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.