This is how terrible Leatherworking is in BfA

Community General Discussion
1

https://imgur.com/a/kMewa0G

There are literally 3 usable mats. Why?

Because Expulsom, Hydrocore, and Blood-Stained Bone is why. These are the things you don’t need either Expulsom, bones, or Dungeon BoP mats for:
-Barding (consumable)
-Barding (mount equipment)
-Diving suit (consumable)
-Diving helm (consumable)
-converting Tempest Hide into Hardened Tempest Hide.

For everything else it is possible to make, you either need dungeon mats or you need bones. Because where does Expulsom come from? Scrapping. And what can LWers make to scrap? Leather & Mail armguards. Which require bones. And because you can use leather or scales to make armguards, but both require the same bones, Blood-Stained Bones become the only remotely important Leatherworking mat.

For Tailoring and Blacksmithing, low level gear is made with thread or flux. Both of which can be bought from a vendor. So for those professions, the Expulsom grind uses only one kind of low-level material, which makes it considerably easier to make. And because there’s no bottleneck on low level gear, there’s no bottleneck on Expulsom. And because of that, the higher-level mats for those professions are far more valuable.

Meanwhile, I have 6661 Hardened Tempest Hides that I literally cannot use unless I farm up ~30 bones per each Expulsom needed. It would take between 40-333 THOUSAND bones to use that many hardened hides. That’s at least 300k gold in bones at their current value. All of the hides, otoh, are worth 666g. Woo.

There cannot be a bottleneck like this. Blood-Stained Bones need to become a vendor mat so that LWers can make their low-level gear with the same amount of restriction as every other profession. Being gated behind bones destroys the rest of the profession mats LWers use.

Making Expulsom BoA would also go a long way to helping. It would make ALL the professions run more smoothly. These BoP mats are always more annoying than they need to be, especially when there are 4 of them! Or even add a vendor selling Expulsom. Have the mount vendor in Nazjatar sell a BoA container of 3 for 100 pearls. Given the proc rate of 1/6 to 1/8, it costs 30-40 Prismatic Pearls per Expulsom already, it just involves a lot of annoying busy work, clicking “Ok”, and RNG. I literally created a “click OK” macro just for the incessant confirmation dialogues from buying and mailing benthics.

Finally, in Shadowlands, PLEASE don’t make the BoP crafting materials required for EVERY RECIPE again! Crafting in BfA was better than WoD or Legion, getting pretty close to the Goldilocks zone between those two extremes, but Expulsom really put a damper on the whole endeavour.

11 Likes
2

You kept going OP. Points for persistence given.

It was when I hit BOP items I stopped. Should have checked before I started lol. As I was going it be really nice to ship out mail items to the hunter for mogs. If, you know, they weren’t BOP. And the leather worker was a leather using DH.

I mean it killed crafting as even means to make mogs. Unless in the case of leather you wanted to make a separate leather working char for mail and leather class.

So this twice the mats fun you were talking about. It not even “fun” for one char.

3

Shadowlands looks likely to fix some of these problems but you’re right, LW got screwed over particularly hard in this or moreso Skinning. It’s a wild world out there if you’re not an Alchemist or at least an Enchanter.

1 Like
4

Inscribers can be useful. You can at least hook up alts who may need a contract for rep. With my alt army some alt can usually use this anyway. How they sell open market no clue.

5

Yeah, I don’t think I made it through any Legion professions except JC on my main (free daily mats in Dalaran was a nice incentive to keep going) and BS on another toon. I’m going to make it through them all in BfA, it’s just bloody annoying. And the scrapping! It honestly needs to scrap all 9 at once, and you need to be able to alt-click to just put everything in at once as well!

6

expulsom probably the worst material I’ve seen ever…and blood stained bones is also pretty bad because all has to be locked on “RNG”

  • it’s rng that you get X material to craft Y
7

It’s also a load of garbage that you get stuck with all of those 8.3 BoP plans that you can’t use until you get the BfA professions in question to level 165.

Until then, they waste your precious bag space, like everything else in BfA.

8

I will be slightly nice and at least the dungeon quest for a final skinning rank did at least send a leather worker and skinner to a dungeon with things to skin.

Now wth the rest of the dungeon had to do with skinning no clue. You must kill the boss. The boss who is a spider lady. We can’t skin spiders though…odd

9

Gear crafting is in a no mans land between competing with the core rewards system of the game and the devs not wanting to make gear professions a requirement for gear progression. All warriors have to be blacksmith miners type of situation.

This expansion did go over the top with making them completely useless though. Crafting stations requiring raiding so you can make BoP gear that’s almost has to be worse than what you got from all the raiding you did to be able to make it.

Ridiculous Catch 22 there.

3 Likes
10

This alt (my main since Lich King) has mining and herbalism.

Is there some way to trade in Expulsom for anything other than gold?

11

The irony of crafting in this expansion is that with a little bit of tuning it could have been really good; the scrapper is a really good system for helping to ensure you, your alts and your guild can all be supplied with everything you need.

The problem is that with relatively few exceptions the gear sucks; by the time you can craft most of it you’ve out leveled it, the better items require an absurd ammount of time investment relative to the pay out (and are rendered obsolete in short order) and you rarely make any money off of crafted gear.

If armor/weapon crafting had at least offered unique pieces it would have had some value but as it stands this is no bueno.

2 Likes
12

I haven’t seen a leatherworker in years.

13

Umm…leatherworking combined with blacksmithing provided with the majority of the gold I needed for the 5 million gold mount. Tailoring combined with leatherworking also provided me a lot. (alts, in case that didn’t make sense)

Yes, there are some useless mats, but skinning/leatherworking also has two of the most profitable raw gold farms (farming mats yourself, crafting, then vendoring) in the game. Including a legion one that has been proven to be worth 24k per hour.

Also, BoP mats are awesome, and I think they should use them more. Don’t let people just make alts to do their crafting. Those actually playing the characters should be the ones getting the most use out of the professions.

1 Like
14

All professions are pretty bad in BfA. Leatherworking is maybe one of the best, since no matter what, you can get a free self useable drums (which is sweet for Jaina).

15

Shadowlands will fix this. Pretty much, at this point, any thread complaining about BFA is pointless. BFA is over. SL is right around the corner.

2 Likes
16

I have a stable of alts to do the crafting professions (as a completionist, not for actual gear or gold). But I haven’t bothered to level their professions in Legion or BfA. (To be fair, I set them up in MoP and gave up on the recipes hidden behind end game activities. I got most from the WoD professions because, hey, garrisons.)

The whole" long, involved quest chains, doing content I find annoying" and “you need to get three stars to get the best output” was annoying as heck.

I’ll probably go back and complete my old content professions during the content lulls in SL. Or not.

17

Leatherworking?? :rofl: :rofl:

Every profession is crap other than herbalism/Alchemy

1 Like
18

Good man.
I refuse to play blizzard game of self abuse here.
Ive got a ton of recipes that I WONT even bother trying to get on all of the crafting professions for the SOLE reason that I AINT running group content to get it and i AINT sitting at that stinking shredder for one more stinking second.

They want to get real with this mats joke and make it even remotely sensible again, Im in.
Till then, no stinking thanks.

1 Like
19

…or you could just wait for the 5 expolsom world quests to come up… I never scrapped for those and have gone through hundreds.

20

I got a $50 bill sitting here that says if a poll of the entire player base was taken that a vast majority ARENT going to agree on this one, especially the more like BFA it gets.

Sure, maybe…if its like Blood of Sargeras…and even those are annoying enough. You can only farm so much in a play session…and so youre game time becomes about farming a mat instead of enjoying the game and just buying your stinking mats on the AH…all so you can make ONE item for an exaggerated number of hours invested.
Believe it or not some players simply dont have the TIME to spend 4 hours a day farming mats.

If they pull this crap again, expect more players to abandon crafting and complain even more about it.
Thankfully from what ive seen of SL crafting it seems blizzard MIGHT have learned at least a small lesson about BoP mats.