Why has Blizzard failed at professions ?

[blackbird1205]

I think the biggest mistake they made was making crafted gear soulbound.
It relatives all gear crafting professions regarding the economy/making gold. Yeah I can craft bags with tailoring and some other small things here and there, but the main aspect is only for you.
Additionally to that, it takes an eternity to be able to craft 440er (if you aren't mythic raiding you need over 10+ full hc id's to get the ornaments together). 90% will have a better item on that slot from m+ or war/titan-forged like others have mentioned.

To fix this I would do
1. Make crafted gear BoE again
2. Make Raidmaterials not bop, for example like in Icc and earlier raids.

Maybe you could play with the ilvl then so that not everyone has an instant mythic item, but that would be good. At least imo that is a solution to fix one of the many problems professions have.
(and pls don't turn this post into a discussion ala "if you don't raid mythic why do you need that" or something like that)

[GreenJesus]

They should also allow everyone at least 1 gathering profession and at least 2 crafting professions. Its pretty stupid you are locked down to only 2 professions. Every other mmo game I've played allows you to have all professions as long as you spend the time (runescape, eso, ff14...).

[MoanaLisa]

Every other mmo game I've played allows you to have all professions as long as you spend the time (runescape, eso, ff14...).

This is how I wish they would do it as well in WoW. It's only really to their benefit to do so. It would expand the world game greatly and the possibilities for recipes that draw from multiple professions to craft would make professions really an unbounded thing creatively.

[Pugfugly]

Just get rid of it, nobody crafts anything but potions and vanity items anymore.

Terrible idea. This is how you make the game worse. Improve the systems. Don't get rid of them.

[tru]

Terrible idea. This is how you make the game worse. Improve the systems. Don't get rid of them.

Hm... pretty sure lot of people could live and be happy with a few of BFAs systems being removed and not missing them but then again the ones you offend or piss off the vocal minority always make it seem the world is ending....which is why the game is the way it is and ppl wanted a diff version of it to start over from.

If your afraid to remove or drastically change then they just change for the sake of change even when it's good and people are happy. I quit playing retail but struggling to Max my BS and I can't figure out why it was made like that. Even if you Max everything on day one it's so quickly made obsolete...

Imagine being spec armorsmith profenciency and that benethic gear comes out.

Weaponsmith and it's legion?

Scribe good for a month? Then just lol

A boa item that you use for a buff that makes alchemy near useless.

So yea delete the shit and build it from ground up with a specific goal in mind classic got all the old stuff if you gonna miss anything. Have feats. Toys still usable transmog etc. Needs redone or removed.

[Pentium]

I think it is disbanding the game!

[Anastacy]

Professions were never intriguing gameplay.

[Catscratch]

I'd like a garrison when I log into the game. All my characters present and I can walk around and order my other characters or the npcs at their stations to craft things, if there are mats in my storehouse. Then I select my character and move out. Since crafting is tied to my garrison i don't have to take proffessions, all i need to do assign my chars to station in my garrison. So i can gather anything with any character and build anything in my garrison. All gear are split into 2 items. Weapon armor or accessory itself and the kits that drop from bosses in dungeons. This way crafting and dungeons/raids are also tied together. Crafters build the main item with base stats (str, agi, int, stamina) and the dropped armor/accessory/weapon kits have seconds stats (crit, haste, etc) that you merge afterwards with a station or again with the help of crafters (trade window).

Lame ? Too much ?

[unbound]

Hm... pretty sure lot of people could live and be happy with a few of BFAs systems being removed and not missing them but then again the ones you offend or piss off the vocal minority always make it seem the world is ending....which is why the game is the way it is and ppl wanted a diff version of it to start over from.

If your afraid to remove or drastically change then they just change for the sake of change even when it's good and people are happy. I quit playing retail but struggling to Max my BS and I can't figure out why it was made like that. Even if you Max everything on day one it's so quickly made obsolete...

Imagine being spec armorsmith profenciency and that benethic gear comes out.

Weaponsmith and it's legion?

Scribe good for a month? Then just lol

A boa item that you use for a buff that makes alchemy near useless.

So yea delete the shit and build it from ground up with a specific goal in mind classic got all the old stuff if you gonna miss anything. Have feats. Toys still usable transmog etc. Needs redone or removed.

I think a great many people would be happy if Blizz was to delete professions and redo it really well from scratch. In fact, far more would support than complain.

But the key issue here isn't what Blizz could do, rather what they are more likely to do. And what they are far more likely to do has been telegraphed for a long time...they will do the minimum work that they can do. So they will tweak or possibly gut professions, but they are very unlikely to overhaul the system to try to make it better. That said, they may try to overhaul the system to make it cheaper and, thus ultimately, worse than it even is today.

Every element of Retail is because of Blizz being cheap. Professions, talents, spells, gear, drops, dungeons, raids...all made more simplified to reduce Blizz costs, not make WoW a better game.

[Daedius]

When it comes to gear, Professions are absolutely useless when the game throws gear at you like no tomorrow. So as it is, they only exist for transmogs and vanity stuff.

Alchemy, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting will always have their demand though.

They ought to revamp the whole system and make it similar to FF14 or Wildstar's... where it's an actual process of crafting stuff via some minigame of sorts. Perhaps add a little variation to it so one can craft better quality stuff with better stats of the same item depending on the materials and process used.

[JoeGood]

Crafting stuff, weapons etc. that takes time and real freaking effort and is souldboud would be very cool to see again

[Wokopoly]

Indeed, one of the things where I agree among all the negativity is this. Unless it is gathering, professions are pretty crappy and worthless to me.

They are expensive to level for very little benefit, and some recipes and mats apparently only come from raiding? No idea what is so hard to have rewards for Archy like they once had (pets / mounts) or even just add the fisher friends like in MoP or Legion. And then they stupidly removed at least th +5 skill upgrade every month from the DMF

The only professions I am levelling seriously are gathering professions...my BS / JC ...they sit at 1, tailoring at 70...but even there it is now useless recipes that cost me at least 100 gold per skillpoint in AH mats. Yeah, 100 gold is nothing, but there also is nothing coming up. I can make horribly expensive bags of the size that I can make cheaply with WoD mats....so I am still selling Hexweave bags rather.

I really have no clue what they are thinking

Making money right off the bat with professions isn't exactly a reasonable way of looking at things. Have you tried collecting gear and selling them on the AH using TSM to recoup some of the cost of leveling professions? Alchemy is still worth leveling because potions and flasks are still in demand. I'm not saying drop your current professions and go Alchemy, Blizzard needs to find a way to make all professions viable again. But, at the same time each profession has some sort of money making ability, even if that's all they are used for these days, it's still worth the grind and investment.

[mario710]

Professions are without a doubt in the best period of game design, right now.

My enchanter has the ability to channel raw magic into golems to serve as my constructs and my tailor can mend tears in the fabric of reality. Professions are absolute perfection.

[Draken4o1]

i made this topic in blizzard eu forums few days ago. Cant post links yet so ill just copy in this discussion.

Hello,
i have made a long post with my personal feedback regarding many of the BFA systems and problems. But i desided to separate it and place each of the points i want to see adressed to their correct forum section. Also i dont speak english that good, so please excuse me.

So i will talk about the current state of BFA professions and hopefully this will spark some further discussion and maybe give some insight to our developers so they can move things in right direction.

Im not a very big wow profession specialist, but in my opinion, no one should be in order to make some use of a select profession in the game. Im familiar with enchanting, alchemy, inscription, jewewlcrafting, blacksmithy and leatherworking.

In this current state, in BFA, the PROFESSIONS are continuing to be in a realy bad place. Some of them are good and proffitable and remain like that throughout the entire expansion .( alchemy, enchanting etc.)

For Alchemy i would love to have some improvement when it comes to the daily cooldowns. Looking at classic right now and how people can sell their daily cooldown… it’s something that i miss. Also would want more interesting alchemy trinkets that actually worth keeping the slot and be competitive with the raid trinkets. Make them so we can sellect the stats that we get from them. Somethng similar to the mechagon trinket. Other than that, i think its the best profession right now. Flasks and pots are allways in demand.

Enchanting is also very good. But the market is inflated and depending on realm population it can be very hard to sell enchants. First few weeks of a new tier is good no doubt. But right now on my realm the market is dominated by 1-2 undercutters that automatically repost each auction the minute u place an enchant. I think thats due to the cheap materials we get, thanks to the Profession tool and benthic gear. And even the new enchants are too cheap to make.
Its still a good profession . I personaly want to see more valuable personal enchants, not like the current bracer enchants that are… worthless.

Inscription has remain a good profession due to the combination of good consumables available for different gameplay aspects (vantus runes, respec tomes, reputation contracts) and the BOE sellable trinkets that suprisingly remain relevant far longer than their actual Ilvl. This is the direction the rest of the professions should go.

Blacksmiths,leatherworkers,tailors, jewelcrafters and engineers should also have their high ilvl crafted weapons/armors be able to be sold. Currently the crafted personal gear 440+socket is bis for many players. And looking at the new versions that are comming in 8.3. Those will be the only socketed armor pieces available (unless nerfed) wich will make them better than corrupted gear and essencially bis again. This makes those professions good choice to have , but not for moneymaking.
I personaly want to have a similar to WOD crafting system where u could spend some time to collect the required materials, via timegated daily cooldowns or activities/quests, but essentially u could craft 1 max ilvl boe item for around a month gameplay time. Or maybe less… i dont remember exactly. Even Legion had the crafted BOE legendaries wich were good way to get some gold if you do the quests regulary. The reason it should be timegated or locked behind some activity, is so people dont abuse it by just logging daily on an alt click one button and get the material. This will ruin the market . Its ok for alts to have access to those, but they need also to work for it.
This way we can actually feel like a masters in a profession. Imagine crafting a perfect stat weapon that rivals the best weapon in the current tier. And its made by you. You can chose to keep it, or maybe sell it. Same goes for jewelry/armor etc. Hell… even a super cool transmog only item would work :slight_smile: .

Jewelcrafters have the short end of the stick this expansion imo. The gems are realy cheap, and the market is realy inflated with them. Even that we pursue items with sockets right now, from the next patch even that wont be a thing. Wich leads me to many questions… What will happen with the profession without any sockets?.
I personaly would love to to add a craftable item, available for jewelcrafters that add a socket to a item . This would be amazing way to keep the profession relevant similar to enchanting. Also like mentioned above let them actually craft high ilvl BoE jewels (rings/necklesses maybe next xpansion)

Engineering has their craftable mounts and realy good azerite helmets, so they are kinda ok. I only recently rerolled one of my 2 main characters to have engineering so i dont have much insight regarding that.

The gathering professions will always be a good way for income as well, specially if you are a multiboxer… But thats another topic for another time :wink: .

TLDR, i want more options for each profession to actually be like a profession and give players more secure income. Just by playing and investing in the game and in the selected profession. Also miss the bonuses we had once, where a profession could give a personal bonus, a power increasing one.

Hope all this makes sense. Maybe i missed some things, sorry for that :slight_smile:
Thanks!

[Doffen]

For simplifying stuff.

Personally I thought the system with quest line was very fun in Legion(the first 2 times for each ) but professions was at it's best in TBC/WotLK, where it was relevant throughout the expansions. I must say that the BoP gear from the crafting professions in BfA is very good, but they could make season-appropriate ilvl BoE crafted-gear be a thing again. 370 gear when the standard ilvl-gear for that season is 400-415 is just not good enough.

[Bryci]

simply because many of the professions are either requiring too much or too rare materials and it does not worth crafting them. Obviously this vary from server to server but for example on my realm enchanting is not profitable. Everything is on material price. You make more profit by selling the resources than crafting anything.

[Flutterguy]

A combination of requiring too many mats to craft mediocre items, removing perks, and removing how many professions contributed to high end min/max. Used to be almost every slot had an enhancement from one of the professions. Gear often had sockets. Remember special helm sockets? Blizzard removed all this because "missing enchants and gems" was too socially punishing or some other stupid reason for it. Funny enough, players having to reinvest in these items for new gear was a good way of keeping gold flowing out of the pockets or rewarding players for the efforts they put into crafting.

I also noticed that the same attitude of "never being done" with your character that exists with the gearing schemes they have going right now is bleeding into professions especially with the ridiculous requirements.

[monkaW]

Why bother gathering recipe ranks and mats when you could just finish M+ run and get the same reward and even better in the weekly chest?

They've been saying they want to make profession gear relevant since WOD, don't expect things to change when they probably didn't even notice why they keep failing on it, the current devs is clueless.

[Grimbold21]

I know some, if not a lot of people, didn't/don't like Elixirs, but I think i'd be nice to have them back. They were/are a nice, less powerful alternative to flasks, particularly today when, in order to get a flask at max power, you have to jump through a serious of barriers to get them, not to mention today's ridiculous amounts of mats required.