On paper and probably in the minds of people who aren’t affected and have no idea how the lariat recipe acquisition worked, extremely rare recipes sound cool.
It was unclear what dropped the lariat from the start, players were left to guess what it drops from, the drop rate was atrocious and it only dropped from timed events, what? 1 time per day? 1 time a week? Who knows. The event in the elementalist future that dropped the ring bound hourglass was annoying as well.
In reality the Lariat only caused problems, on populated realms it created a cartel of toxic players who flooded your support staff, on unpopulated realms it was just sad if you wanted to get a Lariat.
You will have people who have millions of gold to waste on a single recipe, people who enjoyed being part of that cartel speak in favor of an equivalent in the next expansion. Is that who you cater this system to?
The game is unapproachable enough as it is, gating the recipe for a powerful embellishment behind extreme RNG on top of RNG will serve only to create toxicity and apathy towards your game.
I have both recipes, it didn’t feel like anything to get them, it didn’t feel like I achieved something.
I was just relieved I don’t have to interact with anyone to craft my own and for my friends.
I just paid for a recipe and I got it, might as well put it on your in game store from my point of view.
I didn’t abuse having the recipes to make millions of gold as I don’t even see the value of gold in this game. The wow token basically means gold is just IRL money, it’s extremely immersion breaking. It basically means I am not a character in the world of warcraft, I am just another paying client, my worth in game measured by my IRL budget for the game.
For the few times I bothered to read trade chat to craft for strangers, what I got is ridicule, scoffing at me for asking more for crafting a lariat than a normal leather bracer for example, and why shouldn’t they? They have no idea where the recipe comes from. It’s not their problem to know. They just want a craft done at an arbitrary price they find appropriate.
So my vote is to have all recipes either deterministically available or far less rare than the Lariat and Hourglass