Why is no one talking about work orders being garbage?

Gameplay Professions
1

I am a blacksmith, I specifically specced towards 30 breastplates, 30 large armor, 21 armorsmithing. I want to be a master at breastplates.

There are two problems with work orders (making me feel like I wasted this profession):

  1. Work orders can’t specify what they spent their knowledge on. You could put up a request for a Primal Molten Breastplate and it would get made by some guy who put 0 breastplates, 10 large armor, 10 armorsmithing. This really incentivizes blacksmiths to just maximize number of recipes over quality. Even linking my blacksmithing in chat doesn’t show specializations.

  2. The spark of ingenuity being gated so you can only get one means no one is going to request these high end recipes in the first place because tons of people are crafting their own. Seems the best thing to have gone for blacksmithing is to completely ignore anything requiring the spark of ingenuity and make tools or sharpening stones. Even then, we run into problem number 1 on tools.

I asked in trade chat if anyone could make any of these: Khaz’gorite Pickaxe, Khaz’gorite blacksmithing hammer, or the Khaz’gorite blacksmith’s toolbox. The first response I got was someone who said he could make all three. Which meant he specced the following:

  1. Specialty Smithing 10
  2. Toolsmithing 10
  3. Weaponsmithing 10
  4. Hafted 10
  5. Maces & Hammers 10
  6. Axes, picks, & polearms 10

That means he got a little in a lot of things so he could fulfill more orders at lower quality than someone that went entirely into making the best of one thing. And if I throw a work order up, it’s a gamble as to whether or not a garbage person like this can make it.

This is such a half-assed system blizzard made.

39 Likes
2

I couldn’t agree more, this whole system is rough to be honest and it’s unfortunate that I was so excited for it. I love the concept, but there are some serious tweaks that need to be made for sure. I particularly don’t like how the Sparks are gated biweekly to get ONE. It should be maybe three or four weeks (MAYBE a month and a half MAX) before we are able to farm them or grind them out at a decent rate.

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3

There’s like, at least a dozen threads saying exactly that. 13 now.

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4

  1. The person placing the order can specify the minimum acceptable rank for the order. Requesting a higher rank will filter out the people who can’t actually craft that rank. They don’t need to know your knowledge, they just need to know that the item is going to be the minimum they accept and the system allows for that.

  2. Sparks aren’t used on recrafting, so we can spend them now to craft a rank 2, and it’s only a few ore and mettle to get a higher rank later. There’s no reason to delay them.

  3. The system isn’t half-assed, you just don’t understand it. If you want a rank 5 Khaz Pickaxe, then find someone who is specialized deep into hafted>Axes and specify that.

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5

Thats why they have personalized ones so you dont have this issue.

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6

One thing I noticed with public orders is it requires the person requesting to front the materials. That’s fine except with tailoring it requires thread and bolts which only a tailor can make. I can’t just toss up all the cloth I’ve collected and ask for something made. Also there is no spot on crafting orders to request sub-combines. Like I can’t toss some ore up and ask an engineer to turn them into bolts for me so that I can then use those as mats to have something else crafted.

The system has potential but it really need to be expanded and have the rough spots smoothed out.

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7

I’m giving up on crafting and just doing mining and herbal from here on out to be honest.

11 Likes
8

Meanwhile I have seen literally zero work orders for Alchemy.

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9

I mean that’s a whole different issue as well

because despite what the questlines emphasise, now we’re being incentivised to ignore the unreliable community aspect and just craft using alts and guildies

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10

As an alchemist, I don’t even have access to any of the crafting recipes that are allowed to have crafting orders. It feels like they went too restrictive on what could be put up for order.

Why can’t I craft bulk orders of healing potions for people?

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11

So where do we go to suggest changes and improvements to the system? Like there needs to either be a way to request sub-combines or change it so that the requirements are 100 cloth not 4 bolts. Also yeah you should be able to craft basic potions for people. Sure you can just buy that off the AH but what if I don’t want to pay 20 gold per potion and would rather just supply the mats to have it made cheaper per unit?

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12

Exactly, if I can craft it, why shouldn’t someone be able to supply the materials for me to make it for them rather than having to go to the AH? This is the case for alchemy (especially transmutes, which provide mats for other professions) and basically all of enchanting. Almost every single craft (i.e you put mats in and an item comes out) should be able to be done as a work order imo.

4 Likes
13

You’re forgetting to add that people just don’t put in work orders at all… At least on my realm. Even if I had every recipe, it wouldn’t matter 'cuz no one wants anything.

Then we have some of these purple recipes that can’t be ordered at all, so I’m sitting on BoP profession gear that I can’t use, trade, or make for others? Wild.

10 Likes
14

simple, keep using the AH like you did before, you arent forced to use the work orders.

15

I think this is like a prod test in a way … they’ll probably make some major adjustments to it coming up. They did state that they’ll be making more frequent iterations to things this time around. I’m guessing since this is a major feature of the xpac they will be making some big adjustments to it if it’s not really accessible to most people. I think they need a clearer tutorial for sure.

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16

Except it doesn’t work like that. Some of the best crafted items are BoP which means folks have to navigate the poorly implemented system to sell some of your best wares. Also since they need to supply all the materials (regardless of how many you have sitting in your bag), it makes a clumsy system even harder to get people to use.

I check every time I am at a crafting table (which is a lot if you know anything about the trainwreck of Alchemy levelling) and have seen a grand total of zero orders. As in zero total since the expansion launched. I suppose other professions that Blizzard hasn’t mangled as hard this expansion may have better luck but going by the fact I’ve seen people literally try and pay people to take their work order, I don’t think so.

4 Likes
17

The expansion isn’t even a week old. Give it some time. I like a lot of the changes to crafting. Let’s see how it plays out before we start claiming that the sky is falling.

5 Likes
18

The problem is they wasted all the dev time available to fix the obvious issues with the system by not putting it up for testing.

Even the first functional iteration of work orders was AFTER the pre-patch went live. Then they made one iteration where they made public work order provide all the mats but didn’t think through all the implications of sub mats like bolts of cloth.

To me this feels like Azerite armor 2.0 a game critical system that was not tested at all in beta and resulted in terrible gameplay and brokenness when it hit live.

I also feel that they have vastly over-restricted the key materials for crafting the good stuff with sparks being a once a fortnight reagent.

From the point of view of the customers the experience is terrible as all anyone wants are a few specific items that probably can’t be unlocked yet (Dragonflight accord 19 etc) so what the customer base is learning is that the system doesn’t work so many will not bother coming back once the recipes have been learned.

Sadly I think the profession revamp will prove to be a failure with only enough business to support the handful of crafters we had with the Shadowlands legendary base items again. This might be good enough for the hard-core craft gnomes but given Blizz has talked about crafting being a 4th pillar of endgame play along with mythic+, Raids and PVP it is clear already that there is not enough market to support more than a handful of dedicated crafters per profession per server.

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19

I only see renown 18-21 ranked recipes being asked for lol which pretty much are impossible to get rn

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20

I’m not too sure what they were thinking with this system in particular. It’s like they saw the crafting system in ESO and FFXIV and went “how can we make this worse?” instead of better and while leaving out several things from either of those two. IDK, this is the first time i’ve really bothered with profs since Wrath…and for whatever reason it just seems like they can’t ever get it right.

ESO the system is, pick thing to make, make sure you have the metal/cloth/leather/etc ready, have style material, have stones/whatever to increase quality, craft and done. (we don’t have any relative to this except some god awful quality system that looks like it was supposed to be tacked onto SL crafting…which again was garbage)

FFXIV: As much as I hate the crafting in this game for it’s monotony, you control quality almost completely on gear you make. Need a high quality mat? Get the stuff and press some buttons to get make it HQ, slam it into whatever you’re trying to craft gear wise, press more buttons, poof it’s done and HQ.

idk…nothing about WoW’s crafting right now feels good or makes sense design wise and again it just feels like they went window shopping for ideas and just took a concept and made it worse than it’s progenitors.

My 2 cents

6 Likes