Look I left in Wrath where Blacksmithing made sense and I could make items then sell them that were useful in progression throughout the entire expansion.
Obviously when I came back I thought the same thing but dear god was I wrong. First thing I noticed was the only way to get Expolsum until it was added to World Quest was through the goofy scrapper.
So I got recipes a stupid amount of Marks of Honors and thought I was good as atleast I had the 340 Sinister gear that I could sell. Then I noticed EVERY SINGLE recipes above 340 ilvl was bind on pick up…
Season 2 comes along and literally across the board ilvls go up but no new Blacksmithing recipes. There is NOTHING on my Blacksmithing list that is useful to me right now or anyone else.
Why has crafting been killed so effectively in BFA? No new recipes and everything useful being bind on pick up has made this profession USELESS for the rest of this expansion.
Meanwhile people creating flask and gathering herbs are making bank. I have mining and BS but it is pointless. I invested a VERY large amount of time grinding mining, leveling blacksmithing and obtaining marks of honors to get recipes that are USELESS.
People with gathering professions are trading their time for gold, they aren’t making bank. Think of it as a minimum wage job and you get back what you put into it.
The majority of players with alchemy are actually losing gold, not making it. Their claims of profits are coming from the fact that they gathered the herbs themselves. They fail to place a value on those materials or their time and attribute all of the profit to alchemy.
Blacksmithing and all of the armor crafting professions are about making entry level gear for fresh level capped characters. The BoP pieces are combat perks to reward players for leveling the profession, just like during BC.
Fresh capped players are starting out at 330 ilvl now from Normal then 350 from heroics. All of the BoE BS recipes are 340 ilvl and that is it.
It seems when they started Season 2 and raised ilvls they just forgot certain areas of the game. We should have been given 370 recipes to learn that uses Tidalcores that can be BoE.
The easiest fix would be too sell the 385 ilvl recipes we have that require 15 Tidal cores. I would chain run Mythics for this.
The 340 ilvl crafted gear WAS the upgrade for season 2. It is just that the 8.1 patch and the start of season 2 were so spread out from each other.
However, the 340 crafted gear lets players skip normal and heroic dungeons for the most part, if they want to throw gold at the problem. Just like players had the option of doing at the start of the expansion with the 300/310 crafted gear.
I also recently returned after leaving about midway through Wrath. I’m an herb/alch, and can tell you, I’m NOT making bank. I used to make most of my gold through the healing pots EVERY class needed, as well as mana pots every caster class needed. I have used only a handful of healing pots from 80-120 and not a single mana pot…
Flasks sold for quite a bit in the day, but the higher level herbs were hard to come by unless you spent hours camping them. Although they take more mats today, the mats are easier to come by in my experience.
Best I can tell, between heirlooms and the new gear system, blacksmithing, leather working and tailoring are currently useless (other than tailoring bags).
Because blizzard lacks creativity. They constantly want to stifle the economy with bind-on-pickup items (Breathe, Sanguine, etc.). While at the same time making the produced item BOP - which removes all value from it. My main will always out level any gear he can make - as the grind for blacksmithing BOP gear is excessive and unfulfilling.
They should allow us to gather a variety of materials and create our own items - determine what stats we want (rather then randomania) and slowly upgrade our crafted items through the expansion. I would even suggest allowing crafters to make some form of Legendary / Artifact that they can shape throughout play.
Additionally, crafting should be brought into the endgame. Allow us to melt down high end PvP / PvE armor and combine it with crafted sets to for every tier. Allowing us to further increase the strength of armor or unlock additional elements (unique bonuses). Of course, make this tradeable - so everyone has access to it and there is an established economy.
IE: Mythic Raid Gear + Mythic Quality Crafted Gear = Combined into a superior armor. Otherwise allow it to be fitted or altered by a crafter.
These are all random ideas, the fact is - Blizzard can do better. They should also focus on NOT eliminating older materials and making crafting as a whole more dynamic. Truthfully though, they will likely just remove professions at some point and give them to vendors.
Also, Blizzard should give crafters the ability to create Heirloom gear specific to the crafters profession. Inscribers should be able to make experience boons and other beneficial things for lowbies. Additionally, each crafting profession should have the ability to make cosmetic sets for substantial amounts of investment that can be sold as ensembles. These sets would be based around the theme of each expansion that the item was set in (Pandaria Plate, Northrend Plate, etc).
We need to make professions interesting, exciting and have wide reaching effects.
sorry to see you return to a very different WoW back in WoD Blizz began to devalue professions to the point that they became nearly useless. I think they were hoping to get the 20 or 30% of players to drop out of the game and than they could remove professions from the game.
IT DID NOT WORK so then they made doing dungeons, raids, and PVP requirements to level professions, and we still have not quit. I AM WAITING for them to require 25 or 50 pet battles to qualify to do each dungeon or arena and 50 to do each raid.
BoP reagents are a way for Blizzard to cut down on alt-armies flooding the market. They add value to professions beyond pushing a button every three seconds. The alternative would likely be taking a day or two to craft a single piece of gear. In fact I think during Mists and WoD, it could take weeks to craft anything of value.
As for the BoP crafted gear? It is a combat perk at this point. Perks that were removed a few expansions ago and suddenly re-appeared in BfA as a way for Blizzard to get players to level armorcrafting professions. Then they doubled down due to the horrible response to the expansion by upgrading engineering helms in 8.1 and adding a BoP ring for jewelcrafters.
I think BS like some of the other professions LW, Tailoring, etc have limited uses really. I gave up crafting anything other than flasks and I kept engineering only to be able to have use of the AH without going back to SW.
BoP is always antithetical to any form of economy. It creates an artificial value (IE: WOD bars are generated at a limited rate, thus we ascribe value to the limit). In BC I would buy elemental essence from people, buy ores and then create something that people were interested in using or wearing. At times I would do all of this on my own.
They need to restructure the whole system. Stop artificially telling players how fast they can progress. The guy who no-life’s should be able to surpass me based on that fact. The current environment caps what you can achieve and then attaches it to RNG. We need more agency in this game as a whole.
Blizzard is so afraid of customization, sandbox systems / open economies that they have an aneurism at the thought of people breaking off the tracks.
I in a way have to agree BUT…
different strokes for different folks
I wonder why any gear that any player picks up in totally useless dungeons or raids is anything other than B.O.P
Some of us play for farming and crafting. there was a time when many or perhaps most p[layers depended upon crafted gear.
The game would be far far far more fun if crafters could make and sell gear that players actually desired. Players might be willing to pay a fair price if they could not get a better piece of gear in a 6 hour raid than a crafter could make with 20 hours of farming materials.
The ilvl 340 sinister gear should allow one to skip the lower level dungeons. Don’t have to farm, can just buy mats on the AH. The ilvl 225-233 gear is a nice boost when starting out at clvl 111.
They had a fantastic opportunity to allow Blacksmiths to be able to make Azerite armor, actually all the armor crafting professions, and make it produce a random piece.
Make them require a good collection of mats within reason of course but make them at least useful.
So much possibility that they just seemed to ignore.
I appreciate this post, because I think that the professions are very imbalanced. For example my engineering skill has a lot of quirky flavor abilities, but for my alt tailoring it seems only useful for pragmatic reasons, i.e. crafting bags.
As a dragonscale leatherworker since Vanilla who also left halfway through WotLK and came back for BFA, I feel your pain. I remember making my own gear as well as gear for my guildmates, friends, alts, and anyone in /2 LFW and being tipped nicely for it. GOOD gear was hard to come by, the world didn’t progress with you and quests would sometimes give you gear you couldn’t use or gear that wasn’t made just for you at your level.
World Quests, LFR, and Battle for Whatevers make end-game gear that’s better than professions can make ridiculously easy to get, while Heirlooms, LFG, BGs, and quest rewards upgrading to where you are currently crush the need for making gear through professions.
Gear is hardly unique anymore, nor is getting geared difficult to achieve.
That’s one of my pillars for why I can’t wait for Classic again… Professions will finally be made great (useful) again.
Retail WoW is a good, casual experience, don’t get me wrong, but it’s lost almost all RPG and progression aspects of it.
I think Blacksmithing requires too many mats compared to what you normally get leveling. This expansion seems brutal to me for leveling it. By comparison, Leatherworking was easy to max out while leveling this toon with Skinning. You simply do not mine enough mats to level Blacksmithing easily this expansion.
Not really my issue. Issue is the raid level mats that are required normally by the time you get them there is an upgrade for you. Had a Waist on Human Paladin 400 ilvl last about a day because farming the breaths I got a replacement I think that day in Heroic.
Professions right now are mostly being used as a work around so people can trade the loot that is higher ilvl. Method did this with engineering.
Even this so called Mythic hammer I farmed for like 5 hours has a 1/4 chance to create an indestructible item and ONLY REPAIRS one item at a time with a stupid high cooldown. Like seriously why is it not a full repair with a 1 hour CD?
The logic here is so stupid because people can LITERALLY carry around repair anvils or just go outside and mount up to repair.
Another issue is the Sinister Gear did not go up to 355 ilvl to match the Heroic increase. We were given no new mats in the middle range to make Blacksmithing profitable for us. Nevermind the simple fact all the high end stuff is BoP for reasons…
![:confused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")