Using ore to create crafted items feels so dumb. Ore is not metal. It’s rock. Smelting is a very necessary step. Why was it removed? Even if it’s not part of mining, at least give Smiths and Engineers the ability, the way Scribes can mill ink or Jewellers can prospect. Or have a smelter NPC who can do it for us before we use it. But can we stop making armour out of rocks? Or freaking SLATE?
And while it may be the most major symptom, the whole progression system feels more like a mini-game than an actual RPG element. It’s not like it’s important anymore, so why can’t it be immersive?
I do like smelting as an element, but I think the problem is there are too many outputs and not enough input.
To clarify, you have engineers who need the ore for this or that.
Then you have Smiths who need the ore for this or that.
Then you have the Jewelers who need the ore for this.
And the Jewelers who need the ore for that (prospecting).
Yes, it’s always been the case, but as of Draenor, I guess they ran out of reasons to have the player do it rather than an NPC. But instead of adding more NPCs to do exactly that, they chose to save resources (data’s still growing), and cut out the smelting middleman. Dunno why, or whose decision it was, but its what has stuck since then.
Scribes don’t just mill anymore either. Now they mill then have to mix that with water which has to be bought separately and powder for green, also bought separately. To make ink for recipes for things that are worthless. There are maybe six or seven BFA only glyphs that are very expensive so youd never erase them. Yet Smiths get to make actual armor and weapons from rocks and slate.
… That’s a stupid change. Whose idea was that. They should be put in charge of… I dunno maintaining Heros of the Storm or something with explicit instructions to touch nothing (but the lamp).
This is true and false simultaneously. The miners, whom originally had smelting tied to it, were booted from their helm, as the Draenor Bars were made at the smithy, and if it wasn’t the NPCs making them, it took either Savage Spirits or a ton of time to collect more than 8 per day.
Like, I’ve been leveling this toon as an engineer and I’ve had these infuriating parts where I have to get a bazillion pieces of ore in order to craft items, which would be fine if I didn’t need multiple pieces of ore in order to craft the thing.
Nowhere was this more pronounced then in MoP where Trillium was a thing and I needed to get both 2 white and 2 black trillium to smelt a bar of it. Which would again be fine except that they made this crap stupidly rare and drop typically 3 or 4 pieces of one type that seems to be randomly determined.
And beyond that, it’s not like I need one or two pieces of trillium to craft later gear, oh no, I have to smelt like 12 of these, which means 24 of each color.
To be fair, that did put them in-line with Enchanters, Scribes, and Jewellers though, as they too used mats shared by other professions but had to “refine” their own.
If both Engineers and Blacksmiths could smelt, I honestly wouldn’t mind it that much. The other option is to allow Herbalists to mill? Or just roll gathering into crafting the way Tailors and Enchanters are.
It sure gave those trillium bars a ton of value. I remember at least 80% of my Mists income was in straight trillium bar sales. I even used them wholesale to barter a Vial of the Sands.
Oh I’m sure you made a killing off of them. I was able to do reasonably well off of titansteel back in Wrath, particularly after I leveled a transmuter who could just create titanium out of saronite.
Legion mat requirements make MoP look like a cakewalk. It took SO MUCH material to make anything there! You only noticed it in MoP because it was just after Cata, where the older design philosophies were prominent.
Oh, they bumped up all the material costs to compensate for the convenience of not smelting and then a convenience tax on top of that. I’d rather just have the smelting.
Thing is, unless you were crafting demon steel there was tons of ore all over the place; around half the zones had creatures you could mine for fel slate and leystone, nodes and veins were common, and they respawned at a rate that led me to believe blizz had a minimum pop algorythm in place to ensure that ore was always present.
By comparison, earlier eras of the game routinely had “rare” nodes that were super stubborn about spawning (khorium was idioticaly rare).