(NOTE: I don’t address the ongoing Alchemy or UI bugs here, but head to Bug Report for more information about reported issues.)
TL;DR - The design of the Alchemy sub-spec wheel, Transmutation - and Dragonflight transmutation in general - could use some design review. The UI and overall design is dangerously (catastrophically?) misleading. The tooltips are rife with opaque, ambiguous language. Most elemental reagents aren’t valuable enough to invest a single knowledge point (let alone twenty) toward transmuting for them more than once a day. Not including an option to transmute up to Awakened Order, Decay, and/or Ire has been a confusing design miss. Resourcefulness/Multicraft will help with viability, but probably not soon enough for it to matter.
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Now that we’re a few weeks into the expansion and the economies have settled into their respective auction houses, it’s time when most players are looking at how they’ve spent knowledge points and deciding whether or not they made a wise decision with the information they had available to them while leveling. The beta cycle didn’t leave much for guides and websites to chew on, so the early going has had some risk, with players patching any holes in information with personal guesswork. Few point investments have been made without players first crossing their fingers.
I’ll say this for crafters like me that have invested the full twenty points into the sub-spec: Transmutation needs some help.
I went into Dragonflight excited about elemental reagents, the ways in which they would serve as fulcrum materials across professions. I made an exhaustive filterable spreadsheet (DM if you’re curious about it!) to understand which professions share which reagents. Need to know which professions use as much Awakened Fire as Blacksmithing? How about the amount of Awakened Frost you need as a Leatherworker, as opposed to an Alchemist? That information seemed important enough to track and compare. Investing in Transmutation seemed similarly important.
Aided by this overview of the profession system (ie. pouring through an aggregated list of recipes across all professions) it’s been easy to see how transmuting elements would be valuable, particularly early off in the expansion - now. Certain professions require more of one or multiple element types (eg. Alchemy needs plenty of Awakened Air/Frost/Decay). At first glance, being able to flexibly transmute what’s been collected into dedicated stacks of something specific seems very useful. I won’t blame you if you had a similar thought. Who could?
Here’s the problem: at the moment, because elemental reagents are very easy to come by, because the knowledge point investment is steep, and because Transmutation is handcuffed by a charge cap and once- or twice-daily recharge timer, Transmutation is only sort of useful. Even maxed out, its intended use seems to ignore how ubiquitous elemental reagents actually are.
This lukewarm usefulness also defies the rich history of what transmutation has been in this game. Historically, transmutation has been this: take small things and spin them into bigger things with better value, but only once a day. The daily limitation stops small things from becoming big things too many times. Great.
Here’s what we have now: take small things and turn them into an equal amount of small things of similar value. Sometimes you gain more than you give, but you need this sub-specialization and maybe one or two other sub-specs to realize that potential with any consistency. You can transmute reagents of higher value, but only downward into inferior materials at an absolute loss, and only after an initial investment of knowledge points.
You get it. Here are some things I’d recommend looking at…
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- You can impose once- or twice-daily lockouts on transmutes. You can impose zero-value-gain transmutations of ubiquitous/cheap reagents. You shouldn’t impose both.
A pressing issue is that these transmutes help less long-term, and they aren’t really valuable in the short-term. When stores of elemental reagents pile up on servers - and they will - prices will drop. At that point, it becomes easier for a player to make reagent gains for what they need without help from transmutation. Even now, you can currently (and limitlessly…?) farm elemental reagents with a gathering alt at a similar or better rate, and it’s hard to see that changing with full sub-spec wheels contibuting to Multicraft/Resourcefulness.
It would help to rethink the daily limits altogether, as they mostly serve to (falsely) inspire players to spec into Transmutation without realizing that the full wheel barely helps their situation - or that the reagents they’re transmuting for aren’t really that valuable anyway. Notably, the daily lockout also doesn’t do a great job of protecting against a rate of reagent gain that isn’t already happening on most servers. Transmutation is stuck in its old system that perceptibly describes a certain value, which is fine, but the value isn’t there even with a full investment, which isn’t fine. This needs a rethink.
- The sub-spec tooltip language needs some work. “More frequently” and “higher capacity” don’t do a great job of describing how the full sub-spec investment actually improves the craft. Consider a rewrite.
The definition of how the final node helps does seem to be under developer review currently, but tooltips need to be more exacting than this. It seems like many players reasonably assumed that this meant “Don’t sweat the lockout. You can now transmute multiple times a day." The current regret in the playerbase is that this actually might mean “A higher capacity of banked transmutes, just in case you don’t want to log in every day.”
These aren’t the same thing conceptually. This failure in language causes people to rush a sub-spec that ultimately isn’t very important.
- Banking transmutes isn’t that valuable for most crafters.
Saving charges only seems to benefit the absolute casual player niche that logs infrequently (maybe once weekly? Twice?), somehow decides to maximize Trasnmutation, and only does so to generate a small handful of elemental reagents every week. If we already have transmute charges, investing twenty points for another couple of charges each week seems way off from what most players would ask for. If the design is meant to reach these absolute niche players, the full of the sub-spec should be something closer to ten points.
- Breaking Awakened Order down into Rousing Elements seems to have little-to-no economic value, even with a full investment of knowledge points. Consider inverting the 10-point node, such that it transmutes rousing elements up instead of Awakened Order down. Failing that, consider allowing this recipe to Multicraft.
Awakened Order is a fierce bottleneck for a lot of crafting orders, and it’s hard to imagine when this would be a craft worth continuing after players receive its first-craft knowledge point and mettle. This would need to be resourcefulness’d multiple time over to be 1:1 value, and, even then, it’s presumably still a gamble that has you risking a valuable reagent for very little. Even if the best-case scenario is a 10% failure chance, it’s too much to risk for what you get in return.
More on this below, but Alchemists should be able to make Awakened Order, and that 10-point node seems like a great candidate for the recipe. Failing that, it would be nice to see the recipe affected by Multicraft, as it’s currently just subject to Resourcefulness procs. The simple idea of reaching the extent of the specialization and only being able to conjure a slight amount of rousing elements once or twice a day seems trivial at best.
For reference, here’s how the tooltip currently reads:
“Learn how to transmute Awakened Order into its entropic elements.”
Here’s what would work better as a valuable Transmute at that same KP cost:
“Learn how to craft Awakened Order from its entropic elements.”
- Awakened Order, Awakened Decay, and Awakened Ire need more sources than purely farming for them. Transmutation seems like the perfect place to stash production behind a daily lockout.
Similar to the above, choosing to exclude Order, Decay, or Ire up-crafts seems like at big miss in the design. Transmutation needs something singularly valuable to make the daily lockout(s) feel worthwhile. At the moment, Alchemy is resting on the design idea that creating handfuls of common elemental reagents for “free” a few times a day is useful or exciting, which may have been true in earlier iterations of the professions system when such a turnstyle had impact, but it’s barely useful or exciting now, and it’s easy to see its use and exciting quality falling off sharply by the time people make a full investment of knowledge points.
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I have more thoughts, but these are the bigger bullet points. I’ll spare folks the continued wall. Food for thought!