Would anyone want something like this ?
Given that professions now take pretty much a year to max out and some profession recipes cost millions , it feels extremely pointless to level a profession a second time on alt , expect for <requires engineering 1>
Not to mention that after having spent the time to level the profession on server A , the crafting orders are realm specific , so your theoretical horde on server B will not even be able to benefit from all the effort you put in , because it cannot order it .
There is also the question of switching main . All your effort , millions of gold and rare recipes go down the trash bin . I have two scribes . One has some of the glyphs , the other some other glyphs , so it is extremely hard to even figure out what I actually have learned . I have an old vanilla blacksmith that has some rare Vanilla designs and it just sits there on a forgotten server .
Do you want Account wide professions ?
How do you propose they are implemented ?
My idea is that the designs and knowledge points you have are account wide .
So if you want to you just go pickup an alt , learn the profession and advance the ârequiredâ skill to appropriate level .
Knowledge points and âfirst craftâ can only be earned once across all characters .
I think Account Wide Cooking and Fishing would be fairly uncontroversial. My fisher / cook is my palading (currently around level 67 and struggling to find motivation to level further).
For the others Iâd quite like an option where you could write a training manual and send to an alt to transfer the profession (only one char could have this at once so the writer would lose what theyâve learnt when the alt reads this). This could have a cooldown to stop it being swapped back and forth all the time.
Why would that not be a good thing .
There are many small realms which suffer exactly because no one can do anything there , so people are forced into transfers .
And you still need to put the effort to learn and max out everything , so what does it matter if you did it on high or low pop realm ?
We havenât had a âfreshâ realm since WOTLK and we will likely never see one again in Retail .
It is like saying LFG / Cross realm is bad , because you can get your geared raider from High pop realm to do dungeons with some guy on a dead realm , who would never even have been able to see Raid gear otherwise .
Why ? When everyone else will be able to do it too ? This means cheap herbs , cheap mats , more choice for players . Not be blackmailed by the one crafter on low pop realm to pay 50k for a craft
Mind you goblins were already doing something similar in Shadowlands, where they bought up materials on high pop server for cheap, crafted legendary bases, and then server transferred an alt to a low pop server to sell them for more.
So in a way it was already happening. The biggest losers on a realm-wide work order system are the crafters themselves as more competition = lower prices so I think most would not even care if this happens, as leveling a crafting profession is something a lot do not engage in.
I do not agree with it being expensive though, unless you want to capitalize on crafts early and buy high value recipes.
Given that it is possible to send non-BOP items and materials through the mail in the same realm, and even to all realms via trade, and probably cross-realm mail is the next step that will happen, I believe professions are already account-bound in practice.
That means this is actually about cross-realm work orders so we should discuss that because is the only thing for wich account-bound professions and character-bound professions make a difference.
I think we just need some better catch up mechanics for professions. It shouldnât be trivial, but if youâre dedicated you can catch up about the same pace you can catch up on gear with aspect crests. ATM you are essentially time gated by knowledge, praying to RNJesus for the odd dragonscale drop.
Edit: a good idea would be to have a drop chance for dragonscale knowledge from doing crafting orders (10%?) that come from a character not on the same account.
Thatâs a good point . We already have cross-realm Mythic raiding âsort ofâ , so what is next ? Cross realm guilds ? With cross-realm Guilds , you get a guild bank to move stuff between realms . Maybe even the realms themselves will disappear and it will be all layers .
Not to mention that you can pay for transfer and dominate the market on your select realm after leveling a profession on a large realm even now . The only difference would be that you actually need to pay protection fees to blizzard for your so called âexploitâ .
On the point of cross-realm work orders . I was thinking about that too , but honestly it is basically the same as account wide professions . You just add mores step and 3-4 log ins , log outs to craft stuff for yourself on realm B .
Not to mention you need to use addons to track which character has which professions . To my view the less addons we are forced to use the better .
Catch up feels like it devalues what you achieved . Imagine if you put 300 hours in patch 0 to patch 3 to max out . In patch 3 catch-up comes and someone can put in 3 hours to do what you did for 300 . Would you put the effort from the start , or just wait until patch 3 hits . Some catch-up where you put roughly the same time and effort, minus the time gating would be okay .
But unless the catch-up is literally âcap max for 3 hoursâ , I canât imagine bothering to level a second blacksmith (that needs what 500 points?), let alone a third .
It was okay in the old profession iterations , where you just spend some gold and can get back in the game . Now it takes literally a year to reach max level . Having this tied to a single character makes no sense .
I completely disagree. What your effort got for you was 2 patches of exclusivity to monopolise a market.
Look I have every profession maxxed. I made 30M gold in the first patch of the exp and it took me hours. And hours but I wonât begrudge people catch up because Iâve already reaped the reward of that effort a thousand fold. Anything else would just be greedy and gatekeeping
I will never understand wow players and their obsession with âoh you did grind it out like I did ages ago, well then you canât have itâ a healthy economy relies on constant participation you canât just have X % of people miles and miles ahead all the time with no easy entry for new participants otherwise the economy stagnates
I want to be able to level every class and profession on the same character (and switch between them) rather than having to maintain an army of alts if I want to do âeverythingâ.
