With legacy professions becoming relevant again, it is past time to fix them

Gameplay Professions
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Let’s be real, grinding professions has been, and always will be, something of a drag. There’s a reason gold farmers do so much gathering; most players have maxed out their gather profession long before they have enough materials to max their crafting one. This grind/gold sink is not what I have come here to talk about.

What has been frustrating me, and which will surely frustrate many, many other players when Midnight launches and they discover that the decor item them want is locked behind a crafting profession they never completed, is that ever since the launch of Dragonflight changed the way professions work on a fundamental level, older professions have been broken.

If you attempt to follow just about any old profession guide, you will find something curious. Most will contain a materials list stating how many hundreds of herbs or ores or cloth you will need to complete the instructions in the guide, which intentionally takes you along the shortest path to max rank. As you follow these guides, however, you become perplexed; your materials run out long before you’re done. You chalk it up to RNG or crafting the wrong item once or twice, buy a few more mats, and shrug it off.

And then you hit Legion/BFA.

“What am I doing wrong?” you ask yourself, weeping. “I have spent 100k gold trying to level up a single Battle for Azeroth profession, and I’m not even halfway there!” And then you look closer at your guide, and you read, “Make sure you only craft items which are orange, since they will give you three skill-ups instead of one.”

You stare at your chat log in disbelief, and discover the truth - nothing you have crafted since you began this catch-up journey has granted three skill points.

Where did the 3 skill-ups go? The answer: They vanished at the launch of Dragonflight. All it means to see an orange recipe now is that it will be longer before it turns green.

The missing skill-ups are a pain point in every expansion, but nowhere are they so excruciating as in Legion and Battle for Azeroth, where the cheapest recipes for certain sections of the process cost on average 50 and in some cases in excess of 100 reagents.

So how do we fix this?

I can see three possible ways forward. One, Blizzard finds a way to add back in the triple skill point. This probably will involve a lot of messing around with the skill system, i.e. a lot of work.

Two, they could reduce the costs of legacy professions to reflect the loss of the triple skill-up. It would be a lot of number tweaking, but probably easier than fixing something they accidentally broke 2 expansions ago.

Three, they could adjust the incoming decor recipes to allow players to level up their legacy skills by crafting items which are currently relevant.

What would this look like? Instead of needing 80% in a skill just to craft a fence post, put that fence post at the 40% mark, then the next decor item at 50%, and so on. Players will still need to put in some work, but at least they won’t be vendoring 95% of what they craft.

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Agreed 100%

I have said as much many times.

:surfing_man: :surfing_woman:

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They have not changed the old professions.

Here is where you are going wrong (and if you read the guides more carefully, you will see that they told you this):

In Legion/BfA recipes had RANKS. If you had a higher rank recipe then, it gave you more skill up. The Rank 1 recipes tend to go grey really fast.

Most guides will tell you where to find the easiest Rank 3 recipe to skill you up. You MUST find that recipe or you will not get points.

Getting to 140 out of 175 skill in BfA is actually not that bad. But you do need to find the recipes (welcome to old crafting, that is how they be).

Also, there are a lot of players that have the skill who are going to sell these items for a LOT less than you are spending to level up your crafts if you’re spending 100k or more…

Edit: Also, the decor will level your legacy professions. So. They’ve already done that.

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I’ve been hearing that for some professions (or maybe some players?) the triple skillup is still working, however I can assure you that this is not the case for everyone. I have acquired the higher rank recipes and am still having this problem. The fact that it is not consistent implies some very broken code in there somewhere.

Decor will help you finish leveling up your professions, yes. That last 20% is always a pain. But reaching 80% in BFA and Legion is a hurdle that is already sending AH prices for profession materials from those expansions through the roof. I can only imagine that it will get worse when 11.2.7 hits in December and sends even more people scrambling to level up their professions to fill their decor collection. I think only gold farmers will benefit from things as they are right now.

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So keep in mind that there is a progression. For certain brackets of skill you get 3 points, as you skill up it goes to yellow and 1 point, then green and 1 point, then grey.

They have not changed leveling. I have leveled all of the professions multiple times, some recently, some at content. I have seen no changes in terms of the number of points. I have master of all (all professions maxed) multiple times over.

If you feel like you are erroneously missing points submit a bug report detailing exactly which recipe it is and what your skill level was when making the recipe.

If anything, the changes they have made make leveling more accessible not less. Changes include removing cooldowns, releasing previously soulbound items to make them either BoE or warbound.

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Reporting it as a bug hasn’t done any good so far. Hence the post.

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BFA professions may be riddled with unfixed bugs that will hamper leveling. For example, yesterday, my Nightborne scribe purchased Rank 2 of the Honorbound contract from Ransa Greyfeather. At Zandalari Inscription 125, she clicked the item, nothing happened. At Zandalari Inscription 135, clicked the recipe, still didn’t learn rank 2. I’m fortunate that rank 1 of the Honorbound contract leveled her enough to use Darkmoon Card of War instead.

Players going back to finish leveling old professions for housing crafts will run into issues. And MicroBlizz can’t be bothered to fix old stuff. They simply don’t have the manpower anymore.

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This is the one that gets me. I dabble in going back and leveling crafting in past expansions but the number of ‘soulbound/only from a dungeon’ mats in these two stops me in my tracks.

I have half-completed professions across the board. Am just going to wait and see what exactly those housing items are that involve legacy mats or crafting, and see how it goes.

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That is not an “old professions” bug. That is a general bug that is in the game. You will notice this sort of thing happening with current recipes as well. Most of the time /reload clears this issue. Sometimes a full client restart is needed.

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Generally speaking, I would advise people to not level old professions if all they want is a few decor items. However I know you are interested in professions in general, Spiralle, so remember that Darkmoon faire can level old professions as long as the current ones are leveled. It’s a slow, but cheap and easy way to level over time.

However, for those not interested in professions but are just here because you’re expecting to make tons of gold selling decor, please consider the following:

Having an old profession maxed is not rare. The proportion of players across the expansions that have at least one profession maxed is roughly 70%. Competing against 70% of the player base and expecting to become gold bajillionaires is a little unrealistic.

If you can’t make gold now, selling mats, when people are frantically leveling old professions out of some sort of FOMO hypnosis, I can’t see why you would suddenly be able to make gold under much more competitive circumstances.

If anything, look at the item you want and price out the mats. That should give you a good idea of the cost of the item when midnight launches. Are you going to spend more than that to level the profession? If so, then stop. If not, maybe just level that one expansion and that one profession. And even then, maybe look hard at those mats and try to understand why those mats are so expensive. Just leveling the profession does nothing if you can’t make the ingredients– the bulk of the cost is in the ingredients.

Let me give you an example.

Icecrown plague canister is a decor item from WotLK. It requires Crazy Alchemists Potion, Runic Healing Potion, Frost Lotus, Eternal Life, and Frozen Orb.

If you buy all of those mats on the AH, you’re going to get undercut and will not make a profit.

Why? Are people just dumb, and posting things without a profit? Nope.

  1. Crazy Alchemists Potion is a potion which is only learned through discovery. Northrend research is a 4 day CD and discovery is random. Which means .. not everyone has this recipe. In fact, only 2.88% of the player base has that recipe. We can make that item at mat cost. You, however, may need a month of discovery before finding this recipe, depending on how lucky you are.
  2. Frost lotus and eternal life can be purchased for frozen orbs from the frozen orb vendor. So I know that if either of those spike in price, I have a stockpile of frozen orbs ready to go. Do you?

There’s a lot of things like that. There are ink traders and mat traders and transmutes and rare recipes and time-gated recipes…unless you are really into old professions–into them, not just filling the bar–you’re at a disadvantage.

I’m not trying to discourage you but I want you to have a realistic expectation.

But the bright side is that so many people are leveling that the decor items will drop in price once the early frenzy dies off–and let’s be honest there’s no rush to get that chair on the AH… if you can hold off for a few weeks the prices should be reasonable for most things. (Although watch those TBC items–the mats themselves are so pricy those will stay high)

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Thank you for your detailed response. :slight_smile:

You picked Northrend professions so that’s a great example of the cobbled together professions I have. Maxxed out tailoring from that xpac, maybe leatherworking and blacksmithing. Did some dabbling in alchemy there but very little, so did not know that about the Crazy potion and the timegating with it.

I actually do have some frozen orbs socked away lol, but I bet they spiked in price since the housing and crafting craze was announced. So I may be able to hit paydirt with random items, but others will be inaccessible. I’m definitely not going to go overboard, as leveling old profs was *already* time consuming and a side thing.

My wow mode with pretty much anything is to become hyperfixated on one recipe or task and hunt it down until it’s accomplished–or not. I wanted to do the T3 sets but gave up with the Stratholme speed run for example.

I am a bit of a hoarder so have two guild banks full of old mats but it again will be randomly striking gold. I really wish they would make guild banks organization more like the new personal bank filters. Would help me a lot.

I started doing Darkmoon Faire about 6 months ago and leveling some profs that way. Thanks for all the advice!

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There are lots of little trades you can do like frozen orbs. Garrison resources buys you any basic mat in Cata. For inscription, the leveling guides tell you to get this that and the other ink but.. you only need one ink! You can get all the previous inks with umbral ink (shadowlands ink)

Example: oh no I need ink of the sea (Northrend ink) (ah 79 g). What I would do would be to go to the mission table in SL get some herb caches (for free) turn those into umbral ink and then trade for ink of the sea (or whatever ink I need). Everything is free as long as I am patient.

Low and slow they way you’re doing it is the right way to go!

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