It’s honestly crazy that every blacksmithing order I get from patrons requires me to supply tens of thousands of gold in materials.
Really makes profession knowledge points and acuity feel like pay to win at this point, because I’d need to either buy a token or spend hours farming gold to fulfill these orders.
They are designed as something you invest in to up your professions, not just a log in for free rewards + resourcefulness procs every day
Right, like I said… “buy a token or spend hours farming gold.”
Feels bad, but I guess sure, some people probably do like farming gold to get things that used to come from a quest.
I’m skeptical of everyone who tries to claim that every patron order they receive provides zero mats. I feel like they’re either exaggerating or just outright lying. Engaging with it every week myself, including with alts, I get plenty of orders where I barely have to provide anything and usually one or two where it’s a completely free craft to complete, alongside only a handful of orders where I have to foot the entire bill.
That isn’t what pay to win is.
I seldom buy mats, I mainly gather my own. If you don’t want to put in any work to leveling your professions, power to you, but if they made everything give mats 10/10 times then why not just give the points when I log in
Farming gold?
Do you do any kind of harvesting? Or touch wax nodes at all?
I quite literally make 10 to 20k a day just being lazy harvesting as I just fly from destination to destination.
Got to hit the monthly quota’s on WoW Tokens.
I’m not saying they all provide 0 mats, but it seems very, very, very rare for me to see one that provides all of the rare materials.
I’m logged in on my blacksmith now and every patron order that provides “some” materials is still asking for me to provide things like 6 x sanctified alloys, 12 x ironclaw alloys, or multiple null stones.
Buy token is the new strat 
Thank you, you just described farming gold
Only bop items are certain to be supplied. Anything else is random. You’re free to do them or not.
I can say with confidence, there is a difference between any activity that isn’t gold-negative and actual gold farming.
Thank you for the summary, my post was asking why that is the case.
Like someone else said, it’s investment for the skill up and knowledge point. You can ignore the patron order. You can scour the trade chat and get someone else to order it. You can farm the items required to do the order yourself, which you usually have to do anyway in order to get the knowledge points from said farming profession.
Having it cost you mats is better than never being able to do it like it was the case in dragonflight, wouldn’t you say?
Like I also said, how is it not pay to win when the only source of knowledge points and acuity requires spending tens of thousands of gold, though?
Or the opportunity cost of spending hours farming and then using your own mats instead of selling them.
How would this be less of an “investment” if patrons more reliably supplied the rare/epic mats and the crafter supplied the uncommon materials instead?
Having it cost you mats is better than never being able to do it like it was the case in dragonflight, wouldn’t you say?
In Dragonflight, knowledge points and artisan’s acuity were available from multiple weekly quests or drops that didn’t require spending significant amounts of gold to complete.
That’s untrue. In War Within, if you miss knowledge point, more orders will show up as a catch up mechanic, many of which are brain dead easy to complete.
Because you still can (quite easily) put in time to get those items. It’s no more pay to win than literally everything short of RWF raiding
I don’t think KP or acuity should be free, which is why I’m against most patron orders supplying all mats.
But I think it’s unreasonable to expect us to spend tens of thousands of gold for a single patron order.
Other than first crafts, what are the “brain dead easy” sources of Artisan’s Acuity that don’t require me to spend thousands of gold fulfilling patron orders on my blacksmith?