Excessive grinding for mats is nothing new. A highly convoluted system is but that can have pros as well as cons. For me, the worst factor inhibiting growth through professions is the heavy dependence on crafting orders. It’s nice that we can find our own mats then get someone else to craft the item for us, but the crafter must first obtain the recipe, and it has to be a popular recipe. Players are unlikely to ask for items equal to or less than what they received through just playing the game so the recipes we need to progress quickly become useless.
As a casual player, I miss the old system. I knew that the items we created would usually be outclassed by what we could get from dungeons so it was never about making money from it for me. I just liked getting better at it. Now, the grind quickly gets boring. I work for hours to create one or two items which fail to raise my level. I’ve progressed to the point where I either need to save up and purchase mats or get on an alt and get them up to the level where they can gather what I need.
I think WoW thought they could make a system that would benefit players from working with each other throughout the life of the expansion but they created a system that tries to force players to work together rather than encouraging them to do so. It’s a recipe for failure. Instead of players helping each other progress, it holds them back in very obvious, discouraging and frustrating ways.
21 Likes
I haven’t even gotten to that point yet. I’m still working on getting to 50, much less beyond that. What sucks for me is that after 50 you have to find the recipes with which to continue leveling, and that means mostly hitting certain renown ranks with various factions. I don’t have the time to grind the rep needed to hit 15; I haven’t even hit 10 in a single faction.
The other issue is that the specialization points are locked in once you assign them. I was under the impression that there are only a limited number of points you could find, so I’m practically paralyzed because I can’t make a choice for fear of doing it “wrong”. I hate this new profession system. The old way was bad enough (any gear I could make would be obsolete by the time I go to that point), but this is a dumpster fire.
15 Likes
Being on a dead server and unable to find crafters is the worst part for me…
9 Likes
Not enough work orders to get skill ups
The complete lack of mettle if you upgrade all equipment and buy all recipes with the fact that you require mettle or an inspiration proc to max out certain recipes (and the person submitting the order cannot give the crafter mettle)
The very suspicious way rank 2 crafted items are worth nothing vs crafting costs
6 Likes
Was not a fan of having to sit there and spam refresh for hours to get crafting orders in order to a) level up the profession and b) get first craft bonuses. I also ended up having to pay people to let me craft items for them to finish off my Inscription since either no one wanted the staffs or if they did they wanted it max level which I couldn’t do even with inspiration.
I also don’t like that there isn’t catch up mechanics for knowledge points and artisan’s rep quests if you started a profession later.
The quality concept was interesting - but now it’s obnoxious. As more people get into professions rank 3 items are selling for cheaper than rank 2 and 1. Some gathering professions had ways to turn low quality items into higher quality, but I don’t see that ever becoming useful due to the pricing.
3 Likes
The public tab on Crafter Order page is just sad… There is literally NOTHING there. It’s like that economy doesn’t even exist! I was hoping that ppl would put tip and request some minimum quality order for things… But nope… ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So ends up everyone just have alts requested personal orders just to get their weekly done… That is just awful!
12 Likes
Public orders are a failure but other than that it’s not too bad. Trade is actually being used by crafters instead of boe drop sellers and trolling. Although I did just have a bug where I didn’t get any skill for the initial craft. It seemed to happen when the order was canceled by the buyer as soon as it was started by me.
5 Likes
There are lots of repeatable points but they are also not that common. There are guides for getting up to 70 fairly easy but filling out the entire spectrum will take likely take years for most of us.
Worst part for me is having no way of verifying what you say when advertising profession. Linking a profession only shows the skill and recipes known, but gives no information about the crafter’s knowledge points or stats so they could claim to have a certain % inspiration but there’s basically no penalty for straight up lying about it because of the RNG nature of it making it impossible to tell based on a single transaction.
I’d like to see a couple of changes to address this:
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When linking professions, show everything you can see to everyone else, so people clicking the link can see your knowledge points, equipment and stats at the time you list it.
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When you complete a work order the customer gets a receipt of the order that includes any relevant information about the order when it was fulfilled, such as what rank materials the crafter used if applicable, the multicraft and inspiration %s the crafter had at the time and what optional reagents were used on the craft.
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In addition to being able to set quality minimums for public orders, add the option to set a minimum Inspire threshold and % for crafting, so if someone advertises 40% inspire you can say alright only craft this with 40% inspire and it’ll be impossible for them to craft it without hitting that threshold so that scamming this way is impossible or at least significantly harder.
5 Likes
A little late now but consider having your alts create your orders if that’s an option for you.
1 Like
Already do for the craft order weekly quest. But regarding bonuses and stuff I didn’t really want to waste gold and limited sparks on things my alts can’t use. At least until some mats come down in price more and sparks are more freely obtainable.
It would be better to just remove inspiration altogether. It’s the root cause of these problems.
2 Likes
Not being able to level Engineering past ~60 without dumping 30 points into a useless spec and sub-node.
8 Likes
Truth be told the worst part is just having almost all the items worth making to sell are BoP.
If I could be blizzard for a day this is how i would fix it.
- Crafted items when first crafting, can only ever be made up to rank 3, adjust base material cost to compensate this.
- All rank 3 crafted items are BoE, not BOP, and can be sold on the AH.
- Rank 3 items can be recrafted into rank 4 and 5.
- You have to use work orders to find crafters with enough skill to imporve a rank 3 item to a rank 4 or 5 item.
- you of course can recraft your own items which will make them BoP, IE an engineer can recraft their own goggles.
Outside of that, for the most part crafting is fine, I would like to see a bit more items spread through out some prof to help level them, vs having to make just specific epic items in order to level.
Though not the end of the world nor a major breaking point.
Overall though the prof are fine.
7 Likes
I’d love to agree with you, but what you’re describing resembles some of what’s happening with Alchemy at the moment. Most alchemists are stuck in a situation where they’re crafting at a loss for a market that is almost entirely BoE (the only consumable BoP Alchemy crafts are phials that hardly anyone wants someone else to make and a potion that hardly anyone can craft because the recipe is H Vault). On top of that, Blizzard didn’t stick the landing on the reagent quality economies well enough to let general use BoE crafts spin a profit with any consistency. If you open up the bottom three ranks of armor and weapons for BoE, you’re going to run into a similar problem. Or, perhaps worse, you’ll run into many of the problems of SL legendary markets.
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The worst parts of the new system have been the hints that a lot of it went live without proper testing (eg. public orders), in addition to the seeming unwillingness of devs to make big changes in a live economy where there’s incredible imbalance. There are players that are stuck in trap sub-specs because of ambiguous tooltipping. There are crafters - folks that, in some cases, outright exploited from the start to make gains - making windfalls on order commissions while others search scan in vain for hours before quitting. It’s a mess that only resembles fairness simply because items are being made and some people are making a buck, and it won’t get better until someone acknowledges that it’s a system of meaningless choices unclearly intermingled with meaningful ones.
5 Likes
I don’t mind grinding for mats but I feel this new system massively disrespects my time considering the sub fee is still firmly in place. I enjoy being able to invest as much time as I want to grind mats, and when I have them I have the item I want. This system basically takes that freedom away.
The problem is the massive artificial time gating. You are not free to spend your sub time grinding at your own pace. You have to wait until weekly knowledge quests are up, or sparks are trickled to you, and once you craft your one or two pieces you are just completely hamstrung for weeks/months unable to basically do anything useful.
EDIT: Also, Artisan’s Mettle is a huge slap in the face.
I also hate the quality levels. Anything other than max quality level is worthless. 2 star mats on the AH sell for less than 1 star mats. If you make anything less than max quality you lose gold just on the price of mats, making crafting a net loss for anyone but those lucky enough to get pattern drops, which are locked behind difficult content many crafters will never do.
The inability to reset knowledge even once is also really bad, considering there are so many useless dead-end specs with massive point sinks. I have mined dozens upon dozens of rich nodes without a single diamond with fully maxed Surveying, for example. Totally wasted 30 knowledge which is like 3 weeks work of points.
Having you limited to a handful of knowledge per week totally disrespects your time. Preventing you from leveling if you pick a spec without recipes that take you past a certain point (which isn’t really described in the UI at all) is a huge oversight.
The time gating is over the top. The weeks to grind knowledge and chaos mats on top of a slow trickle of sparks limiting you to 1-2 high end crafts per month makes the whole system barely useful to even gear your own character let alone make any gold.
I was looking forward to the crafting overhaul more than anything else about the expansion, but overall I really dislike the entire thing. It feels like it is designed to make it easier to just buy WoW tokens to get items on the AH and forget about the whole thing, rather than a system that is actually fun and rewarding.
5 Likes
Professions.
Irritating right now.
Alchemy and Enchanting are OK, just pain leveling.
Tailoring and Blacksmithing, just wow. Can’t make entire set of items because of the change from BoE to BoP, so making stuff for Alts is limited.
And just how would one craft something for anyone other than the lower level BoE stuff. Even adding extras to those BoP makes them BoE.
Once again weapons is limited, too limited. And grinding for some items is worse than Shadowlands/Zereth. At least in ZM one could get a decent set of items reasonably.
Being gated by rep to get recipes you need to level, picking the wrong specializations and not being able to respec. Things like vials costing 5g a pop putting a big dent in profit margin. Very alt unfriendly with no catch-up mechanic
7 Likes
- The recipe prices are up, vendor mats are mostly up in $$
- RNG almost everywhere
- Crafting orders necessary to level the last bit of some professions basically
- Region wide change ruined my gold making
- Barely anything worthwhile is craftable and when it is, quickly is ruined by being over saturated so the prices crash because of the direct result of how professions were structured.
- Some vague vague vague tooltips and some really unnecessary traps in some spec trees.
Overall, I like the foundation but the rest is a giant feelsbadman.
2 Likes
Auction house should replace or combine with crafting orders. Otherwise, I only have two reasons to place order, I am unable to buy it on auction house so i spend more time requesting an order even more time if i have to negotiate with a crafter. Or, I want to save some gold because zapthrottle soul inhaler is too expensive on Auction house
3 Likes