The Future of Warcraft Announcements -- Professions Update

Community WoW Community Council
#33

The quality piece is a huge concern for Alchemy. Why would you ever want a lesser than max quality Potion/Flask? These items are exclusively used for additional power gain via consumables.

During Shadowlands this profession has suffered from the removal of procs coupled with the remained increased price of crafting (from BfA), to then add an additional barrier of trash on top seems like a very strange decision from an end user perspective.

From a design perspective, yeah its great. There’s progression within professions, but imo this should be handled via procs for Alchemy at the very least.

4 Likes
#34

If we have all this crafting and material for potential lesser crafts we should just be allowed a free gathering profession if we have double crafting

We have the technology!

2 Likes
#35

With these profession updates, is there any consideration to making changes to the number of professions any character can have?

Maybe increase the total or differentiate between gathering and crafting professions? I’d much rather be able to do everything on my main than have just an army of alts to level professions.

3 Likes
#36

One criticism I’ve had with this expansion particularly that I hope is considered in the next, is the validity of new recipes/patterns released in a patch and their uselessness if you are an end-game player. I am a tailor and enchanter. Blizzard released several new augments to add to tailoring items in the last patch with Zereth Mortis. Unfortunately because I am a raider and PvPer, I never found any value in crafting those items. They are not even profitable on my server. I really liked the idea of these new enhanced abilities to the tailoring items, but the practicality is they do not see use. I only noticed some PvPers used the Jewelcrafting ring augmentation, but unfortunately, tailoring was not able to partake in the excitement.

2 Likes
#37

Oh, I remember back in Shadowlands Beta, the dev team talked about how they considered making the 3 Gathering Professions into Secondary Professions, so everyone can have them, but you ran out of time, and decided to think about that later.

Is that still something being considered?

Cause it seems weird that my hunter has slain countless enemies, including a Titan, but she can’t figure out how to pick a flower.

6 Likes
#38

Hey Everyone,

Sorry for taking so long to start responding to this thread. We’ve been super busy building out the professions system and content we have been discussing. I’m going to try to slowly work through this and address some of the bigger points and questions here as I have time.

Professions is actively being worked, on so your responses and feedback are super helpful, so please keep them coming!

For my first response, I want to address some of the confusion around how you improve at your profession, and thus craft/gather things at higher quality. You do not directly get better at a recipe via crafting it multiple times, as you do with legendary recipes in Shadowlands. That is an interesting system, but ultimately requires a huge amount of gold investment and can get repetitive. This means only players with lots of gold can easily engage with it, and has also resulted in the cost of legendaries being extremely high in many cases.

For the profession revamp, there are many different ways to improve at your profession (I’ll talk more about those soon), and thus craft/gather items at higher quality. The goal is that the pursuit of profession progression is through compelling and fun activities over spending lots of gold though. Gold will of course still have its place. You may still want to buy reagents or make orders for high end crafting gear for instance, but it should not be a gate to your ability to dive into and have lots of success with your chosen professions.

11 Likes
#39

It is absolutely the case that we plan on having crafted gear be able to compete with top end gear from other sources, and in some cases even be best in slot. One of the most important goals to the work order system is enabling crafted gear to be much more relevant to the game - across all activities. Just remember, in order to have that powerful gear crafted for yourself, you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!

11 Likes
#40

Is it possible to speak a little about the anticipated “grindiness” of this?

#41

Gladly.

I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on the planned system for Dragonflight yet, but the intent is that this is not generally grindy when aiming to earn gear appropriate to your activity.

That is, if you are a normal raider for instance, your normal raid provides enough reagents to allow you to to craft a limited amount of ~normal raid item level gear without needing to go do a bunch of other stuff. But if say, you wanted to craft heroic raid tier gear as a normal raider, you could choose to go do other activities such as m+, pvp, or challenging outdoor activities to supplement the reagents required and get better gear sooner.

In general we’d like crafted gear to feel like something you are earning at a satisfying rate along side your other gear sources. Say you had bad luck and got no drops while raiding, you’ll still be making progress towards some high end crafted gear…and say you just can’t get legs to drop for you, you may choose to have legs crafted to fill in that particular slot with a larger upgrade.

For some crafted gear, you might also need to seek out a special rare drop off a certain mob in the world, a dungeon, or a raid as well. Earning crafted gear should feel like a bonus, an adventure, and a social experience.

17 Likes
#42

This is excellent! Thank you for the reply.

#43

Hi Drough!

Thanks for chiming in to the conversation.
The big question I have is in relation to small servers. To your point, some of this gear may be Best in Slot. Is there any consideration being given to these items being legitimately harder to obtain on small servers because not everything gets created by a character? I think the work order system sounds great but given what I’ve experienced with Legendaries in Shadowlands, this is a major concern for myself and many others.

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#44

Hi Letholas,

Yes, this is definitely a valid concern and one we are discussing how to address!

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#45

Glad to hear it’s being looked at! Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter.

Not sure what options are on the table for you, but a few that have come to mind for me would be to extend work orders beyond traditional realm barriers (thinking of things like the old Battlegroups)

Another option I’ve thought of would be to allow the game to scan work orders from large realms and duplicate them on small servers, where those same items are not available - the commission would go to the void but at least the option would be there for us to seek out those items.

2 Likes
#46

This is great to hear, that was definitely a concern.

However, could you address the other concern related to improving recipes, in that it essentially will make the Work Order not used often at all?

Why would you risk putting a work order up and having it answered by someone without a decent skill at crafting a recipe, when you could just post in trade chat and have them craft it if they have it high?

#47

This is a big improvement over the Shadowlands legendaries for sure, but I’m still a little hesitant. I guess it depends a lot on what sort of activities one has to do, I think it would be unfortunate if it’s going to be “defeat X boss in mythic” or something like that (not that I think it’s going to be that), but if it’s something more creative, I’m looking forward to it!

This also makes me feel pretty hopeful! I only dabble in crafting fairly casually, mostly to make some catchup gear for alts that I don’t play in endgame content or collecting craftable transmogs/toys/mounts, but work orders is making me consider upping my game a bit and provide more for the community if it works out well :>

I would assume you decide what the result of the work order is, and that no one can give you the inferior product to that which you would like. Otherwise the work order system is going to break pretty quickly. I assume that if you want an ilevel 300 helm, no one can come around and give you an ilevel 250 helm in its place. Though it’d be nice with some confirmation and more details on how the system works. I’d also defer to my other question about work orders:

1 Like
#48

Anything you can reveal towards profession items and WorldPvP? Id like more than just glider and nitro boots Mk 3

1 Like
#49

We definitely have world PvP in mind with our crafting plans, both with interesting recipes, and with regards to gathering reagents, but nothing we are ready to talk about in detail yet!

8 Likes
#50

One thing I want to talk about that we haven’t mentioned yet is the concept of recrafting. It’s still in the works so is likely to change some, but the basic idea is as follows:

Recrafting will allow you to take any piece of Dragonflight crafted gear and bring it back into the crafting screen as a crafter. You can then spend a special reagent, plus a small subset of the original reagents from the recipe to “recraft the item”.

During this process, you can completely change out optional reagents if you want. The new quality of the item will be determined based on the new setup of reagents, plus your current skill. This means you can have an item crafted at a low quality, then later recraft it when you are higher skill to a higher quality.

For non-crafters, we are planning to support recrafting orders as well. In this case, you can send you item to get recrafted to have its optional reagents changed out, or to potentially have its quality increased.

All of this should help players feel comfortable having a high end item crafted early, when it might not be at max quality, secure in the knowledge that they can always have it recrafted to be better later.

19 Likes
#51

Couple questions for you here:

  1. Will the missive system - or something similar to it - be coming back in Dragonflight, and if so can the recrafted items have their stats changed from the originial craft?
  2. Is a system like reforging likely to make a return in relation to crafted gear (or any gear for that matter)? Maybe an item to reforge stats could be given to a profession?
  3. Just for clarification, (Making up random numbers for context), if an ilvl 325 item costs 50 dragonscales to make, and a 350 costs 75 dragonscales, you would only need 25 dragonscales to upgrade your 325 to a 350? Instead of needing to craft an all new item? (Similar to how upgrading shadowlands legendaries works for Soul Ash/Cinders)
2 Likes
#52

Any plans for older crafted items like engineering bombs and alchemy potions to be usable again by removing level restriction? I miss using skystep potions and old stun bombs

2 Likes