Shadowlands had me build and manage a well oiled machine of crafting toons, each with their own job, and me at the helm. Commanding. The journey there was long, expensive, and risky, but worth it overall.Dragonflight demoted me, cut my pay and forced me to work for "tips".— Manthieus (@manthieus) January 24, 2024
Shadowlands had me build and manage a well oiled machine of crafting toons, each with their own job, and me at the helm. Commanding. The journey there was long, expensive, and risky, but worth it overall.Dragonflight demoted me, cut my pay and forced me to work for "tips".
Professions actually cost the casual player more gold than they make, due to the high cost of the BoE recipes and the cost of the mats to get to skill level 100 or so. And then you can’t actually get anything out of your investment if you don’t know enough people to craft for or have the time to babysit the public order table and trade chat like it was an actual real-life job.
Professions in DF were typical Blizzard. They are incapable of understanding a middle point on anything. Instead of just giving some heft and value to crafting and gathering professions, they took professions off the cliff, into a ravine head first. When people said "We'd like professions to matter" this was likely not what anyone meant.
Dragonflight killed crafting. (specifically work orders)
I enjoyed it, my biggest complaint would be that it felt like a beta version that wasn't well supported after launch. If you didn't start your professions at launch you are probably still catching up. For the rest of the game that isn't an issue but what if you're someone who wanted to craft and came in at 10.2?I restarted my main and profs in 10.1. I'm almost finally maxed now. How long should it take? I assumed they would add more nodes with each patch to require R5 for newest geae but nope. So the base progression remained slow.There wasn't ever really any specializing. There wasn't the one guy who made best shields except maybe right from the start.
Also no more insentivising doing a couple of orders a week. Always one dude getting free mats cause he knew some people would be desperate to get knowledge. @#$% those freeloaders.
I’ve definitely made more with professions this expansion than the last few expansions. It was awesome clicking a couple of buttons and getting 10,000 to 20,000 gold through the crafting orders system.
In Shadowlands I was heavy into the vendor shuffle.Made multiple macros and weakauras to tell me when my bags were full.Something like 8g every 2 seconds, 240g a minute, 14,400g an hour depending on mats i could buy for cheap.With that all gone I ended up relying on Alchemy Transmutes.I've got 8 max out transmute alchemists turning out Awakened Air each day.Used to be quite profitable but with the current collapse in prices there isn't much money in transmute alchemy now ... about 100g profit per craft.
IMO they really overshot with the complexity of professions. Basically professions were LFR and now they're Mythic. That doesn't mean nobody will like it, just that too many won't. The "what the hell is this now" factor is way too high. But the game was lost to the data gods long ago. The people who design the systems think, act and design like mathematicians. They need more influence from people who don't.
The biggest issue with DF was getting the recipes to drop, if you were lucky enough to be able to actually craft something worth money it was good, or just sell the recipe. Otherwise you were dead in the water trying to craft the same things every other person was able to craft.On top of that if you did not sit in trade chat all day not playing any other facet of the game, when you went to the crafting table you would just find nothing available to craft, and even if you did it ended up being a 1G 'profit' using your own mats.
I'm maxed on all professions and have all recipes. DF crafting is just amazing and was a lot of fun to improve. I actually felt sad when I maxed out all knowledge in a profession. There was always something new to look forward to each week.
As a casual player who started a single toon before Legion from scratch, I didn't even start learning how to play the game until I reached level 110. I may be boasting if I said I now understand 45% of how the game works, so I made a lot of mistakes. But I have fun playing.I started making alts in BFA to learn professions and the auction system, then I had to learn toon management and needed to create an ever-evolving spreadsheet to track them. Now I have alts from level 10 to 70, five of which only do bank/AH stuff, the rest handled all BFA/SL professions, my main is a gatherer only. I usually play a patch behind the current patch, guess I'm slow in learning the new systems or such... DF professions especially.I used to play 16 hours a day when I only had one toon, now I'm doing good to play 24+ hours a week with many toons.People talking of making 10s, 100s, or a million gold an hour, is that for one hour or consistently? Due to my ever-evolving spreadsheet, my last 48 sessions I played (I took two weeks off for the holidays) totaled too 577 hours which includes AFK time, I only track average gold profit per session/hour after any/all expenses. Sure, I had one session where I made 37,664g/h for x-hours, but for 577 hours, my average is only 3,384g/h profit just playing the game and having fun.An hour of crafting for overnight sales is one thing, but what is really the gold per hour profit a person makes playing the game on one account, or does anybody really track it?
maybe if you didn't make Elemental Lariat/Hourglass recipes SO GOD DANG LOW DROP CHANCE people would have had the chance to make gold with Jewelcrafting more! a weekly locked storm rare? to drop not a pet, nor mount nor toy, but a SIMPLE RECIPE? even shadowlands didn't pull that crapola! Don't do this for War Within! P L E A S E
I do not work for tips because most of them are a waste o time. They like to send 1k and under, even 50g. In that time I could have made some good gold. I use a filter to block "tipping". But the word tip is still working and I sometimes ask how much is it so I can reject it beforehand.They can throw their trash to the trash can.
Money from crafting is great if you're lucky to get patterns early on when everyone wants the item. It sucks if you get them after the rush. I have two inscriptionists and neither one got the Warden contract from the superbloom weekly until like four weeks later when everyone already had the rep. Whoever got those drops that first week made some serious bank. The rest of us - a big nope.Whoever picked the right tree to go down in crafting (usually tools) had it easier to skill up and make money. If you picked the wrong tree (usually armor crafting) then you were forced to rely on work orders with sparks to get your skill points. Basically, you were screwed because you can't tier crafted pieces so that just leaves a few possibly pieces you'd see people want to have crafted if you were lucky. Also, for whatever reason, the Darkmoon cards required a load of KP points to flesh out, but nobody wanted those trinkets. First time I've ever seen DM trinkets not on anyone's BiS list. I still feel bad about asking a guildmate to tackle that tree thinking they'd get massive money only for that to be a total bust. Without any way to reset skill points and start over, you were punished if you made bad choices which were common despite scouring the guides ahead of time because what looked good on paper turned out to be horrible in implementation.The lariat and ring were the most consistently demanded item (still are) and I made money from those despite buying the patterns off the AH. The leather boots requiring you to go through an entire dungeon to get to the altar wasn't a good use of time for low tips, though I was able to use the new NPC dungeon team to get there with 10 minutes to spare as an experiment. I don't think a system where the customer sets the price works very well in cases like the toxic altar which requires more from the crafter than just clicking a button. Forcing you to use insight on enchants to guarantee max quality sucks because there's no recrafting on those. I'm maxed out on everything, I crush the elements, I still can't guarantee a 3 star. Why? The inequality between the trade skills is very bad. BS requires the most KP by a long shot compared to other professions with LW a distant second, but I rarely make any items using it. I never see anyone want alchemy, engineering, or most trades in the work order system beyond people trying to get cheapies made so they can AH them for money. Why do miners and herbalists get the same amount of Artisan Mettle per week as an enchanter or JC who actually needs it for insights? Why oh why is the stupid insight dropdown on the left on some crafting professions and on the right in others? It became painfully clear that teams were given their craft to develop and never once looked at the system as a whole.I feel like the system is a great start but needs a lot of fine tuning.
Got all profs maxed on at least one toon, got most recipes including lariat, kinda liked the chase and the grind, but actually have less gold now than at the end of SL (where I made millions with legendaries). I did buy tokens for paying the addon and the sub on 2 accounts though, and some mounts, so I'm not in the minus with my crafting, just couldn't sustain the same "expensive playstyle" that I easily did in SL.All in all, the system has too many flaws - a buyers economy can't work if most people have no clue how things work, what things cost, how rare some recipes are and how long it took to max some trees. Also it killed crafting for people who just liked to be self sustaining for raids with their enchanting/alchemy for example - it just wasn't worth it to craft suff for yourself most of the time which is sad.Another major red flag was the ability to grind out professions on the first few days via extreme dragonshard grinding, until they fixed that - so now a few people where WAY ahead of everyone else, with no chance of ever catching up, these got OBSCENELY rich while the rest could just watch the profits go to zero when they got there - I mean, I don't need a game to simulate the worst of global latestage capitalism we have in real life...Also, curses to the person that thought it was a good idea to make this stupid popup telling me I have undistributed crafting points EVERY FREAKING TIME I LOG IN - yeah, thx, I liked to save them for until I know what I even want to do with them so they are not wasted in some %^&*ty tree, but hey, keep on pestering people into senselessly distributing them just to keep that popup away -_-
There should be much more money gained by doing high end content like high m+, raids, and pvp. Like way more. We get ripped off by casuals in the profession industry and the AH. We dont have time to farm, because we actually play the game. And these scammer ask fot like 20k gold for an enchant at the beginning of a expansion. For an enchamt thats mandantory. Same with everything else. I dont care about BOEs because thats a lixiry, you can actually obtain gear doing content. But mandatory stuff like enchants, flasks, potions, should not be object of scamming tje whole server in a wrll designed game. Same goes with legendaties in shadowlands for example, which were an absolute scam. And the smaller was the server, the biggest was the scam. We're talking 500k for a max level chest vessel and sh line that. Obviously i'm not talking season 3, when everything is cheap cuz no one plays the game. I'm talking 5 first months of an expansion. Which to be honest are also when peaplo leave every expansion massively.