Dragonflight Professions Feedback, School of Hard Knocks Removed from Achievement

[Stoy]

Warcraft Arclight Rumble Interview Roundup

Dragonflight Professions Feedback

Hey Everyone,

Sorry for taking so long to start responding to this thread. We’ve been super busy building out the professions system and content we have been discussing. I’m going to try to slowly work through this and address some of the bigger points and questions here as I have time.

Professions is actively being worked, on so your responses and feedback are super helpful, so please keep them coming!

For my first response, I want to address some of the confusion around how you improve at your profession, and thus craft/gather things at higher quality. You do not directly get better at a recipe via crafting it multiple times, as you do with legendary recipes in Shadowlands. That is an interesting system, but ultimately requires a huge amount of gold investment and can get repetitive. This means only players with lots of gold can easily engage with it, and has also resulted in the cost of legendaries being extremely high in many cases.

For the profession revamp, there are many different ways to improve at your profession (I’ll talk more about those soon), and thus craft/gather items at higher quality. The goal is that the pursuit of profession progression is through compelling and fun activities over spending lots of gold though. Gold will of course still have its place. You may still want to buy reagents or make orders for high end crafting gear for instance, but it should not be a gate to your ability to dive into and have lots of success with your chosen professions.

I just hope some of the profession items can compete with raid gear too, or be able to highly level it to the point to at least enhance a “Best in Slot” item.
It is absolutely the case that we plan on having crafted gear be able to compete with top end gear from other sources, and in some cases even be best in slot. One of the most important goals to the work order system is enabling crafted gear to be much more relevant to the game - across all activities. Just remember, in order to have that powerful gear crafted for yourself, you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!

you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!

Is it possible to speak a little about the anticipated “grindiness” of this?
Gladly.

I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on the planned system for Dragonflight yet, but the intent is that this is not generally grindy when aiming to earn gear appropriate to your activity.

That is, if you are a normal raider for instance, your normal raid provides enough reagents to allow you to to craft a limited amount of ~normal raid item level gear without needing to go do a bunch of other stuff. But if say, you wanted to craft heroic raid tier gear as a normal raider, you could choose to go do other activities such as m+, pvp, or challenging outdoor activities to supplement the reagents required and get better gear sooner.

In general we’d like crafted gear to feel like something you are earning at a satisfying rate along side your other gear sources. Say you had bad luck and got no drops while raiding, you’ll still be making progress towards some high end crafted gear…and say you just can’t get legs to drop for you, you may choose to have legs crafted to fill in that particular slot with a larger upgrade.

For some crafted gear, you might also need to seek out a special rare drop off a certain mob in the world, a dungeon, or a raid as well. Earning crafted gear should feel like a bonus, an adventure, and a social experience.

The big question I have is in relation to small servers. To your point, some of this gear may be Best in Slot. Is there any consideration being given to these items being legitimately harder to obtain on small servers because not everything gets created by a character? I think the work order system sounds great but given what I’ve experienced with Legendaries in Shadowlands, this is a major concern for myself and many others.
Yes, this is definitely a valid concern and one we are discussing how to address!

School of Hard Knocks Requirement Removed from For the Children Meta Achievement

Non-PVPers hate it because they’re easy prey and a disproportionate amount of players to the objective, PVPers hate it because their battlegrounds are basically ruined for a week straight.

Every year people overwhelmingly tell Blizzard they hate this achievement, and I’m sure this year will be no different. I questioned why I hadn’t gotten my Violet Proto Drake yet, and now that we’ve hit the final batch of holiday achievements I need, I’ve come to remember. Take it off the Meta achievement already and put something else on there that isn’t a complete slog to finish.
Hello Collectors!

To help you on your trip to obtaining the Violet Proto-Drake mount, we have a hotfix in the works that removes the School of Hard Knocks requirement for the Children’s Week achievement For the Children. This hotfix should be deployed soon and will be noted in the hotfixes update.

[Lora]

school of hard knocks doesnt even require anything difficult to achieve lmao. whiners really wilding out here

[NoiseTank13]

okay god damn it, i completed school of hard knocks when it first came out, i remember it too well

the hatred i had of my fellow man, the loathing i had for wow pvp and the wild sense of relief, like a cactus finally removed from my anus and the spines pulled out. sweet relief, of when I completed it

fuck this achievement, congratulations to those who finally no longer have to do it, but fuck this achievement and fuck whomever long ago thought this was a good idea. fuck you right into a briar patch, asshole.

[Alayea]

Thirteen years late, but better late than never. I earned the achievement back in 2009, and I don't begrudge this awful achievement being removed from the meta so others won't have to suffer doing it.

[Toybox]

okay god damn it, i completed school of hard knocks when it first came out

Same, but...

i remember it too well

I can't remember it at all I remember it being PvP related & I recall the complaing each year, but the achievement was so relatively painless for me that it just never stuck in my memory. I guess I dodged the war scars some people seem to have (& that future folks thankfully won't need to deal with).

[Mysterymask]

school of hard knocks doesnt even require anything difficult to achieve lmao. whiners really wilding out here

Did you miss the part on how that disrupts battlegrounds for a week and is painful all the way around... I got that achievement when it was new and the violet proto was the easier 310 to get and it was irritating as fuck and I'm glad it's gone

[Al Gorefiend]

I got the violet proto Drake first year for my first 310% speed. I remember being a healer priest and got used as a doormat by the alliance in WSG

[oplawlz]

I have the achieve and I'm still happy they finally removed this. That post is absolutely correct, it was a bad experience for everyone involved.

[Lora]

Did you miss the part on how that disrupts battlegrounds for a week and is painful all the way around... I got that achievement when it was new and the violet proto was the easier 310 to get and it was irritating as fuck and I'm glad it's gone

i did too and it was easy as fuck. there was nothing difficult required with the achievement.

[Mysterymask]

i did too and it was easy as fuck. there was nothing difficult required with the achievement.

Yes it was easy at the beginning cause everyone needed it and we you know had a semi competant community back then

Flash forward like 10 years ....when like chunk of people are trying to do this versus a bunch of people who don't give a shit or already have it and are just trying to pvp

[Playintrafic]

school of hard knocks doesnt even require anything difficult to achieve lmao. whiners really wilding out here

Was able to do School of Hard Knocks during Wrath. During the first, or second cycle through world events to get violet proto.

Back then it was a bigger deal as it was one of the few ways to get a 310% mount. I have zero, and I mean zero skill at pvp, and even less experience. I've been playing wow for 17 years, and I have never done rated pvp, never even gotten an original battleground rep to exalted. The highest i got in the old rank system was like corporal...

[aeuhe4yxzhds]

The entitlement these days, something requiring effort? REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

[Unlimited Power]

I don't recall having too much trouble with this when it was introduced back in WotLK. But then again, I also played an elemental shaman at the time, and most people hadn't really learned to play around Thunderstorm yet.

[Lex Icon]

" Just remember, in order to have that powerful gear crafted for yourself, you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!"

tanking it before it even started or am i understanding that wrong?

[Grimbold21]

" Just remember, in order to have that powerful gear crafted for yourself, you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!"

tanking it before it even started or am i understanding that wrong?

What's wrong with the idea that better crafted gear requires rarer materials that you have to farm?

[MrLachyG]

The entitlement these days, something requiring effort? REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

imagine not being able to read the reason why they remove it so you make a generic boomer comment.

[Lex Icon]

What's wrong with the idea that better crafted gear requires rarer materials that you have to farm?

nothing. but it makes it seem like only the person having the rare items will be able to to wear the crafted gear.

[chiddie]

What's wrong with the idea that better crafted gear requires rarer materials that you have to farm?

Nothing. I am more concerned about WHERE you can farm those rare materials.

If for example crafting a +15 level gear piece will require materials you get in M+ ONLY, for me this new revamp will be dead on arrival.

Luckily enough it SEEMS reading the blue posts that they will also drop from open world content stuff, let’s see how it will sort out.

[darkwarrior42]

What's wrong with the idea that better crafted gear requires rarer materials that you have to farm?

Inherently? Nothing. That is as it should be.

But remember this is Blizzard. If you can craft gear that's equal in ilvl to what you get from a raid, they will require you to provide materials that come from that raid... and they're Soulbound, so no buying or trading them. You'll have to do the raid yourself. In other words, to be able to craft raid level gear, you have to first complete the raid.... which drops gear of the same level.

And they don't want to deal with complaints about crafted gear being mandatory, so it will be inferior to what you get from the raid itself.

Which means that you're not crafting gear instead of raiding for it, you're just using your profession as an expensive and annoying substitute for bad-luck protection. Which is fine if you're a raider... but not if you actually care about your professions.

[Ezekeel]

I did the achievement in WotLK but I am very happy for other players since I hated it. Alliance was terrible in our battlegroup and people were using emote macros to point to the child companion yet they were getting miserably thwarted by Horde. I was about to ragequit the game because of this achievement. Thankfully, people from my guild helped and I got it in the last day.