#0 - Feb. 13, 2007, 10:15 p.m.
I'd like to start a discussion of engineering based on facts.
Here are the facts
1. Engineering didnt' get a recipe or a rep reward for about 8 major content patches except for a couple of goggles and novelty items and this trend has continued unabated
2. Engineering got shafted into uselessness in the expansion, good items were made unuseable after 60 with no replacement, bombs are too expensive to make, and even trinkets that are supposed to scale (arcanite dragonling, battle chicken) are pitiful, and their replacement was given to Jewelcrafting.
3. Engineering blows.
4. Blizzard posters are often misinformed and we are more often than not disappointed.
5. No blizzard poster has ever replied to any of the 654654654 'engineering item idea' posts in the past.
To compare to another profession, imagine if all good blacksmthing weapons and armor said 'chance to fail for no reason against targets higher than 60' and then blacksmthing being given no viable replacement weapons or armor above 60.
The point of scaling down low-level items that have unique functionalities (such as the Admirals hat or Green Whelp Armor) is to make the high-level items more desireable. The problem is that there are no high level desireable items in engineering. Why isn't there a mind control cap or battle pet for high levels?
A further annoyance is how Blizzard poster have never replied to the question about armor types in engineering, and how using cloth makes people never want to wear them because they don't offer enough protection while they're not being used, and using other armor types makes the item unavailable to cloth wearers. A simple solution would be to offer engineering armor transitiions to different armor types, but this perfectly reasonable suggestion has gone ignored for 3 years.
*The noteable exception to engineering uselessness is scopes, which are only useful to one single class.
EDIT: Reply to blizzard poster further down
Well I dropped it before you announced this 'lookover'. In fact I waited for a GIANT lookover you had last month. Did you ever hear of it? It was called The Burning Crusade. I waited for that profession revamp and was disappointed. Now you're scrambling to make it up to us by giving us nebulous promises about future patches. There was a professions page on the BC preview site and most of what was listed on it was scrapped. TBC was under development for more than 16 months, and it looks like 4 hours worth of work on a Friday afternoon was put into engineering, and I know a bit about software development.
Not a peep about engineering from you in the Beta forums during the months of testing when engineers were saying how badly it was sucking.
So is it working as intended now, or is it working as intended then? When will it be working as intended?
Here's my question, and it's a simple one. What is the design purpose of having engineering in the game?
As far as the user can tell, it's; scopes and novelty items and money sinks. If the user of your software product cannot see the design purpose of a feature, it's probably because the design purpose isn't being met or there is no design purpose.
