The State of Professions

Community General Discussion
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I’m pretty sure that most people agree professions are in a very bad state now. I am personally of the opinion that they have only been getting worse since vanilla since that was when they felt most like trade skills.

Some crafted item materials were produced by other professions, and enchants were not able to be sold on the AH. In the case of enchanting, your success was determined by how much time you spent actually interacting with people. Today, you can do pretty much everything by only interacting with the AH.

I started BFA with my Pally as a blacksmith. Right now the only gear that has any relevance in the game is BoP. I understand that Blizz doesn’t want to have an endless supply of 385 gear on the AH because people can just buy gold with real money, but I think there is a solution to this that would involve new tech.

Right now, if I have enough sanguiceil and expulsom, I can craft a 385 belt, and a 385 pants for myself as a blacksmith. It would be amazing if I could craft those BoP items for someone else, using BoP crafting mats they acquired.

This could serve as an alternative to the old badge vendors, and gear vendors in general. The two biggest things I didn’t like about The Burning Crusade were the BoP crafted items, and the fact that badge gear just came from a vendor (it felt somewhat immersion breaking to me at the time). Those two issues can basically solve each other.

The other issue I have with crafting is how streamlined materials have become. I find herbs and cooking materials are probably in the best shape on live in the sense that there is a little bit of diversity, and you can generally target an area or a zone if you want to gather them.

There are two main things that I miss about how crafting materials used to be. It was awesome having areas to farm for specific materials like the elemental plateau for primal fire, water, earth, etc., and I also miss crafted by other professions like belt buckles, enchanted leather, etc. The problem with streamlining all of this is that it actually takes away content from people who actually want to do this stuff.

I’m willing to bet some people wouldn’t want to put the effort into actually interacting with people, but for once can you actually develop for people who want to be playing a multiplayer game? It is getting quite frustrating in general that you developed the majority of this game to be played solo, and people are really getting sick of it.

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I can’t see how the first is accurate since we do have the second. And enabling you to do the second would put things back to the first, which you appear to think is bad.

Also, not everything in this game has to be done in groups - solo play for certain things make sense and no not everyone is getting sick of it.

btw, I don’t like your ideas either.

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Okay you’re right about that, I guess I didn’t articulate it properly. What I mean is that you don’t need to interact with anyone else in the context of it being a tradeskill. Clearly you need to use the profession window to craft anything, and you need to talk to NPCs. My point was that it is rare occasion that anyone actually needs to interact. I have no idea who has what profession in my guild other than alchemy.

And thanks for your input saying “I don’t like your ideas”. Very helpful.

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What professions? I gave up on everything outside of the only three that are useful: alchemy, enchanting and jewelcrafting. And even then, they’re a pain to find mats for stuff and the scrapper is bs.

I’d like my good professions back. When everything was important. When they all had perks.

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If you don’t interact with people the game shouldn’t have to force you to. There was a lot of interaction in my guild at the start of the expansion, the passing around of herbs for flasks, the sharing of those xp gems, etc.

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Professions have pretty much always been bad in this game to be honest. In some mmos you can actually craft good gear and it doesn’t require raiding. It’s just the design blizzard choose that I don’t agree with.

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This game has professions?

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The reason I’m making this suggestion is to allow for better gear to be craftable without there being a flood of high level gear on the AH causing the game to be pay-to-win. The interaction is a bonus. The fact that you think interacting in an MMO is a detriment to the game makes me question whether I should take you seriously.

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The thing is if Activision-Blizzard makes tradeskills relevant it might detract from the RNG treadmill they have built for us

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I think the game shouldn’t force people to interact - there is a difference. People already can interact if they want to, most times people ask blizzard to change the game to force people to interact I have to question if those are the sorts I would even want to interact with.

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I don’t agree at all. For the first time since TBC we are able to make the strongest gear in the game with professions, and they actually encourage you completing group-based progression content to do so.
This is a MASSIVE improvement in my eyes, as up until now professions used to feel like they were useless for anyone who actually played regularly, outside of a profession like say Alchemy.
An assured 385 item has significantly piqued my interest and I’ve been debating leveling up Blacksmithing just for something like that, but I am really tied to Herb/alch and always have been.

Ask me 4 years ago and I would be responding to the question with something like this

The big problem now is that many professions had very incomplete usages for the new materials and little purpose without that, but that’s being fixed on Tuesday.

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I’ve stuck to gathering mining/herbalism getting back into the game here. Everything sells, every expansion. You other proffesion people are like junkies to me. “The first taste is free”

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But would it not be better if you could craft those items for other people in your raid as well? I’m not saying that being able to craft 385 gear yourself is a bad thing, my point is that it is the ONLY thing.

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I think it was more helpful than your comment. “Bad” has only one meaning: “I don’t like”. So you said the same thing:

Comparing Vanilla to now is 100% unreasonable. It makes no sense. WoW isn’t the same game.

In Vanilla, the lowest expansion was also “the latest expansion”. So the probllem that “no previous expansion recipes make any profit” didn’t exist back then. Is there an alternative? What could be done differently?

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Uh… wrong? Because professions always used to make some awesome stuff without having to pray so hard to the RNG gods for a mat. And we used to have perks for them, too. Every single profession was worthwhile.

It wasn’t till Warlords that things got weird, but we still made great gear. And then Legion and this xpac tossed that out the window. It’s not worth the time and effort to make that stuff. You may as well not even have those crafting professions.

Sometimes I feel like you don’t actually remember how this game worked in the past.

“You and I remember Budapest very differently.”

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He does have a point. But yes, the RNG is bad because the only purpose it serves is to make you have to farm more expulsom (which is also more RNG).

It would be irrelevant to bring up something like ESO’s crafting system because WoW’s system would have to be restructured from the ground up in order to work like that. Professions mechanically function in the same way as in vanilla with a few exceptions like ranks for recipes, and the reagent bank. It’s probably the system that has changed the least out of anything in the game right now. The majority of changes to professions over the years have been to what you can craft, and how you get patterns/recipes.

The main thing I am suggesting (the ability to craft BoP items for other people, using their BoP mats) would be a mechanical change that could be applied in the context of every previous expansion’s existing BoP crafted items without actually changing any of the recipes, or crafting materials required. Having this ability would inherently make many professions more useful, and it would allow professions to be developed in the future with more depth without flooding the market with pay-to-win items.

The other stuff I mentioned about materials probably should have just been left out of the post I guess.

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I don’t see how you could create a system where you can craft mythic raid level items AND allow them to be BOE, no.
Its just not good for the game. Buying two of them would be mandatory for every raider.

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The one thing I outright hate about crafting professions currently: Expulsom.

It’s not, “Oh, you need rep to get a pattern to make something good” it is, “You can get rep to make a pattern cheaper, but you’re still going to have to go through the process of scrapping hundreds of garbage items to make one item that you’re probably going to scrap.”

Meanwhile, I’m staring at nearly a thousand sanguicels or whatever they were called, while the patterns that use them are gated behind expulsom.

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Wrong? What’s wrong?
This is the first expansion you can make top-quality raid level gear from a profession ever. I include TBC because people have debated it, but imo its untrue. Those items were only good because the gear was different back then, they were not intended to be raid-level quality.

Furthermore, what “RNG” is involved with materials? Are you talking about Explusom? There are very easy ways to mitigate the problems with it, including picking up Alchemy, or just waiting for 8.1 which comes out this week.

In regards to the past, it does seem like we are remembering things differently.
Obviously since WoD professions have been very bad and unrewarding, however, they were even worse in days earlier imo, because those “perks” making every single profession “worthwhile” were mathmatically unequal, meaning if you actually cared about the perks, you would take the same set every time.

Every profession having a perk that was imbalanced forced people to care about professions only for the perk, never craft a single thing, and created a very min-max environment around something that was never intended to include such a thing.

But ya, if you think its not worth the time to craft Mythic raid quality gear, then I imagine I understand why we have a different recollection of the past.

Seems we are focused on different things, and with that in mind, I hope you and others can understand why this profession iteration is significantly better for those who are.

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I’m not saying they should be BoE…

I’m saying they should be BoP but land in someone else’s inventory. That person receiving the item would be the one with the BoP materials.

I’m suggesting they add new tech to professions to achieve this.