Dragonflights is nearing its end, with the last LFR wing of the final raid out, and last content patch – along with what will likely be the final DF season – already on the horizon. This provides us a good opportunity to look back at the new systems introduced in this expansion, and to think on their future. I’d like to focus on the revamped professions here, with hope that the feedback reaches devs working on the War Within and the entire Worldsoul Saga.
First thing first: gathering skills (Mining, Herbalism, Skinning) in DF are in better place than they ever were. They are leveling up fast, and the specialization trees gave them some life. There are some clearly superior choices here (since quality is everything, base +skill bonus has to be maxxed out; since basic mats are rotated out fast, Perception rises to prominence right after base skill; and nothing compares to the efficiency of gathering without dismounting), but because the bonuses stack with specializations, in the end one wants to get everything anyway. One note here would be to make sure that each tree has something that could be seen as worthwhile as a capstone. Say, a significant reduction of the overload timer when used on a specific node type as a final elemental bonus, or even a chance to trigger the overload whenever gathering this specific type?
Then there are the crafting professions. Some are so-so, like Alchemy; others not as much – like Engineering, which cannot get any orders ever, or Blacksmithing/Leatherworking, which require obscene amounts of knowledge points invested. Others here wrote about the fallings of the public orders and relliance on them. I just want to stress out two things:
- Every single crafting profession should have an unlockable Experimentation, just like Alchemy does, just so we can:
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eventually max up our skills without rellying on systems such as orders,
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unlock all recipes without relying solely on world drops lottery or purchases on the AH.
Without that option, that extra chance it just gets incredibly frustrating on completionists, not to mention impossible to catch up without prohibitively high costs, because maxxing out takes forever and requires tons of special, costly materials. And don’t get me started on the pain of not having any realistic way of getting that one rare drop recipe everyone actually needs from the crafter, like the Elemental Lariat (which is even mentioned in the skill tree description!) or specific Decay-infused craft.
- Retraining – going into DF, we didn’t know the system and often, we went in blindly, experimenting, gambling with the system… and lost, because in hindsight there were obvious better choices, and we made all the wrong ones without any way of going back. This is also true for gatherers, but worse still for the crafters due to how the different trees interact with each other (or rather: how divergent and separate they actually are). So please – lock it behind useful material costs, weeklies, perhaps – just tie it to sparks, just as the important crafts are? Just let us retrain entirely.
I want to add an extra emphasis here, because leveling a skill up is a long-term, not necessarily rewarding task right now, and the only actually “forever choice” left. We can freely swap talents and class spec, and – in major cities – cosmetics including gender (great, much appreciated!), or even pay for a name-, race-, or faction-swap… yet we cannot undo a mistake in a profession tree? That’s mindboggling, and again – unnecessarily frustrating.
Those are my two cents. What do you think? What would you add?
