Heyo! I’d like to talk a bit about the professions and the associated systems, as well as hear everyone else’s thoughts on them.
Firstly, I think the new professions are both an upgrade and a downgrade simultaneously, in every way. They:
- give us more depth and complexity, only for that to transform into being somewhat bothersome to level and use
- give us a lot more flexibility with the Specializations, while being very inflexible due to not being able to re-allocate points, making it essentially necessary to read a guide before investing your knowledge (yes, I did put a lot of points into getting more herbs in Herbalism, I didn’t know and was just trying out what sounded nice to me, yes I am still salty about it)
- are far more important/relevant than they used to be thanks to the high iLvLs that can be obtained, while being completely useless as you can just put in an order and someone will make it for you thus allowing you to completely ignore them
- introduced qualities which allow for more variance in price, allowing “budget, mid-range and high-end” options, but the way they are obtained makes the prices nigh identical for all the qualities and it only leads to cluttered bags
The Crafting Order system is quite interesting, I think it’s a very nice idea, but unfortunately it seems to be mostly untouched. I myself have often put in public orders as it is rather cheap, especially for items where I didn’t care about the quality/iLvL, for example getting my weekly Treatises, some gathering phials, even gear. However I think that the system fails inherently in that it does connect non crafters (or people with different professions) to the right people, but it doesn’t actually connect them, leading to many unknown variables such as “what quality will my item be”, “what are the odds for a multicraft proc” etc. that make it difficult to trust. Furthermore, a simple Auction House purchase or a trade panel transaction will show you exactly what you will get, whereas even a Personal Order does not, sometimes not even the crafter themselves knowing what quality the item will come out as. Which brings up the next point, knowledge points.
I love the idea of professions having knowledge points and Specializations, you can prioritize what you actually want out of the profession. However the way the system is now, it unfortunately very heavily advantages those who have farmed their knowledge very early, with no catch-up mechanism and no way to change course once you locked them in. This leads to those who came in early and invested their points in the right spots being able to craft items in a much higher quality much more reliably than others, and the worst issue with this is that it is effectively impossible to catch up with them in terms of knowledge points. I perfectly understand that it would be undesirable to be able to switch from any spec to any other on a moment’s notice, thus allowing anyone to fill any order or cater to “the flavor of the day” in terms of what is selling best and so on, however some way of reallocation should be allowed, be it on a weekly timeout or locked behind something else. Also, a catch-up should be made, allowing people to meet the few people lucky enough to be among the first to catch a head-start at the start of the expansion in terms of item quality. Which brings up the next point, quality.
Quality is an amazing idea that unfortunately ends up not always working due to the materials. On my server, Twisting Nether, the price gap between qualities for most items on the AH is very small, with oddities being very common, for example q1 being more expensive than q2 or sometimes even q3, not by much of course, but still weird. It also leads to an insane amount of clutter in my reagent bag (which I love the addition of, but it’s a necessity that asks for ever more space). And then there are items where q1 and q2 are very close in price and not much, say 198g and 200g respectively, then q3 is 10k+g, which is probably not what was intended out of the system. Honestly, I have no idea how to make this system any better, and I would think it will self-regulate in time.
And as for the last point, Alchemy. This has been my profession of choice pretty much always as it is essentially always in demand. However I found it to be unusable unfortunately, “forcing” me to actually swap off of it and take up Mining instead. The experimentation system was fun up until I was hit with three explosions back to back and ran out of Liquid Courage, locking me out for four hours in terms of new recipes. Which would be fine, but there is one massive issue with the recipes themselves. I don’t know about the situation on other servers, but on mine it is not worth it to craft any phial at all. The phials themselves, at any quality, sell for far less than the materials used to craft them, regardless of the phial. Take for example the Phial of Elemental Chaos, at the moment it sells for ~641g at q3, however to craft it one needs Primal Convergent, among other things, which sells for ~570g at q3, but here’s the fun part, to make Primal Convergent one needs one of each element in its Awakened form except for Awakened Decay, however simply selling the Awakened elements on their own would yield ~1.5k gold, standing at over double the phial’s price and almost thrice the price of the item they make. Yes, you get two phials per Primal Convergent, however tally up the rest of the materials and selling the raw materials still comes out better by a not insignificant margin. I have found that the only way to make a profit out of Alchemy is to never craft anything and only ever sell phials obtained randomly from Experimentation, as actually crafting any phials would be a loss over simply selling the raw materials. This however completely defeats the point of the profession and leads to frustration, as there are times when I can only craft maybe three phials a day after blowing up immediately. And of course, nobody puts in public orders for Alchemy, which is completely fair, so yeah as far as I could see there is no way to make gold out of Alchemy reliably, at least not out of phials, but unfortunately I have been unable to try other specs.
Overall, apart from Alchemy which in my opinion is deeply flawed at the moment, there are many many good things about the new professions in my opinion, however there are definitely many improvements that can be made. At the moment I found great success from Herbalism/Mining, gathering while mounted is a lot of fun and taking the elemental specs makes them very profitable in spite of not actually producing anything, however I don’t think this is how it should be. What do you think? And thank you for reading, hope you have a wonderful day!