatever it’s appropriate"

Past that are the dummies that want exorbitant tips which you can just ignore and move to the next person on the list of 20 you just got whispered by.

I get some people don’t want to have any human interactions but. Crafting and reading and communicating with the crafters is part of the game. And there’s barely any of that part in the game as it is.

3 ranks of everything. Thats the problem with professions.

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I made the mistake of trying to be “transmute-specced” like I used to in old expansions, and hoo boy. I can’t craft anything for the NPC work orders without burning concentration.

Almost everything using varying combinations of multiple herbs makes it feel less like I’m able to specialize in something and more that there was a Right and Wrong way to use this profession, and I chose poorly. :frowning:

I was gone for seven years and when I came back crafting was so overwhelmingly different I still haven’t engaged with it. it was already getting to be a bit much for me in bfa. I miss classic crafting, it felt much more straight forward.

also, I’m sick of my reagent bag not being big enough for all of the stuff I’m gathering on account of every bloody thing having 3 ranks and I’m ending up with mats for professions I didn’t even choose through loot tables.

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Personally I can’t stand the idea of the crafting tables. I figure a lot of people like it so I’m not going to complain and say remove it but crafting is pretty much dead to me because of things like crafting tables

And the other thing is they went too far with the complexity. I think the previous crafting method was a bit too simple obviously but they went from one extreme to another. Instead of maybe incrementally making it more complex until we found something that was perfect they decided to put every possible system concept from every part of the game since legion probably and wrap it into crafting in dragon flight and to me that was just too much too fast

I really don’t even bother with crafting anymore except in some cases where I need to make something like bags and I usually just go ahead and make all the bags and put them in storage instead of having to keep running back to the crafting table

Personally I think they can tone down professions and maybe make them half as annoying as they are getting rid of the crafting table concept unless they’re just going to give us apermanent crafting toy of some sort that we can just use on the fly anywhere we want

Otherwise I personally am just not interested in professions anymore and that sucks because going back and doing the professions and raising the levels of the professions up on all of my alts was actually one of my favorite parts of the game and that was completely destroyed with dragonflight

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Transmute specialization is still very good, I use it on my Alchemist to just generate money when they have transmutes and concentration available, also for turning things like rank one ore and leather into rank 3 herbs.

Also they tend to have easier patron orders for profit, just making R2 pots/flasks for augment runes.

crafted gear on the ah = price tanks so low the casual crafter, who isn’t willing to invest in complicated spreadsheets tracking resourcefulness vs ingenuity nor run an alt army, actually loses money crafting.

it’s pretty notable that the only people i see asking for ah-able epics usually go on to explain they “don’t want to touch the system” and “find it time consuming” - aka, they aren’t crafters, and are only approaching the “problem” from the singular perspective of “i want purples as cheaply and easily as i possibly can.” which to be clear is perfectly reasonable of them!

but i think you can also see how that would clash pretty hard with what a crafter might want, which is to invest time and effort and be rewarded for doing so. not to mention, the current system places the cost of making the purps you love on both you and the crafter - you have to buy the mats and spend time finding a skilled crafter, the crafter has to invest hours into becoming the skilled crafter who can make your thing for you at the quality you expect.

slands legendary system absolutely sucked as a crafter, where you usually ended up several hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of gold out of pocket while buyers never had to do more than rock up to the AH and pay well below craft cost price for the piece. ah-able epics just places all the financial risk AND time burden on the crafter, which isn’t fair or fun.

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Yep that would pretty much solve my only dislikes with the current crafting system.

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No, I love interacting with people. The crafting table feels like I’m interacting with bots, because of the 20 instant replies from people who don’t even reference my question in their text. “I can replies.” Then I have to browse those to find a real person. The current system forces interaction but its not human interaction. Bot scripts run the whole show.

The odd part is that I like filling orders as a crafter (even through 99% of the time I’m too slow to ever fill a public one because a bot grabs it). The UI feeling is solid for the crafter in that regard, besides the part where I can’t make money because 10 people are willing to craft for free and provide mats. But then some people forget rank 3 mats and I have to cancel the order. Again, my solution fixes all this. Fighting over customers sucks, buying mats to craft something as a customer sucks. We need epic BoEs that we can place on the AH and people can upgrade them after they buy.

I like interaction with people, If someone posts an epic in trade chat and I meet with them in game to trade for it or they send it CoD. Thats different. Thats human interaction. Putting an order up, either public or personal, as a customer just feels awful when I get 20 fake replies. Tracking the recipe isn’t easy either, because then I still have to type and search for the names of the items I need to buy from AH, but like why can’t the crafter just do that part? I still tip 5k for a craft when most don’t because I Know how awful the system is for all parties.

I’d rather buy the epic from the AH and empower it (i.e. raise its level myself through sparks and crests). Crafters would still have a good experience. In fact a better one because no one would put a epic on AH for free. Then crafters could make money. Blizzard would still have their token buying gold sink, which they need.

But right now, people buy tokens to buy mats for crafted items and crafters make almost zero dollars. I can say that through enchanting and other professions I’ve made less in the last 2 expansions than any other time in WoW. Its been brutal.

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I think the biggest issue with crafting is that it is entirely 100% unneeded and artificially added to the game to move gold around.

All of crafting as it currently stands could be replaced simply by letting the vendor crests upgrade a dungeon/raid/honor item to max. All of crafting and I would go so far as to include the wow economy has slowly become a detriment to gameplay.

I will be brutally honest. If gold didn’t exist in wow. For the vast majority of players the gameplay would improve and a lot of a grindy barriers and time wasters would vanish.

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You just dont know how to play it right.

Why buy tokens if you have 4 toons gathering/doing Professions for your toons? Why only using one toon? Why lazy? Professions is not designed for tourists who would play actively for few weeks then vanish and reappear on next Season or Expansion.

You tell yourself that people buy tokens to buy mats. The money is on the rank 3 mats. Thats how you make money on professions.

Yes if gold didn’t exist you wouldn’t use gold and if gear didn’t exist you wouldn’t wear gear and let me just be brutally honest. If the game just ran on text we wouldn’t need to worry about colors and graphics.

I swear some of you are just hilarious heh.

Crafting is , imo , likely the most niche part of the game. I think it’s a very particular player that likes it.

This is my opinion of course but I think it’s a tedious time suck of game time for the return.

I personally don’t like crafting in any mmo I’ve ever played though so consider that as well.

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