What is wrong with having Alts to get access to more professions?

[Qalex]

I have four level 90's, and three of them are used purely for professions. If that bugs him, so be it. I'd rather be able to make everything I need for my main than spend thousands of gold to other people. /shrug

[Normie]

Certainly LW, BS etc can create some meaningful gear, but the issue is generally that in the time it takes to acquire mats, you can get equivalent elsewhere. And the prices of the finished products are so high that your average player simply is never going to pursue them in the first place.

If I had my way, recipes themselves would be far less available on trainers, and more along the lines of drops, which encourages said player to actively play that character.

I'd also give more professions the sort of 'reverse engineering' that enchanting has. Tailors, blacksmiths, lw'ers should all be able to scavenge mats from finished products, destroying them in the process.

Yeah, I agree with pretty much all of this.

There really should be some kind of "scavenge" ability. It might have a negative effect on enchanting materials, but then again, the only players I've ever seen complain about the availability of enchanting materials are complaining that the materials are too available. (I personally don't think it matters whether enchanting mats are plentiful or scarce, within reasonable limits.)

E.g. you would "salvage" a piece of plate mail, and get some number of metal fragments, and maybe some gray flavor junk. Then you combine enough fragments and you have a bar. Et cetera.

Seems like engineers should be able to "disassemble" mechanical pets ....

[melodramocracy]

Seems like engineers should be able to "disassemble" mechanical pets ....

You could do this in Ulduar as an engineer, IIRC.

[Otimus]

I think they want to encourage trading, which is far too late really to change the way we play.

It's always annoyed me how Transmute Alchemists tie into so many professions, but instead of paying other players for their CD's it was easier to make my own. This type of "anti-social" play is what I presume they wish to discourage, but I think it's too late in the game for that.

Even Spirits of Harmony haven't been much (if any) of a deterrent for me as the professions/CD's I use my alts foe don't rely on them.

Yeah, making almost all aspects of professions being utterly and totally worthless pretty much removed and destroyed any real sense of that ever being a part of the game. Not to mention having crafted gear never be all that important, in the long run, anymore. Professions are essentially worthless, save for gouging people and the perks, and that's really depressing.

[Xeraxis]

You could do this in Ulduar as an engineer, IIRC.

That was mechanical mobs he means actual non-combat pets.

[Otimus]

On the surface, nothing is wrong with it.

Below that, it helps players dependency on each other as a community, and also removes another aspect of decision making on the part of the player.

I'm sure professions will get an overhaul, and I'm sure it will be a dumb-down under the guise of 'streamlining'

I can't think of any way possible to dumb down professions. They're already pretty dumbed down as is :x At which point, you may as well streamline it, or at least make it meaningful and important.

[xenogear3]

Let us assume that a profession can produce the latest gear.

If the profession has no cooldown, one nice guy will produce many for free.
If the profession has a cooldown, hardcore raiders will use 10 alts to get 10 cooldown.

[Sageofthe10paths]

I hope the do not screw with alts! They need it to be more friendly if anything. Bring back BoE drops in raids!

[Daffan]

Account wide bank and gold would be awesome.

[championknight]

They screwed professions when they decided 'no good endgame' gear should come from them at the start of TBC

Then they proceeded to make it worse by revamping low level questing/levelling and talents that made the old crafted blues worse than quest rewards

As of now, the only thing they should change are the crafted items so that they are more relevant, otherwise stop messing it up with potentially destructive changes

[Twotonsteak]

I don't level alts for professions. I level them because I like to have options when I play. That being said I've been playing, off and on, since BC. My main is an Herb/Alch. And, honestly, it just doesn't feel right playing a character without some form of profession...even if it's just a gathering profession (or two) for gold. It just adds another layer to the game for me to enjoy.

[zoomgpally]

blizz is worried that players may be leveling characters that they don't want and being bored while doing so because they need to do so in order to open up more professions to help their main character.

it's not a problem if you want to have an alt and you give him professions to help your main. it's a very big problem if you really hate leveling up alts, but you feel that you must because if you don't, you can't have extra professions to help your main.

But what is the solution? Making it impossible to get professions on alts?
Then what if i chose to reroll, will i be stuck without professions on my new main?
What if im playing on a small server where if you can't craft it yourself, you won't get it at all(or have to pay 2k for a stack of cobalt ore)

[Ciddy]

That's pretty much the only reason I even have some of my alts. My warrior has been my main for years. I got sick of either a) paying stupidly high prices to buy stuff like enchants/gems/potions/flasks on my server's auction house or b) not even being able to find said stuff on my server's auction house, so I decided to level professions on some alts and handle all that shit myself.

I may occasionally dick around, run instances, PvP, etc on my other characters when I get bored, but their main purpose is to support my warrior with their professions.

[Otimus]

They screwed professions when they decided 'no good endgame' gear should come from them at the start of TBC

Then they proceeded to make it worse by revamping low level questing/levelling and talents that made the old crafted blues worse than quest rewards

As of now, the only thing they should change are the crafted items so that they are more relevant, otherwise stop messing it up with potentially destructive changes

Blizzard's extreme resistance to offering alternative paths for things really pisses me off. Clearly, they want everyone and anyone only playing and doing one or two things, and not much else. Professions is a part of that. There's no alternative to raiding to get good gear, there's no alternative to PVPing to get the good PVP gear, there's no real alternatives to anything :x

[Deleted]

Current proffesion design originates from Vanilla, back in vanilla having lots of max-level alts and maxed proffesions was unheard of. As a result of that, picking your 2 proffesions was a very important choice. Fast foward to today and 2 proffesion limitation per character feels more like an annoyance rather than meaningful choice. Why care for other people proffesions when you can just log on your alt?

WoW had most of its features streamlined up to this point, proffesions are the only one that seem to stay true to an outdated formula where it shows.

At this point Blizzard might as well introduce a "workshop" kind of system where a single character has access to all proffesions.

[LaplaceNoMa]

The only thing about professions they should change is making recipes account-wide and 'permanent'. In other words, it means 2 things:

1) If I have a rare engineering recipe on my mage, I can drop engineering, level what I want, then drop some profession on my alt, level engineering on that alt, and he will already have that rare engi recipe (as well as everything else I've ever learned in engineering across my characters)
2) If a rare BoP schematic drops (or let's say I get a canopic jar from tolvir archaeology) for a profession that isn't present on that particular character, he can still learn it so it would appear for my alt who has this profession

I think it's fair. I really can't think of a reason to make it mandatory to grind brutal reputation grinds on all my alt if I want to collect every recipe/schematic.

[Icaras]

I think they want to encourage trading, which is far too late really to change the way we play.

Sadly, this is very much true. I myself put the blame on the game's AH culture. They essentially play solely to make gold, but also try their very best to raise prices on the stuff they sell as much as possible.

At the start of most xpacs, mats and consumables and the like are insanely expensive, as stuff is inflated to hell trying to take advantage of the rush to raid. This in turn starts to push into other areas, like crafted gear, and sometimes it seems like crafted gear is inflated to point where only established players have a chance to actually buying the items.

Thankfully, it seems like consumable and material prices tend to calm down about half way through an xpac, but I do notice crafted gear tends to stay a bit out of reach.

[Azutael]

I for one wish we could have easier access to the professions. Just leveling a character for professions isn't a whole lot of fun.
And you "have to" if you wan't to make money or be self supplied.

I have largely just ignored professions and alts since MoP though, it's too much of a "job". And i'd rather have fun instead, even if that means I won't earn as much gold or whatever.

[foxHeart]

Nothing's wrong with it, especially if Blizzard wants to make crafting materials BoP. You can't use your daily CD's on 20 different characters and have a SoO level belt the first day of the patch and you need Spirits to craft tons of other patterns. So I wouldn't worry about professions being changed just because of a few tweets.

[endersblade]

Because alts are supposed to be about trying new classes (don't understand people rolling the same class again) not about trying new professions.

Then I guess it's a good thing that not all players are as simple-minded as you assume them to be, eh? Everyone plays this game in different ways, and for different reasons. Stop being so damned closed-minded.

I really don't understand GC: It's been this way since Vanilla, you are JUST NOW complaining about it? Really? I have had one of each class since Vanilla (and subsequent launches of new classes, etc) and every one of them has two professions. I have several overlapping ones, obviously. I am very self-sufficient. That does not mean that I don't need other players for things. Obviously, many, many other players have the same setup. I interact with the in-game community in several ways, why do professions have to be one of them? I think keeping Spirits of Harmony as 1) Bind on pickup and 2) extraordinarily hard to farm unless you literally 'farm' them (and I never did get into the panda farming mini-game) that it is actually damaging and totally against what GC is trying to say in the first place. I really, really do not like the route they've taken professions this expansion, and I fear for what they plan on doing in the future.