Make gathering professions default for everyone and bring back profession benefits!

[SongWarden]

Title says it. Professions are pretty boring now and it would liven it up a bit, giving new income to otherwise lacking professions (inscription shoulder enchants, leatherworking leg enchants ect). Also, get rid of titanforging/rng sockets. Give JC a use again!

[schwarzkopf]

I want to return to the days when my enchanting profession wasn't freely available to everyone else in the run.

But yes - some professions these days are pretty damn pointless - the only thing my tailor has ever done is make bags or pets.

[Aeula]

Yeah, that’d be nice.

Personally I like how ESO handles it where you can be and craft everything with time and dedication. But seeing as WoW gets higher tiers of gear that might not be ideal...

We’ve got to keep the scrapper going forward though, this is the first time I’ve bothered with crafting thanks to that thing (Currently wearing a crafted helm and pants on my main).

[valky94]

i disagree that everyone should have gathering professions, instead they should combine mining, skinning and herbalism into one profession called "Gathering"

or

they should be included into their crafting professions, for example, BS/JC/ENG get mining, ALCH/INSC get herb, LW gets skinning, so every crafting profession can get their own mats without requiring a gathering professions, similar to how enchating gets its own mats from the crafting professions

[Aleksej89]

Gathering should be a secondary profession imho.

It is really boring to lose one of the "production" profession slots to a gathering profession.
Even lamer to have a character devoted entirely to gathering

Perhaps a character should have separate gathering and production profession slots.
Learn up to 2 gathering and up to 2 production professions.

Or as others have said - pack the gathering profession in with other production professions that predominantly use it.

[Adramalech]

i disagree that everyone should have gathering professions, instead they should combine mining, skinning and herbalism into one profession called "Gathering"

or

they should be included into their crafting professions, for example, BS/JC/ENG get mining, ALCH/INSC get herb, LW gets skinning, so every crafting profession can get their own mats without requiring a gathering professions, simmilar to how enchating gets its own mats from the crafting professions

This sounds reasonable, and also like something Blizzard would do. If we're giving it to everyone, might as well merge them into one to save interface space, right?

I expect them to eventually do one of the two things you have said. Maybe not next expansion, but eventually.

[exochaft]

Personally I like how ESO handles it where you can be and craft everything with time and dedication. But seeing as WoW gets higher tiers of gear that might not be ideal...

That can be solved by doing what they did in WoD and Legion: have certain items (in this case gear made via professions) have an equip limit of 1 or 2 so you can't make an entire set. However, I honestly wouldn't care if you could craft really good gear, but my caveat would be to make it really hard to completely craft an entire set of gear. The only reason there are restrictions with crafted gear right now is because it's so insanely easy to not only craft the gear, but constantly craft it over and over. The entire point of restrictions is to prevent players from gearing out too quickly, and there are a myriad of ways to entertain that goal while opening up professions more broadly to a character.

Another way to go about things is to have specializations of professions (similar to Classic) if you open up all professions to people. Beyond gearing restrictions, the other reason for limited ability of professions on a single character is to promote player interaction, and specializations could potentially be the best of both worlds. This wouldn't be my ideal situation as it stands, but it is an option.

Most people don't remember, but WoD did actually bring perks to players in terms of gathering professions (such as extra crit chance if you had Skinning). No idea why they scrapped this idea, as this system (along with many others in WoD) were actually pretty solid despite the overall execution of the expansion.

If anything, I want professions to be more meaningful from a gameplay and/or RP perspective. In some RPGs I've played, you can actually play the role of an armorsmith and actually experience meaningful progression. Along the themes of time and dedication, your quests and world events are focused around your craft. It just harkens to one of the problems with WoW right now: it barely even qualifies as an RPG.

[Wylyth1992]

I think they should at least make Tailoring and Enchanting secondary professions.

[Nfinitii]

Title says it. Professions are pretty boring now and it would liven it up a bit, giving new income to otherwise lacking professions (inscription shoulder enchants, leatherworking leg enchants ect). Also, get rid of titanforging/rng sockets. Give JC a use again!

Professions do need a rework. I like the idea of gathering professions being baseline. But they should bake in bonuses to the crafting professions to make them a little more exciting and specialized.

Like bs finding more ore, and jc finding more gems etc.

[Pandragon]

Title says it. Professions are pretty boring now and it would liven it up a bit, giving new income to otherwise lacking professions (inscription shoulder enchants, leatherworking leg enchants ect). Also, get rid of titanforging/rng sockets. Give JC a use again!

They have been considering making gathering professions secondary professions since Legion.

Also, no to the shoulder enchants/leg enchants...ect..ect.. That just results in people choosing which ever has the highest dps increase. Remember BSing sockets? Everyone had Blacksmithing. But the professions should have a benefit that doesn't increase your role. Like giving Alchemy it's endless healing potions back, without them sucking. Or inscription being able to change talents anywhere. Stuff like that.

[mojusk]

I think they should at least make Tailoring and Enchanting secondary professions.

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lets make all profs secondary!

agree with OP though

[Hitei]

This is how you make professions even shittier. How do people not understand that a major reason why professions are completely fucking worthless right now is that the over-abundance of alts and ease of just picking up a profession and at skill level 1 gathering end game mats and crafting patterns for that very expansion means that there's far more supply than ever demand, and rarely a need to ever interact or trade because you can just hop over to an alt you've put next to no time into and craft whatever you need.

Profession need to be more time and resource investment and less accommodating to people who just picked the profession up.

[Draenosh]

personally, i don’t think that they should make professions (especially gathering ones) secondary.
for me, it feels so dumb, it’s like in old wow when you should make a fucking pickaxe to mine resources from a rock
yes, it take time, it should take fucking time
you cant kick a rock with one hit and then get everything from it
and there comes your thread where you asking about making some professions secondary
blizz already made profs feels unrewarding and not unique
with these changes you won’t feel like an indispensable alchemist
you gonna feel like each fucking other
why the fuck guild should recruit you if the other guy can to the same because value of each profession is way lower, you can take two of them literally without any problems
yea you can take two in actual game but then you’ll spend money on resources
oh wait
money, of course
there are so many ppl doing duo gathering profs to make money, man
these changes would break the AH, making prices on flowers and ore so low that literally you’ll take it from AH for free

[Ihsan997]

They have been considering making gathering professions secondary professions since Legion.

That’s fascinating, but I hadn’t heard that before. Did this come directly from the devs, or is it a rumor?

[MrKnubbles]

I predicted a while ago that gathering professions would be folded into their crafting counterparts but that never happened. Similar to how Jewelcrafters can prospect gems, Scribes can mill herbs and Enchanters can disenchant magical items, I expected the other professions to fall in line with this trend.

[Pandragon]

That’s fascinating, but I hadn’t heard that before. Did this come directly from the devs, or is it a rumor?

I believe it was an interview Ion had when discussing professions during Legion. I heard him say it somewhere.

[MoanaLisa]

Yeah, that’d be nice.

Personally I like how ESO handles it where you can be and craft everything with time and dedication. But seeing as WoW gets higher tiers of gear that might not be ideal...

I'm in favor or this as well. Rich, deep recipes that take a lot of components to be found out in the world, multiple professions to make the pieces and assemble them with no specific time gating.

Lower tiers could be sold. Higher tiers of gear would be fine if you could only make them for yourself and you had to choose between World/Dungeon-Raid when crafting it.

Strictly profession alts could disappear if your main could handle everything on their own.

[Relapses]

They have been considering making gathering professions secondary professions since Legion.

Also, no to the shoulder enchants/leg enchants...ect..ect.. That just results in people choosing which ever has the highest dps increase. Remember BSing sockets? Everyone had Blacksmithing. But the professions should have a benefit that doesn't increase your role. Like giving Alchemy it's endless healing potions back, without them sucking. Or inscription being able to change talents anywhere. Stuff like that.

They were actually pretty balanced in MoP. Situationally some of the professions were better but the mathematical advantage was pretty consistent. The only downside was that if you didn't have two non-gathering professions you were essentially gimping yourself. I remember declining plenty of apps for my guild back in MoP because of this and if these benefits were to come back it'd likely be the same today. Even said, that provides an upswing for players because it'll mean more people will be able to craft BoEs, increasing supply and making them more affordable.

[gd8]

professions have never been interesting at any point in this game, just another dull grind. I don't care about them and don't want them to return to how they were earlier in the game's history

[Panta]

This is how you make professions even shittier. How do people not understand that a major reason why professions are completely fucking worthless right now is that the over-abundance of alts and ease of just picking up a profession and at skill level 1 gathering end game mats and crafting patterns for that very expansion means that there's far more supply than ever demand, and rarely a need to ever interact or trade because you can just hop over to an alt you've put next to no time into and craft whatever you need.

Profession need to be more time and resource investment and less accommodating to people who just picked the profession up.

Amen! Profession are useless cause everyone can do actual xpac stuff with 10 minutes of play.
OTOH, I think the patterns we actually have are pretty nice, and well though, althou I would like to have a couple of extra items to equip every level (like, I can equip a crafted item at 111, but then none up to 116... I would like to be able to equip another at every level).