It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense? If we put the time in to learn all we could, we should be able to at least jack of all trades ourselves.
There is not anything from stopping you from learning them all. You just need to level alts. Each new alt can learn two professions.
It’s what I did. I have everything covered. I’m not maxed in everything yet for this xpac but I do plan on it before the next do xpac.
To make us interact with others I’d guess.
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Honestly, I feel like professions are too crowded as it is. Too many people can make anything you’d make so the market gets flooded. I’d rather see it pruned down to 1 crafting, 1 gathering profession per character and also have specializations come back.
That way less people will be crafting certain items and you can actually make stuff without the bottom falling out of the market so easily.
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While I agree that would have been a better design at the start of the game, it would be impossible to tell people with 2 crafts that they have to drop one now.
This is actually how it worked in the original WoW beta back in 2004. They changed it, because everyone just ended up mastering every profession, so there was no real in-game economy and no incentive to trade or use the AH.
I 99% agree with this. I don’t feel like the “master” of anything, because my professions are really no better than anyone else’s.
This is what I’d like to see:
- Get rid of gathering professions.
- Make it so all characters can gather everything.
- Make resource nodes (herbs/minerals) much more scarce to compensate.
- Each character can choose 1 crafting profession.
- Within that crafting profession you can specialize in crafting 1 piece of gear (or gem or potion).
- Being specialized allows you to craft that item at a reduced resource cost.
The idea being that it would create a crafted item economy again. Of course, it means that the crafted items needs to be useful. In BFA none of the low-level gear was useful to craft. They were just DE/scrapper fodder. This wasn’t fun. Bring back the Warlords crafting where the gear was actually good, but you could only max 3 pieces of crafted gear.
Currently, it is also most efficient to have both gathering (herb/mining) on one character. This doesn’t really feel “fun”, it just feels like something you need to do to be playing most efficiently.
They could do it with a new expansion. Make it so that in the new expansion you get to pick your 1 profession (which doesn’t need to be one of your existing professions). Your old professions still persist, but they just don’t apply to the new content. In this way your character doesn’t lose anything that it had before, so people would have less to complain about.
Or even let people take all professions but only one of them is a “master” profession. Master professions get recipes at a base cost, all the others take much more mats, maybe triple the amount.
Same thing for gathering, anyone can have one master gathering that gives triple mats. The other gathering gives a base amount. Or some ratio that makes sense and balances out.
I think anything other than your “master” profession is pointless though. Why would you spend 3x materials to craft something you can buy off the AH. It would be leading people in the wrong direction. The design should be that your character can become a “master” of one very specific thing, and for everything else you need to trade.
There is almost zero player interaction in the current profession design. I want to see that come back.
It would be for people who are self-reliant and want to farm and craft all their own stuff. Obviously the most efficient thing to do would be to buy the less-expensive item of the AH if it was available.
The triple value was just thrown out there, maybe it would be 50% more, maybe it would be double. That’s a tuning thing, some value that would make it worth it to have a main profession but still allow people to craft stuff themselves a bit less efficiently.
I guess I just fundamentally disagree with that design philosophy in an MMO. The game systems should be designed to encourage people to interact and work together.
You would still be able to be self-sufficient: you would just need a lot of max level characters that had each profession. No different than today really.
I think 300% is the right design. It should be much less efficient to craft everything yourself rather than let some other character who has chosen to master that item to provide it to you. That would allow them to charge some nominal amount between 0 and 199% of the material cost for their service. And you would be able to reciprocate that for the item you chose to master.
As I understand from older blues posts (ghostcrawler era maybe?), you are limited to two primary professions as part of good game design. You have all these profession choices, but by limiting players to two professions per character, they have to make a choice (rather than Blizzard making the choice for them) of which professions best serve the purpose of their characters.
Obviously the limitation also forces more interaction between players. I can be self-sufficient with a gathering / crafting pair of professions, but I need to rely on the AH for armor or consumables. I could level dual crafting for armor and consumables, but then I need to rely on the AH for materials. Or I could go dual gathering, but I have to spend my game time gathering materials in order to afford to buy finished goods off of the AH.
My problem with crafting is related to many things in the game: it’s too easy to do stuff so everyone does it and very little is special.
For example, nearly every tailor can make the same stuff. There’s a bit of a grind to find some unique recipes or get different ranks but they really aren’t that special. You’re certainly not making the gear for anyone now that so much easy gear is being handed out.
Maybe you’ll sell a couple of 340 items to someone looking to gear an alt very quickly but that stuff will sit on the AH forever while you wait for that person to come along . In the meantime tons of people are crafting the same items while leveling up, creating a glut of them and making them sell for far less than the mats cost.
There’s no epicness to being a top-level in a profession. Everyone can get there and get the same recipes with a bit of time and money. Many people using the items are the ones making them so you’re really only crafting for yourself.
So there are several problems here:
- Lack of unique features in crafting, each person learns the same things.
- Crafting is too common, since people can take two professions it only takes a couple of alts to cover everything.
- The items created are mostly mediocre and will be discarded soon after crafting, making them hardly worth the cost.
- Most items are overproduced and underdesired, making their worth very little on the AH.
- The real benefit are BOP items you’ll only make once.
How do we solve these problems? By making crafting useful and special again.
- Reduce players to one crafting profession (gathering is a different matter).
- Allow specialization again, further splitting each profession into subgroups.
- Make crafting levels more difficult to learn the higher you go. Remove the hard cap and let each person find their own level. Allow dedicated players to reach epic levels of crafting that most players won’t put the time and effort into reaching.
- The crafting level influences quality of the resulting item instead of just the ability to craft it.
- Allow players to craft enhancements for items that add secondary stats, similar to socketed gems. These would be consumables that a player could make a bit of money on for their time and effort.
- Players could make things like repair kits that would repair armor instead of having to find an NPC. Or they could even repair stuff in the “will not be traded” window. This would be similar to enchants/enchant scrolls.
I’m sure there are other ideas out there to enhance these. The point is that each person would be able to work on their subset of a profession, gaining experience and making even better items while still creating useful consumables that keeps their profession alive. Instead of having the profession as an aside to their character it could be a daily thing to do, make a few things, sell a few things, learn some more, occasionally get the thrill of creating something special as a proc.
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This “should” is your opinion, which is clearly different from the opinion Blizzard followed. Every expansion I max out all the professions using several characters.
I agree, if you change “game” to “MMO”. In an MMO, you are not supposed to be 100% independent of all other players. Professions are part of that. Blizzard could have limited us to 1, but they allow each character 2, plus every character can have Archaelogy, Fishing, Cooking, First Aid and Riding.