Crafting orders are the worst. Driving me crazy

Gameplay Professions
1

Hello,

I’d like to share my feedback on Crafting orders. I consider this to be one of the worst systems, added to the game:

  • clunky: I have to go to the NPC, open what I’d like crafted, take a picture with my phone, go to the AH, open the picture and purchase the materials.
  • how do I get to know how much to tip? Is it 100g? 1000g?
  • recrafting only works with personal orders… why?
  • you can’t set a “minimum quality required” with public orders, only with personal, again why?
  • even items without soulbound reagents can’t be put on the AH once crafted… why?

All of the above: for no good reason, just to promote the “system”

For example, today I needed a new Skillful Illimited Diamond.

  • I try to find a “crafter” in chat, nobody replies
  • I post a public order, get 2-stars quality
  • I buy the mats anew, post another public order, again get 2-star quality

What am I expected to do then? Continue spamming the trade chat? This is just a gem, I want to be over with it and play the game. Why can’t I buy this off the auction house? It requires no “spark”. Why can’t I set a public order with a minimum quality requirement?

It’s like “Catch 22”. Why must crafting orders be so artificially complicated?

Please consider improvements

5 Likes
2

Certain max level things cannot be guaranteed and is also dependent on the skill of the crafter. If a minimum can be set with public orders, everyone would literally set maximum R5 end with poor items and poor tips. This also applies for recrafting.

Or worse, no mats and poor tips.

A couple of my crafter friends also got people run up to them and get demanded to craft x items at no tips, kind of like a stranger running into a shop and shouting that they must do jobs for free.

So for your particular R3 item, I recommend if your realm has a Realm Discord to head over there and then head to a JC specific channel or trade and paste what you seek, that you provide mats and willing to provide a reasonable tip and then hope a JC comes to negotiate a bit.

If there are crafters in realm trade, use a chat addon to single out JC’s advertising and whisper them directly or use snail mail.

3

Thank you for taking the time to reply and explain! Really appreciate it!

I don’t have Discord, so using that seems rather complicated to me. For the time being I’ll continue buying mats and posting public orders until I get lucky. Still, I feel this should not be the case.

Cheers

3 Likes
4

I still would recommend the chat addon filtering trade to see if you can find a JC for a personal craft that can guarantee a R3 craft, this would save you in gold costs and a bit in time into finding the crafter.

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I’ll get that addon now and see what I can do

Thank you again!

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If you post with a decent tip and mats, most are happy to craft you a max rank.

Sad thing is I regular see people post with no mats or 10g tip and expecting stuff for free.

So yea if your gambling with public orders, try putting a reasonable tip and most the time you will be fine.

500g to 1k tips are fairly standard if your supplying all the mats.

Tip anything lower and you are likely to get people using the optional extras to force a lower rank craft and force you to re-pay for a re-craft.

1 Like
7

Wow, I didn’t realize there was such “culture” of forcing lower ranks. Regarding the tips, that’s exactly one of my points - I have no reference point so I put random values - sometimes 100g, sometimes 500g.

My story today had an interesting ending. Finally I found a good crafter and they asked for 3k gold to craft the 3-rank gem! And they wouldn’t budge! I asked if they could do it for 2k, but they said “it was a lot of time to get all those points” so no, 3k or nothing.

So I decided, I’ll try the public orders until I succeeded and started posting them for 250g. And at my third try I got not one, but two rank 3 gems!! No idea how this happened, but it was the end of my suffering :smiley: happy days!

4 Likes
8

I don’t know if this is really a culture. If you are not willing to tip well, crafters are likely to switch their inspiration tools for ressourcefullness tools. If they are still skilling up there are some items, that increase the chance of a skill up but increasing the difficulty. If crafters are wiling to pay, to lower the chance of the customer getting a good product … this is possible at max level, but with my maxed out crafters, this makes no difference with most patterns.
If you don’t put in materials on the other hand crafters are likely to buy the cheapest materials and that hurts your chances on good items a lot (but hey, thats on the customer in my eyes).

If they offered you a guaranteed rank 3 for 3k that sounds fair. A few weeks ago people accepted my 8k offers and were quite happy. With the reduced demand for crafts, there is a lot of spare artisans mettle and prices might have droped significantly (I haven’t crafted gems for some time), but I agree with the crafter, investing enough to make you a guaranteed offer takes some time (you are not looking for oders in trade chat, if you have only the chance to make one kind of gem at rank 3).

You got a multicraft proc. If you have a trustworthy juwelcrafter you might talk to him about switching out their ressourcefullness tool for a multicraft tool for a small fee (I guess if you increase the tip by 10% you have profit for both). This probably was combined with an inspiration proc (or the crafter was really good and only needed a few points and you get a small bonus for every craft between 0% - well guess this would be no bonus - and 5% of base recipe difficulty).

I agree, integration of the auction house would be a lot better. If you interact with crafting a lot you are likely to have some addons mending this pain, but it is still clunky.

If you expect max level, look for a crafter in chat. Depending on the recipe a few hundred to several thousand might be appropriate. If you want to gamble in public orders, materials with close to no tip might get the item crafted, but if you want to increase your chances for quality, you might want to invest 4 figures (also depending on recipe) and leave a note.

Revrafting often is meant for better quality, and …

Public orders are meant as a fast way to get something crafted, not to get the best crafter. If you want the best quality you have to invest a small amount of time (compared to skilling up a crafting alt, this should be a very small amount).

If you want the reasoning for some of those last few point, you should look for some interviews. I would like a more open way of AH trading, but this is quite unlikely. I am happy, most good recipes are not BOP for the crafter only anymore.

2 Likes
9

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I didn’t realize many of the intricacies you touched upon.

I’m starting to think I might have been wrong and there are valid reasons for all the restrictions. I haven’t watched the interviews and dev deep dives on the topic. It’s just so much to know and I’m a regular player, but maybe if you want the best, it’s justified to expect players to get into the topic and learn these details.

Regarding the tips, I was blown away when you said 3k sounded fair, and people had paid 8k some time ago. I had always assumed these gems were super trivial and set 200g-500g tips for public orders (and best mats ofc).

Again, thanks for taking the time to explain for everybody involved. I now got 2 gems and this will hopefully be enough till the end of the season :slight_smile: Next season, I’ll be more prepared

10

Okay, let me see if I can clear a few things up, though my craft is Leatherworking and not Jewelcrafting.

First off, if you want to make your life easier, when you are looking for an item to craft on public orders look for a small box labelled “track recipe” and tick it in. That will make the recipe show up in the same field as your tracked quests are so you do not have to take photos/screenshots of the mats required.

For tips I recommend tipping between 1k and 2k gold. Crafters can only fulfill 1 crafying order per day if I recall it right. These work on a charge system, so once they are out of these charges they cannot fulfill any more public orders until thry generate a charge. While there are people who readily do crafts below 1k gold they tend to be crafters who are leveling up their profession, so the quality of the craft will be questionable at best.

I think the reason why recrafting is not on public orders is because a recraft can lower the quality of your craft. Having ut on public orders will only end in disaster.

The reason why you cannot set a quality is because of the reason mentioned a few posts above: people would only set max rank quality, which means it does not fulfill part of its intended purpose: to allow crafters to level up their profession.

The reason why you cannot put your crafted piece on the AH, I feel, is because it not only disincentivises you from using the system, but it could lead to people trying to get stuff crafted for cheap and then sell it on the AH for much more.

For a crafter with a lot of knowledge crafting anything at 424 ilvl is a guaranteed rank 5, while others from 437 may require an extra material provided by the crafter to guarantee a max rank craft: an Insight. Usually this is what a crafter asks the 3k for. In case of consumable stuff like armor patches and gems a crafter can only guarantee a rank 3 with insight, so it will always have a higher asking price than 1-2k.

EDIT: Alright, time to finish this.

What issue we currently have with crafting orders is that there is not that much information readily available about it from the buyer’s standpoint. A lot of the customers I have for example do not even know what an Insight is, nor how the knowledge point system works.

I think a good way to solve this would be to make mettle useful for the customer as well. Have a questline that explains on how it works, and make it so that the crafting order poster have the option to add their insight to the order. That would reduce the income of the crafter though, so I am not sure if Blizzard would lean on doing this one.

For now what I can advise is to check your server’s forum section, see if there are crafters advertising their profession there. If you got a crafter to craft a gem for you keep the name of the crafter saved somewhere in case you need a piece crafted in the future. Until Blizzard implements something like a way for crafters to advertise their craft on a board of some sort, and buyers get an option to favoruite crafters for future crafts this is the best method I can think of for having crafters available for your gear crafting needs.

2 Likes
11

Thank you! Amazing insight!

Definitely cleared up a few open points for me! Looking forward for the rest of it.

Overall, I feel more “educated” on the topic now… almost a year later but as they say, better later than never

Thanks again
Cheers

12

Explanation about main stat gems. Madimum skill one can get from spec and best equipment is 20 points less than guaranteed rank 3 with best quality mats. Only way to get guaranteed rank 3 is if JC use large Insight finisher. It costs 50 mettle for 1 and you get 150 mettle per week. Thats why crafters ask for a lot of gold for guaranteed r3. However most JCs that played from s1 have around 35-40% chance to proc r3 even with lowest quality mats.

As for tipping if you put craft orders on wednesday, as long as you provide materials you can tip 1 gold and someone will craft for weekly craft orders quest.

1 Like
13

Whilst this can work, just bear in mind most can only fufil 3 to 4 public orders, which are they going to do, a 1g tip or 3 to 4 other orders with 500g+ tip.

I honestly ignore orders at 10g or under tip, dont need them as you can send yourself orders from a alt to make something basic.

14

Proper way would have been to just lift all restrictions first of all.
Just craft all the shadowflame crest stuff, low high lvl, scales to pvp, modify as you please etc., and then just trade them, sell them, no need to have people talk out a deal and so slowly order/craft stuff.

Upgrades could have been kits. You can mass produce them, like enchants on a vellum, sell, trade, store them for later, done.

The crafting order post npc should ask every week for new stuff that people craft or buy from others, and deliver. Just like FFxiv did it 'cos it simply works.
You get more rewards and biggers ones the better quality/higher ilvl stuff has.

So simple, so good, so easy fast, enjoyable, godlike everything 10/10 chefs kiss…
but no, blizz devs just had to take the worst ideas and make it the most infuriating, unsatisfying, slow, painful garbage crafting/trade system in mmo history.

Thanks.
Please nuke it in future expansions.

1 Like
15

ask the guy you’re work ordering?
public orders are wild cards there are no concrete aswers there. I would argue don’t tip public orders because people who want to complete them to up their own skill will often see that as reason enough to complete it, do make sure you provide the mats tho otherwise no one will pick it up

because you can downgrade with a recraft and if you put that on public anyone can do it even those with low enough skill to downgrade your gear.
Why does recrafting allow you to downgrade rather then just saying ‘failed’? idk, its goofy

because having min quality on the public orders beats the purpose of the public orders, public orders = you don’t care about the quality you just want something made (like for example how I did for a cloak transmog, idk if that thing is high quality or low, I just want the transmog).
The idea was that the public work orders were how people could level up their professions, no one used it though because everyone only wants the best quality (normal human behaviour) even for their level 61 alt they touch once every blue moon.

It works if you’re in a large enough community where all fronts are covered by atleast someone, if you’re a solo player yeah good luck engaging with this system (just like every other feature in the game right now)

1 Like
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I get that 447 can’t be guaranteed, it’s a top tier item and you need to get personal with it, but lower ilvl items can. A skilled crafter will have a guaranteed craft on R5 437 item even with poorer quality mats. The system is already in place with personal orders, if you set quality too high for crafter to have a guaranteed craft, system won’t let him try to craft it, and there is absolutely no excuse to have this system off for public orders.

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This depends heavily on the item.
Signet of titanic insight for example - if you want it crafted with custom stats and embelishment, even a maxed out crafter with maximum tools and top quality mats (even as draenei) would miss the goal by 8 skill (draenei by 3).

There is.
Blizzard wants you to interact/negotiate with crafters and not just ask for the best quality in every case and wait for someone to fill the order.
Public orders on the other side are there to make it quick (and offer the crafters a way to gain some skill). You want it done because the low quality item is way better than your current gear and you might want to get it recrafted anyway if you have the crests for it. This is a niche case, because if players invest mats they want the best outcome, but this is how it was intended.

1 Like
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