this game doesn’t require, enforce, or incentivize picking up and leveling professions as we play the game. it is a pivotal part of our character fantasy which not only sustains the economy but also allows us to fill gear slots, gain a combat advantage through preparation, and take a break from the monotony of questing and grinding.
at this point, small end game profession updates are a moot point to most of us. we know that they are band-aids and will be gone as soon as BFA ends, leaving us with the same hollowed out system we’ve had since Catacylsm. not only have we not had any new professions added in years (if anything, we are losing them), but the importance of low level professions has been severely nerfed by numerous stat squishes, heirlooms, and easy dungeon queues. the system is broken.
please Blizzard, by the Light, give us our 1/3 of our character fantasy back and everything else in the game will click. the economy, the pacing, the emotional connection to our character, voluntary exploration, everything.
I feel like professions can be the end game grind blizzard is looking for (instead of things like Azerite).
I personally would feel a lot better about grinding / crafting items as opposed to farming Azerite & Azerite gear, especially if a ton of the Azerite slots were crafted enchants / glyphs.
Agreed. It’s almost like Blizzard keeps adding new systems every expansion rather than allowing the current systems to thrive so that they can claim they are always adding things when in reality they are taking it away and then giving it back. I like your ideas man. Anything else you would add or change to professions?
Honestly, I think there need to be two slots (legs and feet, perhaps) where crafted gear are BiS (BoE, of course). Ideally this would be the same piece that can either be upgraded by the crafter with materials available through M or raids or upgraded by the wearer in the same manner. This would allow both the crafter and the customer to craft or purchase the gear at one of several ilvl levels, with the logical increase in cost/difficulty.
This would also make LW, BS, and Tailoring mandatory for mains and completely destroy any kind of secondary market for 340 gear since everyone could just craft it themselves. What it would revitalize is alchemy, jewelcrafting, and enchanting as there would be fewer players wasting profession slots on consumable professions.
Imagine a BS crafting an iLvL 340 BoE belt called Belt of the Black Empire which can be upgraded by a BS with materials from M+ and raids. The BS can use materials to upgrade other peoples’ belts in the trade window, making this an item which scales throughout the expansion whether you are a BS or not, and the 340 base version is the only one that isn’t soulbound, making the Belt of the Black Empire and its upgrade materials a huge selling point for BS. With tier sets gone, we can afford giving a slot away to the profession category.
I also think we are narrowing the scope of professions by only talking about the end game as well. To someone who quit WoW years ago, we are just talking jargon. I think the true problem with professions is that they are not supported nor are they needed from low levels and the early economies are all ruined, leaving a sour taste in our mouths as to the whole system in general. The item drops, the recipes, and the items themselves from 1-120 all need re-tuning and new RP elements need to be added to the world to make it feel more alive.
We need a blend of old and new. The old materials, recipes, and items should all be looked at and retuned so that it is worth exploring, finding, and building the recipes, and then we also need a FEW new professions that will shake up world interaction such as Lumbering, Woodworking, Siegecrafting, Barding, Innkeeping, Farming, etc. I completely agree that we should always fix what is broken before adding more new stuff, but in this case, the world is so empty and starved of interaction that I believe WoW must evolve in this capacity. Rather than remove portals, give us real reasons to go scouring the country sides on our dragons.
Just throwing some ideas out there for what a total revamp of the profession line up would look like in my eyes. With a proper retuning of the current professions, I think this would give us a lot of options when pinning down our character’s RP. Just a man dreaming here.
Gathering Professions
Mining - gather and smelt ore and discover rare gems
Herbalism/Botany - pick herbs, log them, and grow specimens in your lab
Skinning - harvest meats, furs, and skins
Farming - manage a garrison-like plot of land for passive materials
Fishing - leave traps overnight, cast nets, harpoon, and fish the waters
Archaeology - discover rare treasures, recipes and materials and learn the history of azeroth
Lumbering - chop down trees
Scrapping - deconstruct gray items for raw materials
Scavenging - gather recipes and crafting materials passively from killing specific monsters
Crafting Professions
Jewelcrafting - rings, necklaces, trinkets
Tailoring - cloth armor, capes, and first aid bandages
Blacksmithing - plate armor, free repairs, weapons and weapon and shield spikes
Leatherworking - leather and chain armor, tanning, mailing, armor patches
Alchemy - potions, flasks, cauldrons, etc.
Runecrafting - elements of inscription, with magic tattoo buffs and special runes you can place in the open world. some are traps, some aree buffs, some are teleports, etc.
Engineering - versatile tinker profession with a gizmo for every situation
Innkeeping/Hearthmastery - brewmaster, cooking and barding profession with focus on food buffs and bonus rested experience
Wood & Metal Working - ship building and siege crafting for world PvP and naval combat, fletching, ammunition, as well as various construction projects which players progress on throughout the expansion
Enchanting - elements of inscription, disenchanting, and enchanting weapons and armor, as well as arcane familiars to do mundane tasks for you
Yeah, im briefly back after about 6 months off and i gotta say, professions and the auction house are the worst i have ever seen. Im not kidding, i have 2 toons at 120 now and was looking to just casually run a JC/BS & Enchanting business just for fun and there is no need for anything other than alchemy raid flasks/pots and weapon enchants.
The only things that theres a market for is pets…?
I dont understand why they dont make some crafted items competitive with raid drops like in vanilla, BC & Wrath? Even if its only x2 slot pieces for the start of each new raiding tier, its still something cool to focus on that:
Helps character gearing
Contributes economy
Adds exclusivity to some things
Everyone remembers how cool it was to be running around in BC or MOP with the BS crafted epics? Those things rivalled some BT epics at least back in BC and you could get them as early as Karazhan.
I miss when professions provided that kind of atmosphere.
I agree with you Licher. It really kills the immersion of the game to see the economy in such poor condition. Why put any amount of work into organizing my loot and posting it on the AH if I can just buy a WoW token or do dailies for thousands of gold? Neglecting professions is also to blame. The economy is merely reflecting what Blizzard has been pouring their development time into, which is primarily battle pets, mounts, and appearances. Items in general just feel bad now.
Old items feel bad because:
years of stat squishes
spec-specific stats
stats removed from the game
items which once held prestige for their rarity and supreme stats are now only collected as appearances
cata revamp removing much of the nostalgia element of 1-60
heirlooms
level scaling
easy dungeon queues
nothing is crafted by us
New items feel bad because:
titanforging
spec-specific stats
stats removed from the game
less itemization choices
no more tier sets
multiple rarities and iLvls for the same item
old raid tiers invalidated by new raid tiers and mythic +
having to ask randoms whether or not they need a certain piece of loot in LFR
Absolutely agree, JC, Tailoring, BS & LW are all dead.
We dont need a perfect game, we JUST want immersive fantasy… of all the things i miss most:
Choosing between Axe, Sword or Mace Smithing OR Armour crafting (BS)
Coloured Gem slots instead of this forging and RNG garbage that both cannot be measured and dilutes item levels (JC actually having a purpose)
Legion breathed life back into proffs but it still wasnt right, but good god… if they gave us proffession specific quests with crafting exclusivity again i would squeel like a small female.
Why cant we have those perks and then as you said just upgrade them through the expansion?
They need to close the gap between item levels, what made vanilla through to Wrath’s content immersive was you could still be after previous raid trinkets or some weapons for BIS the WHOLE game, THAT was fun… not needing to 100% replace all items with current raid tier, just… 87%
We have that a littoe now with Mythic + but alas… id love to have a BS only crafted slot thats viable for 90% of the expansion.
Clearly the interest is there because we had the same weapons all of Legion.
On one hand, how to we keep all levelling content relevant to the current storyline, without NOT bringing new expansions out.
Imagine if they never increased the level cap to 70+ from vanilla and BC+ remained expansions at 60 like how they re-engineered the original Runescape.
I dont know how the devs are going to both systematically keep levelling a current storyline for up and comers a relevant journey and also progress the story for raiders.
If they figure it out though, WoW would forever be unkillable.
I don’t think WoW is a single game anymore. It is more like sports games where a new version is released each year that ignores the previous version. So we aren’t playing World of Warcraft, we are playing Battle for Azeroth.
Yes, we were able to “transfer” our existing characters to the new game and it reuses old content, but the “game” we are playing is BfA, not WoW. We are just using the WoW game engine.
I’ve been saying for a long time that I would LOVE crafting to become relevant. At best people only buy crafted gear to raise an item level to get into the next tier. The higher end gear takes mats that are so hard to get, and require raiding, that by the time you get enough to make the gear, you’re already wearing something better. I’d love an expansion where crafting was relevant again, made gear that was actually on par or better than raid gear. I mean really, who the hell is making the gear dropping off the enemies that none of us could possibly make?
![:ok_hand:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/ok_hand.png?v=6" ":ok_hand:")