New profession idea: Cartographer
The idea is to encourage thorough exploration of the entirely of Azeroth, not just the current “in” zones, and would provide neat opportunitiess for the devs to build the lore and the players to learn the lore.
Now, obviously each zone has 10 or 20 subzones a player must have visited for the game to consider the zone “explored”, but can we really say we’ve explored a zone, know it’s secrets, know the location of every cave, know what type of enemies inhabit what areas, know what drops there are, and know the lore of any given zone just because we’ve zipped around at 700% mount speed and completed some quests?
Players would be required to build up each zones map by exploring every subzone in any given area (even the many ones we explore but don’t get credit for when completing the exploration achievements), and would be rewarded with unique cosmetics and loot along the way, ie by finding a treasure that only spawns for you deep within a cave you otherwise never would have explored because the main quests don’t bring you there. We all know WoW players do the bare minimum so literally most of the world gets passed over because we all play in a such a hurry all the time. This would help slow the player back down, build the world and the players appreciation of it and give levelling an extra twist (or provide extra end game content for those not interested in raiding and mythic plusing).
I imagine this could be used in conjunction with my other profession idea; photographer/compendium (put in another topic)