Tinkers - why are they so bad?

Community General Discussion
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There’s been some solid improvements to the Engineer crafting system this expansion, but it really feels like we’ve taken about five steps backwards in the crafted gear department. For those not in the know, Tinkers can craft helms (which only Engineers can use) and Bracers (which anyone can use) that have a Tinker slot. Tinkers are socketed like gems and have an active, on-use effect that shares a cooldown with a potion (typically). As such, Engineering equipment is not allowed to have an embellishment. One would expect the tinkers to be pretty good, then, considering that they require:

  1. a spark-crafted gear piece
  2. a commitment to not have an embellishment on that crafted gear piece
  3. sharing a cooldown with a potion.
    3.5) A head slot for the engineer-only piece that competes with tier…

So what tinkers do we get this expansion? A PvP only point defense turret (which might be cool for PvP, but is unusable for most content) and a self heal that burns for 30% of your health as a DoT after you use it (making it worse than just using a healing potion…). That’s it. That’s all of them. They’re unusable. It makes Engineering bracers just worse than regularly crafted bracers, despite requiring a substantial knowledge point investment to be able to make them.

Now you may be thinking “doesn’t maxing out scrapper in the profession tree give you a chance to find Dragonflight tinkers?” You’d be correct. So what can we get from this hefty knowledge point investment? A charge that stuns you for 1.5s after using it (thus negating any speed advantage for having charged). Alternatively, it gets you a slightly worse invisibility potion…that shares a cooldown with your battle potion/invis potion already. That’s it. That’s the whole list. We had more tinkers in Dragonflight, but apparently those listed above are the only two “refurbished” tinkers we get. None of these effects are worth losing an embellishment option for, and none of them provide any benefit that a potion doesn’t already do better (and almost certainly cheaper).

Can we please get something, anything, that makes these worth making? I’d be happy to settle for a refurbished Neltharion’s Breath that will give me the illusion of AoE on a healer. I’d be wildly ecstatic just to get a refurbushed “Arclight Vital Correctors” trinket so I can guarentee a battle res (and not have to keep spending Concentration on a limited supply of 3* jumper cables).

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As a note, the tinker that heals but then burns you requires 600 algari healing potions as part of the recipe. So right now it costs ~20k in potion alone to craft. And sells for ~60 gold.

One of my patron orders is for it and I can’t craft it cause of the cost, but it has a 2 knowledge point item on that craft.

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I never could figure out WHY you would want the jump start tinker on your head , when the Gnomish army knife does the same darn thing in your bags?

FYI game spolier, if you build a gnomish army knife you can res people without a tinker harumphs

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I’ll be making goggles later. Mostly to have a piece of gear that has all of it’s secondary stat budget on Crit. But for tinkers, I don’t even know what I’d do with 'em because the invis pot would have a chance to fail and all the refurbished tinkers count as 2-star, so even though it could be useful the failure chance means it would be a liability to use over just having invis pots for M+. The healing pot one is probably the best one just because it’s a MASSIVE heal and the DoT afterwards is no big deal.

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The idea beyond the crafting system is to impose a tax on higher end difficulties to drive token sales. Always has been its why they slowly added mandatory items to it (in terms of power progression)

You are pointing out the entire purpose of the system as a flaw.

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Does the army knife work as a battle res? I was under the impression that only worked out of combat.

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Sorry i admit I did not read the fine print, if it battle resses that would be a bonus, if it does I did not notice.

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You engineers are garbage , go build a rocket and fly to the moon

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that doesn’t work as a bres, chief

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I was excited for the tinker health potion and I made it as soon as i could use it. However in practice; I find it killing me more than providing anything else. Unless I missed something, this tinker isn’t worth using at all. I would love some more tinkers to try out.

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I wish…sadly, what I’m describing is the opposite of that. The Engineering gear is actively worse than any other gearing option right now, despite being hyper-specialized. Nobody’s buying WoW tokens to fund Engineering equipment because it’s a “noob trap” to do so.

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those are broken (not in the good way)

they worked during the m0 week but they stopped working in m+ for me.
it just says out of range everytime even if im sitting right on the corpse.

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