That always sounded like an excuse to me, too.
A similar excuse was given for why reforging had to be removed from the game.
I always enjoyed customizing my gear and my stats… and I am probably on the casual side for a WoW player.
I had the same experience.
I used to carry around my own little stash of item enhancements in case an upgrade dropped for me.
The guild bank was usually stocked with each kind of top enchant, or some guildie could even craft something for you right there and then.
the lady who works on them is holding what I slipped and ended up saying “oh youre the one that ruined professions” at the last blizzcon where shadowlands was announced. didnt mean to it just popped out while i was asking what she did as she signed my poster. i was tired and am never that rude to people who work on things. now other fans we can fight all day that’s where the word fan comes from Fanatic
They’ve pretty much I think came out and stated that sometime ago iirc.
I don’t mind that to some extent but the several changes during beta on professions and now after launch on some of the stuff really backs what someone pointed in that Ion admitted to not knowing what to do with Professions.
[[When I hear constantly from Ion that he doesn’t know what to do with the systems going forward, doesn’t know what to do with professions, or back in a q&a outright asked the camera ‘‘us’’ to let them know what we wanted since they were clueless on some topic of design makes me wonder how this guy still holds the position he does, lol]]
Any one person who showed that behavior at a top level position in a different company would be replaced or at least should be 
That’s an interesting tidbit! 
yea not my finest moment felt like a douche for weeks
And was it just me, or did anyone else notice during the interview with Preach how Ion said that as early as Cataclysm he was already struggling to come up with new talents for classes? (He was trying to justify all the borrowed power systems of SL because it is too hard to add talents.)
Scary if you ask me. The person in charge should ideally enjoy coming up with ideas.
That is probably why we got the huge class prunings as soon as he got his way with his dream expac, WoD.
Yup and the reason so much of that stuff was available, was because for a lot of the people I used to know… crafting was the end game. Along with doing all kinds of social stuff in game.
Your reflexes and eye sight may not have been good enough to be in a heroic 25 man raid team, but By the Light you could max out your professions and be the guy with everything for what ever profession you chose. Need some agility gems? How many? I have 200 in the bank and just put 50 in the guild bank!
I had absolutely no idea how many crafting mats were flowing around this guild until WoD imploded the professions. Ore alone was on the order of a couple thousand stacks a week flowing to each of our jewelcrafters. Those weren’t botters either. Some were retired folks that just floated around gathering while taking in voice comms.
WoD just erased them from WoW.
I’m probably the only guy in my circle of WoW friends that frequents the forums. None of them came here to make an I’m leaving post. They just faded into the mists and disappeared over a period of 6 months or so. Occasionally I’ll see someone has logged in. But I’d guess 9 out of 10 never came back.
Nah they just wanted them turned into bigger grinds
Profs were already insanely popular with tons of players making alts specifically for profs
But they sucked at contributing to /timeplayed so bliz changed it along with a ton of other systems in the cash shop gold buying emphasized borrowed power xpacs
Yeah we ‘nice’ people get that but glad you are past it, those devs get bombarded with worse things, but I know the feeling since I myself IRL tend to not be rude. To be fair, what you said was pretty tame 
Hahaha no I caught that too…
It kinda is to be honest, it’s like a head chef not able to come up with new dishes every so often… if you’re having a hard time, perhaps stick to being a prep cook or in Ion’s case, a raid designer. The more I see reactions from people like Kevin Jordan who was one of the original wow devs, interviews, etc… I can’t shake the feeling Ion is kinda out of his element.
Considering that most of the best crafted gear in the game’s history - right up through BfA - was crafted using drops from raids, this simply isn’t correct.
5.4 had a lot of staying power despite how incredibly long of a patch it was.
But then guilds and even entire servers went nearly empty due to the lack of non-raiding content in 6.0 and 6.1.
My own brother left WoW for FF11 and never came back. I honestly think that if not for Legion, I would have permanently left WoW as well.
WoD was already the nail in the coffin for profs. At this point they’re at some sort of unholy afterlife. Every single other MMORPG has had better crafting than WoW for as long as I can remember
How is that incorrect, the discussion was mostly from when at least what I was referring to was of Ion’s reign. He has outright said they’ve tried to work on finding a balance with crafted gear and most of it except for a few latter pieces in BFA for instance were mostly normal raid ilvl gear.
The other bits had the person require to farm up X reagent from said raids in order to craft it.
The history of competitive crafted gear is a little more complicated than that, as sometimes the mats came from dungeons, sometimes they came from raids, and sometimes they came from cooldowns. Sometimes the crafted gear was BoE, sometimes BoP. Sometimes the mats were BoE, sometimes BoP.
Interesting. This guild and the Horde guild I was in at the time, really started to dissolve about 3 to 6 months into WoD. That was when most people had played through the zones, maxed their Garrison… and realized the Garrison was pretty much it. Along with figuring out all the mats and stuff they would make, would be available from their Garrison, and their friends wouldn’t have anything to trade because their Garrison provided everything for them… All of a sudden the future looked very lonely…
Normally this would be when you’d gear and really start raiding right? But these were people that weren’t really into raiding. They were all kinda isolated in their own Garrisons, they looked at the future and just started to check out.
So the first folks started to punch out about 3 months in, then 6 months in it turned into a flood. By the time 9 months rolled around it was nothing but ghost town city in the guilds I was a part of.
These were long time guilds that would typically have between 50 to 70 people logged on during weekend days/evenings. Doing all kinds of stuff. Dungeons, old raids, a little PvP along with old achieves and just basic shooting the breeze.
They’re already trashed.
The legendaries aren’t engaging to craft at all, and are nothing more than a gold sink that drives most people to just not wanting to bother with them. They’re profitable, but … it’s the worst scenario of “just buy off AH” possible. Wow. Fun.
There’s also a clear-cut difference between a “required” piece making professions viable, and large time sink professions putting you on par with end game gear. Especially the time sinks that are as tedious as instanced progression content. (Please, people, play other games for once before commenting on this. Especially older ones.)
I’ve been doing a lot of older crafting since swapping my end game focus, including Legion stuff which isn’t really that old, and it’s a lot better. Even when it comes down to “just buy stuff off the AH” at least the patterns take engaging effort to obtain, or are at least rare enough the results don’t have so much competition I have to cancel scan every 20 minutes to have a solid sale rate.
I also farm a lot of material by hand to save on costs, and that actually gets you out into the world. I’m not paying 500g per for certain scales to craft hats to sell.
If Blizzard was so concerned about people just buying everything off the AH, more BoA/BoP materials that aren’t RNG drops off final bosses in dungeons works just fine. (Quest chain to be able to get x from y node/mob.)
So much of the crafting got gutted because it was “annoying” for competitive players to deal with, or bruised their egos because only raids and raids alone should drop the best ilevel gear. Oh no, you have to pick from multiple potion types that all took different materials, have to level professions to get a minimal stat gain on the same ilevel of gear, and oh god there’s a stat bonus from profession only perks? Remove it.
More of the gutting of actual RPG elements to appease e-sports players, when those are the players that should have known to suck it up if they wanted to push in a genre that isn’t actually designed for that content.
And yes, materials dropping from raids is fine.
If they truly wanted a balanced system, you’d be able to do a daily to maybe craft a piece once every couple months if you aren’t raiding mythic, but be able to churn one or two out a month if you are. The more sources for more materials, with the more stuff to make, the better.
To be fair as well, a lot of the profession stuff still has a home - even once outdated - through transmog, toys, and other means. I’ve made over a million gold this month casually crafting old transmog gear.
It’s also another reason so many people are getting rightfully pissed we don’t have player housing; because crafting also props that up heavily, especially older expansion stuff.
Properly done professions are ever-green content, which is something WoW seems to refuse to do. I’m still doing the Legion profession quests.
The final irony…
Now that I am pretty much a solo play only kinda guy, I always quest through WoD and max the Garrison. lol
Only thing I don’t have is the AH. But I maintain a couple of bank alts so they deal with all the AH crap.
Sounds very typical. I remember someone in trade chat once saying that they logged in after a few months to discover that they had been automatically promoted to guild leader.
No coincidence that Blizzard stopped publishing sub numbers in WoD, as it must have been embarrassing.
I personally stopped raiding in WoD. The raids were good, but very soon all the people I used to raid with had left the game or were not raiding any more. Most specs were no longer as engaging as they used to be, and I didn’t need raid gear sitting in my garrison anyway.
Eventually, one of my old MoP friends invited me to a Normal HFC run. But then I messed up the Eye of Anzu mechanic on one of the bosses, and caused a wipe. The group was very understanding and even traded drops to me, but I felt so ashamed and out of place. I realized that raiding wasn’t for me unless I was willing to give it my all.
If game devs had continued the same systems and class design as MoP and the game hadn’t plummeted like it did in WoD, I probably would have stayed a raider.
Wait, there is a Shadowlands engineering mount? What is it?
I survived SV being made Melee and Combat Rogue becoming a dice throwing Pirate, but I gotta say I miss all the people I used to run with. Loads of funny characters, lots of highs and lows. Loads of fun times. Like the “Pizza Delivery Wipe”. [1]
I rebuilt this guild twice, and after WoD I just didn’t have it in me to try again. I could never trust that Blizzard wouldn’t change things so drastically it would erase whatever had been created.
[1] We were in Dragon Soul. Our best geared heals had ordered a pizza for delivery. We did a ready check and he looked at the time. Figured - It’s ok, 25 minutes to Pizza Delivery! So he clicked ready on the readycheck, and the tank pulled. About 20 seconds in the doorbell rang. It was the Pizza guy. He got up to answer the door and the raid wiped. We were all - What happened man, are you OK? So he explained about the Pizza Man.