Before I start the complaining, I like the idea of Tidalcores and Hydrocores as well as Blood of Sargeras during Legion. A semi-common crafting material you got from dungeons and world quests that you couldn’t farm in massive quantities but also never needed much of it to craft something. Fair enough because it was also never used for something you needed in massive quantities as well.
But as the X-Packs moved on, they became less and less relevant. With Legion this wasn’t much of an issue because of the blood vendor. So while Blood of Sargeras accumulated over time, you could always trade it in for some usefull stuff like ores and herbs. Not enough to have any impact on the Economy but still a nice little extra.
Tidalcores however are now utterly pointless. Whether you are freshly leveled or boosted, within minutes you’re above and beyond the point where you could possibly need an item crafted with a Tidalcore. And yet, they keep dropping even in high M+ dungeons.
Why? What’s the point of this? We don’t have a Vendor for them and as far as crafting goes, there’s literally nothing productive that can be done with them. So either introduce a vendor where we can trade them in for something actually useful or just patch them out entirely.
Each patch feels like it’s becoming it’s own micro expansion now, where everything previous is forgotten. Like Sanguincell from Uldir (or infact Uldir in general is like running a legacy raid now).
Blizzard are masters of throwing away their own content.
my guess is just that they are phasing such crafting materials out of the game. they were a huge source of easy gold during legion ( too big) and caused the market to be flooded by vendor bought mats. But in this expansion they are mostly pointless. So probably next expansion such a mat will be gone entirely
I didn’t bring up Sanguicell or Bwonsamdi’s gizmo because they were specifically designed for that raid and related craftables. We’ve had this in the past, the orbs in Uldir for example, and once the content becomes old news, so do the crafting mats. But the Cores drop in day-to-day life
Crafting is a mess right now, a lot of ideas were kept from expansions to expansion without giving them much thought regarding their purpose. The Tidalcore idea dates back to TBC and Primal Nethers, the legion bloods were slightly different although i don’t know what that tweak was supposed to accomplish.
The general idea is that crafters who play the game should have a leg up over level 110 (currently) alts who sit in a capital city all day. It seems this could be done with the star rank system, which currently is a mess aswell since you rank up professions with PVP currency from last expansion (seriously make Paul Kubit a janitor already), removing the need for Tidal Cores and other such items.
yeah the only really useful proffesions would be enchanting and alchemy. the rest are basicly just for scrapping so you can get enchanting mats from it
hence the question: why are they even still dropping? Technically there are things you can craft with them but they are simply not needed.
Those stayed relevant until the end of the expansion though. The tweak to the bloods, in my opinion, was to give the possibility to require more or less of them without overburdening the players. You got one Prinal Nether per dungeon but you could get several Blood. If a recipe needed one Blood, you could run a dungeon and craft several items afterwards. with Nether etc. that wasn’t possible.
no clue really , i only really used them to make a handful of items. like the items that cause mission table followers to bring back resources. Otherwise for crafting decent items you would have to farm raids and dungeons so much , you already could have better gear from normal content
it’s not like they are a real inconvinience. it’s a single item that drops each dungeon, it stacks to 200 and that’s that. But i have several hunderets of them. over a thousand if I include alts and there’s just no use for this dungeon drop item.
I’m not claiming this is screwing up my inventory, gunking up my bank or anything of the sort. I just think it’s weird that Blizzard introduced a dungeon drop only item, even updates it from Hydro- to Tidalcores and then makes damn sure that there’s no use for it.
No, they really didn’t.
For primal nether they were sort of relevant because of the early BoP gear was sooo good that lasted until Hyjal basically. But other crafting reagents such as Nether Vortex and Heart of Darkness were added.
Same goes for WotLK, you had few recipes early on with Frozen Orbs, but later they required Runic orbs, Crusader orbs and the saronite thingy from Icecrown.
The difference isn’t in the crafting reagents, it’s in how the gear acquisition worked in early expansion, which gives you the impression that they were relevant until the end.
As for bloods the big change was that it shifted focus from dungeons and raids to outdoor activities, mainly gathering, which is the primary source.
But there were still somewhat useful things you could do with them. mostly not Raid relevant things, but you could always turn them into gold one way or another.
I’ve got them mostly out of dungeons. But then again, i ran tons of rnd heroics because of the Tank reward bags, so i may not be the norm here.
if they want to keep stuff like that then they need to make sure crafting gear is usable and sellable. And concidering how many bots and multiboxxer flood the ah with certain mats this would require some rare mats to be added so the actual crafted items would have some actual value. But as long craftable gear is just garbage just there for tmogs or to disenchant mats like hydrocores will never ever find any use
Again, there was nothing intrinsic that gave Primal Nether longevity, it was the way gearing worked back then, the lack of catch-up mechanics, the power of those BoP craftables, etc. Because if you look only at recipes, Primal Nether gets phased out just as fast.
Personally i’d rather see this type of reagent scraped entirely.
But that’s exactly what Cores are. They were simply a gating mechanism for the first couple weeks of the game to make you do an arbitrary amount of dungeons before you could craft raid-quality gear. Yes, there are some other uses for Cores, but let’s be honest, none of them are particularly relevant other than maybe the 32-slot bags (and even those are questionable, I keep scratching my head trying to figure out who would pay 10x the gold of a regular Deep Sea Bag just to get 2 extra slots). When you get right down to it, the Cores system was a crude, unintuitive and creatively bankrupt way to convince raiders to do dungeons at the beginning of a raid tier. For people staying current with the game, Cores become completely obsolete within two weeks of a raid release. That being said, the entire crafting system of BfA could be fairly accurately summarized as crude, unintuitive and creatively bankrupt, so I guess it was right on track.
But I’m not just looking at the recipes, I’m looking at how it played out ingame. So the Primals did stay relevant. And the blood vendor was ultimately a good solution. you got the blood basically by logging in and through the vendor it was useful right up until the moment BfA went live.
But that’s exactly my point. Unlike Raid materials, you aquire the Cores throughout BfA’s entire playtime. I don’t mind Raid-specific materials becoming irrelevant when the raid does because you don’t go back unless for achivements or mounts. But dungeons have never been more relevant.
The point is that you are thinking about Cores the wrong way. You are thinking about them in terms of an actual crafting material. They are not. They are a glorified timegating mechanism and have no purpose beyond that. Now, I can believe that at some point in the design of BfA they were meant to be an actual crafting material to be used by a wide array of professions to make different things… But if they were, that idea was clearly scrapped along the way and the item was relegated to be a timegating mechanic and nothing more - just like sanguicell, breaths and the whatevers for the focuses in EP and Nya that I can’t even remember the names for because they are designed to be 100% obsolete once their timegating function is fulfilled.
at which point you stop getting them. Same goes for Sanguicel and bwonsamdi’s breath. Once obsolete, you don’t gather them anymore, be it by choice or gamefunction.
If it was up to this community to design the game, we’d have like 40 vendors, with every single item in the game available for purchase and probably a currency tab that’s longer than a Stephen King novel. I wouldn’t call that a good solution.
As for the Tidal core, that’s not your issue then, nor are professions in general. These didn’t change much, but everything around them changed. Your issue is with how gearing works now, that items acquired in 8.1, be it crafted or otherwise, were completely useless when 8.2 came out.
Sorry but turning Tidal Cores into something else is not a solution, it doesn’t make them useful, just a pointless middleman, another currency.
No my issue isn’t the gearing system and I happen to be strictly against PvP Vendors or Valor Vendors. So don’t presume to tell me what my issues are. I don’t like the gearing system, but that’s neither here nor there. My problem is that blizz is handing out Crafting materials that nobody needs for no reason.
Gearing systems of the past allowed crafting materials such a Cores to stay relevant, that’s just a fact. But that’s just not the game anymore. Yet we still get this crap every dungeon for no use or reason. THAT is my issue. So either doing something with this or patching them out would be a solution to this particular problem. And if that comes down to a vendor that can somewhat offset the nightmare that is Zin’Anthid farming right now, I’m perfectly fine with that. Or simply take them out of the m+ loot table.