I’ve been playing a very long time. The last time I did Engineering was Classic Vanilla. I thought I’d give it a go in TWW.
I cannot comprehend it at all. I have no idea where to start or what to do. I found Thermalseer Arhas. And it ends there.
This is a disgrace in terms of intuitiveness, complexity, and accessibility.
I read two guides on Wowhead and I’m still clueless.
Gonna watch season 4 of The Witcher instead.
My least favorite part is how hard it is to get knowledge points. On enchanting at least I could get 3 points from a weekly quest and disenchanting. But with eng you’re forced to do crafting orders which can be pricy.
Actually if somebody can point me in the direction of a guide to understanding engineering. From someone with ZERO knowledge. Be appreciated.
I tried Wowhead but got lost after a couple of paragraphs. So much foreign terminology.
All I wanno do is make some stuff. I expect that it’ll be time gated or there’ll be a huge farming or gold cost. Whatever to slow me down. I expect that the recipes will need to be farmed but some can be bought. Typical MMO stuff.
I assume that mining is still optimal as it was in Vanilla?
I skipped Dragonflight so coming back to profs in TWW was confusing as hell to me as well. Delete what you knew about how professions used to work, be patient with yourself, and breathe. It’s a sharp learning curve but I promise you can do it if you still want to <3
There really isn’t timegating the way their used to be except with knowledge points. (which are used to fill out your specializations and to get better profession tools - though the latter arent necessary unless you do profs a LOT)
Unfortunately, yeah there is quite a bit to learn, but once you get patron crafts down and look through the specialization trees, it should get a bit more comprehensible.
Wow-professions tends to have the most straight forward guides if you just want to know what to make to level the skill the fastest and cheapest, but I dont think there’s a simple “this is how it ALL works now” out there. I could be wrong though. It has been known to happen 
Try wow professions. Seems to be good
I came back after taking a break with MoP. Professions now feel like a master’s degree, if not a doctorate. (I wish I was joking.)
You still have skill level points. In the old days, we’d make a bunch of copper bolts, some pipes, etc. It was all about batching to max out and the system was color coded. Batching is dead for most purposes and color coding has changed to arrows/carets to highlight how likely you are to get 1-3 points of knowledge. Sounds great in theory until you hit all the other systems.
Engineering used to have goblin and gnomish specialties. Call that getting your associates degree. Now, you’ll have 3-4 tabs of specializations. You can open one at 25, 50, 75 and 90(?) I believe. The alert was super confusing to me for the longest and this whole thing was awful to get down after coming from the very simple model we had.
Within these specialties are what looks like talents. You can only reset talents once, which is super frustrating when you’re new and trying to figure these out.
For engineering, you’re either going to pick equipment or devices first generally. Work on key branches. This requires far more patience and strategy than the old days ever required.
Now, here’s all the complicated stuff
New confusing thing 1: knowledge points
Knowledge points go in your tree and come from either:
Big note here: there’s a weekly quest to fill orders by where people place them (only applies to crafting professions - gathering is elsewhere).
You can also pick a tab and put no points in it. You’ll do this as you level. Unlike the old days, you’re trying to pick things that are either useful to you OR something you think might be profitable (be aware of other dependant talents in different specialties).
Confusing thing 2: orders
The crafting table provides patron orders on a rolling basis. Initially, there’s only going to be a few and very little you can actually make. These fill up both daily and weekly and expire at various times. Most will require you to provide most if not all the mats. In return, you get either point items or other rewards (more on this later).
Instead of batch crafting, it’s generally better to work orders to get points and other items. Guides will recommend filling orders - patron orders is what they mean.
Confusing thing 3: quality levels
Items in DF and WWI have quality levels now, with mats/resources being 1-3 and final products having 5 total tiers. I believe Midnight is simplifying some of this (2 resource levels and ??? for products).
To get to higher qualities, we turn to…
Confusing thing 4: concentration
You get 1000 concentration, which can easily disappear on 2-3 orders if you’re not careful. It can take days for it to refill if you completely smash through it early on. It’s almost unavoidable initially. This is where guides talk about a strategy. You really have to prioritize learning to make a few things early on (so counter to the old days when we made everything).
Talents can help concentration fill faster, but usually those are the talents I’ve personally been filling in last. What I do - pick a base resource that will support whatever product you want to make. Again, not joking when I say this feels like figuring out a master’s degree.
Eventually, you can make enough key things that don’t drain concentration. This can feel like a very long time.
Confusing thing 5: acuity
Making new things and using items that give knowledge points also creates a byproduct, acuity. You can use this to buy things (such as knowledge point books and recipes), and it’s also used for some key recipes. More later. Each expansion (since DF) has its own version.
Confusing thing 6: profession attributes
Professions have talents, quality levels AND these attributes that influence concentration, mats use, and chances to create more items. Not everything applies to a product. You won’t multicraft a gun, but you could a bomb.
You can control these attributes through talents and…
Confusing thing 7: profession equipment
You’ll start with green items and too really get your profession going shift to blues eventually. Blues require 300 acuity each. You can create 1, but eventually will want all 3 usually.
–
Based on everything above, if can take months to max out a profession.
There are online tools to help explore talents and to kinda come up with tracks. I ended up doing a LOT of trial and error across 2 leatherworkers, which is FAR cheaper than engineering.
Good luck and hope this helps.
Quality levels: not new. We had recipe ranks in Legion and BfA. It’s not much of a stretch to expand this to raw materials.
Profession attributes: not new. We’ve had multicraft in the game since Cataclysm. It just wasn’t shown explicitly, so you were in the dark as to how often it would proc. See: Elixir, Potion, Transmute Master alchemy specialization.
Profession gear: we’ve had this literally since vanilla. And they would have skill on them previously as well. The difference is that previously you had to equip them as regular gear. Now you get a separate slot for them, and thank goodness for that.
See, for example, Goblin Mining Helmet from vanilla.
Time to get all recipes–which is the point of the tree really–the maximum amount of time, for the largest tree, if you get all of the stuff which people don’t even use, is 5.5 months. You can complete ANY of the trees at this point in the expansion. This is not the longest amount of time needed to obtain all the recipes in previous expansions. In WotLK, it takes somewhere in the vicinity of 395 days, or 12.98 months, to obtain all the recipes for JC. It took a similar amount of time to get all the recipes in Cata. In Panda, you had to research daily to get your recipes. Depending on how many recipes you had in your profession, this could take a while as well.
You should not worry about burning concentration.
You can literally make a BiS max level raid item in one day and multiple others with concentration.
Concentration refills at a rate of 250 per day. It should not be saved. Burn it. The point of it is to allow you to make things without needing to have all the skill/tools/etc. Basically, Blizz has given you an alternate path to “figuring everything out” –just press the orange concentration button and win. USE CONCENTRATION AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. It is a free resource that you are wasting if it is full.
But in any case, the OP is talking about Engineering in particular, which does have a bit of a funky leveling path.
So here’s what you need to do, OP:
a) get scrap.
How do you get scrap?
-Same way you always got scrap–you kill mechanicals and the bodies can be scrapped
-New way: Use Pilfer Through Parts. There’s a dropdown where you can get scrap from old engineering parts (or new ones whatever)
-Mining: EZ-Mine nodes also drop scrap
b) Use Invent. You can do this once per day and it will level you all the way to 100 even if you make nothing from engineering.
Invent will give you notes which you can use to learn recipes. It is basically a new kind of Discovery where, rather than getting a totally random recipe, you get a choice of 3 of them. We have, of course, had recipe learning by discovery many times over the years, but this is a nicer version of it.
That’s it. After you get to 25 skill, you can start filling in the tree, which works like every other tree ever. Look at the circle at the bottom. You wanna make that? You fill in all the circles connected to it. There’s arrows.
You get points by making stuff for patron crafting orders. This is pretty similar to how you had to make stuff in SL to make the legendary items OR how you got skill making stuff for work orders in Legion/BfA, but this time Blizzard provides you some of the reagents. Catch-up patron orders refresh every day, so be sure to check them every day.
i used to hate this system when they introduced it in dragonflight. everything is like an alien to me. i did try to master enchanting but i found myself not worthy against those experienced profession junkies. i gave up when i tried to craft the most expensive weapon enchant. crafting it cost more than what i can sell.
however i redemend myself in TWW. i tried to understand the system. i did few trial and error which cost me more than 100k. and yeah i finally understand it. now i have like almost all profs (exclude fishing & cooking). now im sitting at 69mil gold
You know, you could have just asked and I would have told you.
You learn recipes, you craft using materials, you go to the work bench next to trainer and do daily patron orders for knowledge points and acruity which you can use to craft things or buy knowledge points or recipes