Hi all,
I think it’s almost unanimous that the overhaul professions got in Dragonflight was well needed and even if some don’t completely appreciate the changes made or find it very intuitive, we can all agree that crafting is now a much more important part of WoW’s end game.
One big part of this overhaul came in the form of craft quality, and subsequently, reagent quality. This means I can have three different types of the same reagent in my bag / bank, all of different value at any one time due to their differing quality.
While you might argue what I’m about to suggest is just down to player understanding of the system, and something I should get used to, the designer in me would argue that a player learning by doing is not the same as learning by making mistakes.
The problem this suggestion aims to solve is thus:
When you have to wait any amount of time before you can craft a piece of gear that you would like, whether that’s because you are waiting for your concentration to regen or you just want to wait until the next reset to get your final half of spark to finish the craft, sometimes it’s still prudent to collect all of the materials in advance so that when the waiting period is finally over you can go right ahead and hit Craft on your shiny new piece of gear. This gear piece is for me to wear so when buying the materials I bought the highest quality (and thus the most expensive) versions.
So what happens if I then decide, while waiting, to craft a bunch of other things just to get the First Craft bonus, or maybe I decide to fulfil some public crafting orders? Okay great, I’ll go to the auction house and buy some materials of the cheapest price (which is usually 2* quality but sometimes 1* too).
Open up the profession menu, hit craft and… whoops. I had that tick box enabled, because it’s on by default, which uses the best quality of any reagents I’ve got. This includes in my bank. So all of those expensive reagents I bought for my awesome new piece of gear have just gone on an unimportant patron order or a throwaway piece I crafted to get its First Craft bonus.
Now not only do I need to go back to the AH and buy the reagents again, or go out into the world and farm them again, but I also have to manually keep track of which mats I’ve got in terms of quantity at all times to ensure that I am not over spending on the lower quality mats and pushing it into the higher quality mats that come after it.
My suggestion to solve this:
Add a new functionality to items that are either in our reagent bag or reagent bank which lets us ‘lock’ or ‘freeze’ reagents so that they are NOT considered for crafting by the profession menu. This way, I can buy all of the high quality mats I need for my next craft, stuff them in the corner of my reagent bank and then freeze them. I can now craft happily knowing that I won’t accidentally spend any of the mats that I bought for a different purpose and would cost me a lot of money to replace. When it comes time for me to finally craft the piece of gear they were intended for I simply go into the bank and unfreeze them and they would become available in the relevant profession menu(es) again.
Problems with the solution:
How does the profession menu tell you that you’ve got locked / frozen reagents? Does it even need to? Well, maybe it should. Perhaps in a slot that does not have sufficient reagents to craft but DOES have reagents that are locked / frozen show in a different colour or in black and white iconography with a small icon next to it with a tooltip explaining that you have mats of these type but they are unavailable due to being locked or frozen.
If you read to the bottom here I appreciate it, I didn’t intend to go into this much depth but the more I thought about it the more I realised context and forethought is quite important to get any buy in to an idea.
I would appreciate feedback from players too - especially those that are well engaged with the profession system in The War Within.