Courtesy of Battlefield Heroes
I’ve seen a number of comments and blog posts as of late talking about the current state of Professions in the game, and how they need to be fixed in general. Quite honestly, I agree with this a great deal and have for a long time. After giving it a great deal of thought, I’m happy to share a system that would be an improvement and actually encourage more people to have professions (I know too many people who have very few -if any, or of any level remotely close to their character level).
- Every Profession Has A Daily. Indeed, this should be a no-brainer, and it’s probably the suggestion nearly everyone has made. The Darkmoon Faire has given us a taste of this with quests for every profession, but it needs to be in the normal cities of Azeroth as well.
- Every City Has A Profession Daily. That I still have to linger around Orgrimmar or Stormwind to do my Jewelcrafting daily irks me. I don’t always like being in the main city and shouldn’t have to just for a quest (especially when the other cities have better cooking quests, too).
- Every Crafting Profession Should Have An Epic Recipe Quest. I honestly don’t care whether the crafted item is BoE or BoP (ok, as an AH player the devil on my shoulder is shouting BoE), but a solid quest chain to get you a decent purple gear item would be unique and rewarding.
- The More Rare The Recipe, The More Skill Points You Gain. If you’ve been lucky enough to track down something like Mooncloth Leggings, then it should offer you more skill points than other Tailoring items of the same craft level. Under the current system, many of the “multiple point” skillups actually cost the equivalent in mats. That’s not how it should work.
- Fix The Weak Recipes. I don’t care if it’s a Wrath, Cata, BC, or old school recipe, every recipe should serve a purpose other than to Disenchant or get a skill point. An uncommon or better crafted item should serve one of three purposes: great PvP option, better than quest PvE option, or awesome Transmogrification possibilities.
- New Recipes Can Use Old Mats. I saw this elsewhere (Grumpy Elf, I think) and agree completely. Why couldn’t an Engineer craft a “Fire-Emblazoned Gold Plated Shotgun” as a weapon that required Volatile Fire, and some Gold Bars? A Jewelcrafter could easily make a necklace with an Azerothian Diamond and an Ember Topaz. You get the idea. Keep old mats relevant for more than just leveling your profs past that particular expansion.
- Craftable Heirlooms. First off, these should not be easy to do. Whether the mats list is huge, or hard to obtain, or you need be max level, or even some combination of all of them, work should be involved. That said, the crafting professions should all be able to make a piece of gear that is BoA. The higher the levels it works for (1-70 vs 1-85 at the moment), the harder it should be to make. But at the same time, this would be nice for people with plenty of alts who don’t raid/brave LFR or dabble in any battlegrounds. It gives them a way to access Heirlooms without compromising how they play the game. They just don’t need to be quite as good as the current ones.
There’s seven things that I think are incredibly simple and any or all of them could be implemented and suddenly profs are worth having. Blizzard improved Herbalism and Mining by granting experience from doing them (still not sure how to fix Skinning, mind you), while Fishing and Cooking have gotten a great deal of love as well (and encouraged me to Cook with a plethora of toons…Fishing still has me leery). I imagine on a grander scale with the other professions getting improved that people would go back to doing them again or more often. What are your thoughts? If you could improve them, what would you do?
I can’t think of anything I’d want to specifically change in the professions other than what you’ve listed. The daily quest idea is something that would definitely be great.
I like the idea of a quest to obtain an epic pattern as well, since not everyone raids on every character with every professions, nor is willing to pay 10-20k gold for the recipes on AH. It would be nice with some other options.
Part of me wishes there was a way to “upgrade” patterns as patches hit as well. I like what they did with the PvP starter gear that you can craft, and how it will become better each patch so that you can get a “decent” starting set for PvP. You won’t be awesome, but at least you won’t be one-shot. I kind of wish there was something similar for a PvE starting set. Something to get you from quest greens to the ilevel needed to go into Heroics. (Especially in MoP where there won’t be any non-Heroic top level dungeons.)
I love professions, I used to do all of them on every character, yes, even fishing, lol.
I was a little sad that I’ve finally given up on First Aid as I haven’t had to use a bandage in years.
I love your list, I’d be happy if they even did five of them. I know Blizzard has a lot of work to do every expansion but please, oh please, at least a profession daily and an epic recipe quest! Pretty please!
@ Saga
It will be interesting to see what happens come Mists, as to my understanding resilience is being removed from the game (or at least, last I heard) and thus gear is gear so to speak. Either way, you’re absolutely right regarding the “upgrade” idea.
@ Tomeof theancients
I have never done First Aid on any toon. My Death Knights have it by default, but I’ve never bothered with it otherwise. I like some of the changes they made to it, but the game has no necessity for it.
What a great post! That is a great list of improvements! I’m gonna have to link it this weekend
And I agree about those dailies… JCs have one, why can’t enchanters have one? And tailors? I always feel like I miss out, and I really like doing dailies (ok shoot me now I’m crazy)
@Navimie
Actually, I could’ve sworn Enchanting dailies were supposed to come in Cataclysm. I guess that’s one of those things that just didn’t make it to the final product. But, yes, all prof dailies are long overdue.
I love these ideas. Along with the dailies, for each profession, can we make them also have some sort of a token for getting the good patterns? (Like JC) I know it’s a grind, but I’d rather grind out tokens than farm or buy the mats for purchasing the patterns.
For fixing skinning – buff the thing that drops volatiles, and move being able to merge lower level leather into higher level leather to skinning (from leatherworking) maybe give it a skillup like smelting does for miners. And let them split the leathers down, too.
Maybe make it so that if 5 light leather = 1 medium leather, 1 med leather = 4 light leather, so that it’s not necessarily beneficial to store in stacks of the highest level. Also, make it possible to convert leather across expansions… so it might take 10,000 leather scraps to make one MoP max-level leather, but it can be done!
The tokens idea is a good one, though I wasn’t adverse to the system using things like Arctic Fur as a currency for recipes. I think a balance where it isn’t all one way or the other is what would work best.
The skinning idea is interesting. From a logistics standpoint, it still seems like something a leatherworker would do (unlike blacksmiths, who don’t have to be smelters to build their gear). Hard to say, but then again Herbalism doesn’t do much else either. Mining’s the only gatherer with a “sub” profession.