Once upon a time, enchantments did not scale, so putting a high level enchantment on a very low level piece of gear was pretty broken, and common for twinks.
So along came enchantments that required minimum item levels. Make sense, and needed to keep the game balanced.
Later, this was changed to where they scale. Even better. Great change. Allows you to use the enchantment still, but not break the game with OP numbers at lower level.
However, this was all for MINIMUM level restrictions.
Fast forward to modern WoW and enchantments now have MAX level restrictions.
Can you please tell me what is the point of this other than to piss off your customer base?
Older enchantments on newer gear is going to give comparable numbers that are insignificant.
You’re worried that on top of my 212 Agility that I have on my cloak, I can add another 7???
Seriously??
Is it because some old enchantments give speed boosts?
Because that isn’t an issue either. With the way speed boosts add up now, are you thinking someone’s +2-8% extra is going to break the game somehow?
There are azerite traits and speeds stats on BFA gear that allow slow plate wears to move at like 130%, possibly faster, if you’re lucky enough to get the gear.
I mean this is really really frustrating as a player and customer to look at my profession and not be able to use an enchantment that I could in JUST the previous expansion.
I would LOVE to hear your explanation on why this is the design you went with?
I agree with you, the one thing id like to see done for the profession enchants though is allow them to be placed on the Gnomish Army Knife. The Gnomish Army Knife is useful for all (if not most of the) professions not to mention it only takes up one bag slot that allowing it to be enchanted with the Profession based Enchants would only make it better. All though i would love to see the Army Knife give a +10 to Fishing and Cooking and maybe do something for Archaeology.
The short answer is they want to balance the usefulness (and indirectly the profitability) of Enchanting with the other professions.
If there are enchants for every slot, then everybody has to buy enchants for every slot. So they only have them for the handful of slots they currently have them for.
But then if you have old content enchants that fill the other slots, people will feel forced to go get those enchants on their gear too because people are stupid and think +7 extra absolutely does matter. And they don’t want to force people to go back to old content to grind either old skill nor mats. So, they deal with it by saying those enchants were for then and not now, i.e. they need to have a max level.
I suspect this and other similar effects were what caused the decision to be made originally. I agree that with the present permissive attitude toward speed enhancements, this restriction no longer makes sense. At most, they could switch these effects to be +speed stat.
I don’t think this makes sense. The item enhancements from the other professions that compete with enchants are similarly limited. Removal of the restrictions would presumably apply to all of them, so leatherworkers would be selling armor patches and tailors spellthreads again.
You need one person per server to grind the old skill; lots of people already do that. Heck, most old mats are still available on auction houses for the people who want to get the old skills.
Plus, isn’t people grinding in old areas good for the game? It adds variety, and the people doing it will extend their subscriptions, making the game healthier financially.
Blizzard intentionally reduced the number of enchantment slots we have available in the game, and the slots are now prone to changing.
In Legion we had necks, rings, and cloaks, but no weapons. A level cap was added to prevent players from adding enchantments to their doomhammers and frostbringers.
In BfA, we lost the ability to enchant cloaks (?) and necklaces, but weapon enchants were returned. So the game was adapted for BfA content.