After fiddling around with professions on the Alpha for a few weeks, I thought I’d give my thoughts on their current state. I mainly do crafting orders, so most of this feedback will be geared towards those, though I’ll note when I am talking about crafting things to sell on the AH, or when something may affect those as well. I had been waiting for some indication that professions were free of obvious placeholder items/values, and all the systems were implemented before posting this, but start of Beta seems as good a time as any.
The first point of feedback is more of a question: Are the current difficulty numbers for crests, missives, and embellishments final?
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As tuned, they would allow aspect crafts to be guaranteed without concentration, which I think would be a terrible decision. While it would give lower commission prices for customers, it would greatly hurt the long term retention of crafters if they end up getting basically no tip for an aspect crest item guarantee 4 weeks after the expansion launches. This would also heavily punish crafters who are late to the party, or only pick it up in later seasons, as the return on their investment would be much lower.
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If this is your plan, I think it would be best to confirm this sooner, rather than later, but most of my feedback here will be with the assumption that these get tuned to be somewhat similar to what they are on live, where an embellished aspect craft will end up being ~25-30 points away from guarantee.
Second: Concentration is currently tuned much too generously, specifically for gear crafting.
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I think the concentration system overall is very clever, and solves most of the problems that mettle/insights had, especially on the customer side. However, I think the same mistake is being made with concentration that was made with crafting orders, where demand was drastically overestimated. On the alpha, concentration is recharging at a rate of 1 per 300-320 seconds, so 270-288 per day. Assuming about 30% ingenuity proc, and 20 concentration per aspect craft, it comes out to around 19-20 aspect equivalent guarantees per day. This is way too generous, and way more than is necessary. If crafters aren’t able to sell out their concentration for the day, then there’s no point in ever charging for it. If concentration is primarily meant to be a way to limit the number of max rank consumables available to keep their prices reasonably profitable for AH players, then that’s good, but as tuned it will absolutely kill gear crafting after a few weeks.
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Using some data I gathered, at the start of season 3 (a high watermark of demand for embellished crafting orders outside of DF launch) demand on Sargeras for the big 4 gear professions (JC/BS/LW/Tailor) was around 400 aspect items a day through people looking for orders in trade chat. That means that only 10 dedicated crafter characters would be needed to entirely supply a large server during the absolute peak of demand, and that number would be even lower for smaller servers, and as demand peters out. Given that a lot of crafters have alts they do professions on as well, or are straight up dual boxing, that lowers the number even more. This is just too few necessary crafters to be able to spread orders out evenly and have it be worthwhile for them.
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If concentration is supposed to be an anti-monopoly measure, to stop one crafter from gaining control over the entire market, and give other crafters a chance to compete and sell their services, it won’t be effective if it goes live with the current values, as a few players would still be able to fulfill most or all of a server’s demand. If concentration is supposed to just be a way for crafters who are behind to still be able to sell their services in the market, and it isn’t meant to be a constraint on max crafters, then what ways do you envision crafters being able to obtain value from the time and effort spent on their professions if they are just going to be at the mercy of whatever pittance the customer decides to offer.
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Admittedly, nerfing it could have a negative impact on consumables, and I don’t think very many people want 10k per flask, so making sure it evens out would be important if any changes were made. Perhaps increasing the concentration cost for just gear crafts would be sufficient, as that wouldn’t affect the people who just want to sell items on the AH and not deal with customers. I think it would be much better to have it start off too restrictive, and then loosen it later if necessary, rather than have a repeat of what happened with public orders.
Odds and Ends: Just a couple of minor things, or things I’m curious about
- Cross faction trade chat: is this ever going to be a possibility? I would love to play a Horde race, but am stuck on Alliance as I cannot get customers on my Alliance dominated server otherwise. I’m not sure if the whisper system still being wonky cross faction would impede this or if that’s a problem that’s reasonable/worthwhile to solve.
- Is knowledge progression going to be hard capped per week, or are there any plans to have something similar to dragon shards? I completely understand wanting to lock down the knowledge progression so that it can be better paced, and not letting people race ahead like they did at the start of DF, but they did serve as a nice bit of catchup for returning or late players.
- One of the dev notes said alchemy was basically done, but potions still only has 2 nodes, is this planning on being increased?
- Are profession racials being looked at? Some professions (LW and tailoring) are left out, and the other bonuses are faction locked. Ideally there’d be some semi-permanent or very long (like a month long tied to the darkmoon faire or something) cooldown way to “Focus” in a profession and get the +5 skill, but I think at the very least giving enchanting, alchemy and inscription racials to the alliance, and blacksmithing/JC/engi racials to the horde would be an acceptable solution as well.
- What’s the plan with artisan’s acuity? Currently it is only used for profession equipment. Is it just going to become a dead currency once those are crafted? There seem to be a few minor spenders, like the everburning forge and condensing food, but those don’t seem substantial enough to not have it just be effectively useless for most players. I don’t think it should do anything like recharge concentration, but maybe at least having a material trader or something would be good.
Good changes I noticed and wanted to highlight:
- Blacksmithing tree with the forge looks really cool, super excited for it.
- I’m also glad you standardized the 30/30/20 knowledge on the tailoring crafts, having the numbers be different for each wing of the tree was probably very confusing for people.
- I’m also a fan of how you added some agency to the JC gem nodes, and made it very explicit what the gems give in the talent description, rather than players having to search for them in the unlearned recipes, if they even know that exists.
- Thank you for making all the gems BOE again. Epic gems were a nightmare to craft this expac since they can’t be recrafted. While this probably would have been alleviated somewhat with concentration, they probably would have remained the craft with the most discrepancy between customer expectations and reality. I’m somewhat concerned about the bloodstone reagent for pvp gems being BOP, but hopefully it shouldn’t be much of an issue since the epic gems don’t appear to have ranks associated with them.
- There doesn’t seem to be any altar of decay equivalent requirements for any gear crafts as far as I could find. Maybe I missed the text somewhere, or it’s intended and hasn’t been added in, but I think a lot of people will be glad to see it gone.