The Future of Warcraft Announcements -- Professions Update

Community WoW Community Council
#22

After hearing Ion’s interview with Hazel I am more excited about the system.

Bad luck protection and deterministic gear have been hot topics, but I think the commonly suggested solution of just putting all raid/dungeon items on a vendor is extremely lame.

Having bosses drop BOP crafting materials that can be used to craft appropriate ilvl gear is an elegant solution. For example, Mythic bosses can drop a BOP crafting material that can be used in crafting Mythic item level pieces. Huge win for everyone I think if the drop rate/cost is tuned appropriately.

#23

One of the issues I foresee with work orders, as fantastic as they sound, is the further effect this will have on small servers. In the interview with Hazel, Ion talked about being ‘the person on the server that can make the best ______’.

Some servers won’t have that person for every slot because there simply aren’t enough pieces.

Also curious what the barrier to entry will be for this. Ion mentioned the gold aspect probably not being the main factor (thank you), but wondering what it will take and if you can master all crafting or just one?

3 Likes
#24

I have a question about commissions, specifically the kind where you put up a work order and provide the materials for it yourself.

What exactly is stopping someone from doing this essentially for free, and if it’s cheaper to buy the materials for work orders than it is to actually put out items on there, isn’t that going to consume the market and even drive up the prices of reagents by a lot? If I have a recipe for something, I’d gladly help others out for free if they brought me the materials, if done through this kind of service, and I’m sure there are others that would do that, too.

1 Like
#25

If fulfilling work orders is really easy (just click a button or whatever), then yeah, people might do it for free. Or the market might settle into a standard 1k gold crafting fee or something like that. It’ll probably be different on every server. I like it. It’s closer to a free market system, with much less friction than is present in the crafting economy now, and will make certain market abuses like cancel scanning and price “resets” less appealing as a way to earn gold.

#26

This is honestly baffling to me. As Xhelann mentioned, this new zone is ripe for exploring and digging, and seems like the best time to revamp Archaeology. The devs saying that they have zero plans for this profession is extremely disappointing and gives the feeling that the profession is essentially dead.

8 Likes
#27

Would love to see engineering return to its insane PvP value for niche things like nets and grenades/utility

4 Likes
#28

One thing that I see that is overlooked in this topic is the leveling process. Currently in Shadowlands, most of the “good” items are crafted at max level, but in order to get there, you’ll have to craft a bunch of worthless items multiple times to get there and that is just a lot of worthless items crafted and potential gold loss, just to get to the max.

I honestly think everything you craft, regardless if it’s level 1 or level 300, should be useful and worthy of a craft.

6 Likes
#29

Which is extremely worrisome. Why would anyone put in work orders and get a lower ilvl piece of gear when the crafters that currently control the economy will do it for a tip?

This is no different than legendary crafting - they’re going to allow the top wealthiest people on the server continue to get wealthier at the expense of the other players.

And the worst part is it won’t even be guaranteed, it’ll be RNG. So you want an upgraded vest that requires hard to get pieces? Well, cough up 20k gold to an experienced crafter and hope it procs. Or get it for cheap from an inexperienced crafter with no chance.

Even worse, is like the legendary system currently, if you want to try to get experienced to help out people? You’ll create subpar, lower ilvl pieces that won’t sell for much when there’s higher ilvls of the same item on the AH at the same time on the way to getting the experience.

The quality system needs to be scrapped, or they need to make it be purely aesthetic - maybe have it give a chance to give gear avoidance, leech, indestructable, etc. or something else that isn’t 100% necessary. That way there’s no downside to getting a lower ranked crafter to answer your board, but if a higher ranked one does, you’ll get a nice, but not necessary, bonus.

Then for things like potions and flasks, have it so they last slightly longer. Not much, just slightly. Again, not necessary, but nice if you get it.

6 Likes
#30

I absolutely agree with this and it’s my main concern with the new “quality” feature for crafted gear.

According to the ‘deep dive’ video that Blizzard posted on Youtube, you will need to craft items multiple times in order to increase your “quality” in that particular recipe and crafts with higher “quality” have increased item level.

This system is going to have the exact same problem that legendary crafting in Shadowlands currently has: There will be absolutely no demand for the lower “quality” items, which means crafting until you get access to items people actually want becomes a massive barrier to entry into the market for new and/or casual players. This will make it even easier for each server’s rich AH goblins to corner and monopolize crafting markets.

And I say that as someone who has made tens of millions of gold via crafting.

6 Likes
#31

Respectfully, I disagree. This can bring back server identity on an individual level. Anyone who wants to tap into the market can do so, but someone can be “the guy who makes swords” and that’s cool. Identity and recognition on your server is cool.

2 Likes
#32

I agree with you. The quality system does sound to me like it will have the same problems and barriers to entry as the legendary crafting system did in Shadowlands. These barriers disincentivize people from participating in the market. I think a healthy market is one in which there are lots of participants and lots of competition. A market in which only one person is the “sword guy” is a market in which that person has a monopoly and can charge whatever outrageous price they want.

2 Likes
#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.

12 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