wow Dragonflight Profession Change Details

[Staff 1,488]

 

We have a lot of new information on the profession changes coming with Dragonflight, as CM Drough took to the forums to share details on endgame viability for crafted items, the move away from leveling by simply crafting tons of items, the relative grindiness of the system, and more! 

Professions (Source)

Hey Everyone,

Sorry for taking so long to start responding to this thread. We’ve been super busy building out the professions system and content we have been discussing. I’m going to try to slowly work through this and address some of the bigger points and questions here as I have time.

Professions is actively being worked, on so your responses and feedback are super helpful, so please keep them coming!

For my first response, I want to address some of the confusion around how you improve at your profession, and thus craft/gather things at higher quality. You do not directly get better at a recipe via crafting it multiple times, as you do with legendary recipes in Shadowlands. That is an interesting system, but ultimately requires a huge amount of gold investment and can get repetitive. This means only players with lots of gold can easily engage with it, and has also resulted in the cost of legendaries being extremely high in many cases.

For the profession revamp, there are many different ways to improve at your profession (I’ll talk more about those soon), and thus craft/gather items at higher quality. The goal is that the pursuit of profession progression is through compelling and fun activities over spending lots of gold though. Gold will of course still have its place. You may still want to buy reagents or make orders for high end crafting gear for instance, but it should not be a gate to your ability to dive into and have lots of success with your chosen professions.

...

It is absolutely the case that we plan on having crafted gear be able to compete with top end gear from other sources, and in some cases even be best in slot. One of the most important goals to the work order system is enabling crafted gear to be much more relevant to the game - across all activities. Just remember, in order to have that powerful gear crafted for yourself, you’ll need to go out and earn special (soulbound) reagents to provide to the crafter in order to have that item you’ve had your eye on crafted!

...

Gladly.

I don’t want to go into a lot of detail on the planned system for Dragonflight yet, but the intent is that this is not generally grindy when aiming to earn gear appropriate to your activity.

That is, if you are a normal raider for instance, your normal raid provides enough reagents to allow you to to craft a limited amount of ~normal raid item level gear without needing to go do a bunch of other stuff. But if say, you wanted to craft heroic raid tier gear as a normal raider, you could choose to go do other activities such as m+, pvp, or challenging outdoor activities to supplement the reagents required and get better gear sooner.

In general we’d like crafted gear to feel like something you are earning at a satisfying rate along side your other gear sources. Say you had bad luck and got no drops while raiding, you’ll still be making progress towards some high end crafted gear…and say you just can’t get legs to drop for you, you may choose to have legs crafted to fill in that particular slot with a larger upgrade.

For some crafted gear, you might also need to seek out a special rare drop off a certain mob in the world, a dungeon, or a raid as well. Earning crafted gear should feel like a bonus, an adventure, and a social experience.

[darkgreenwax 412]

I only read the first half, but I do hope they double down on what they claim of their intent here: make professions more fun and engaging. Create multiple ways of strengthening or leveling your craft. I'd rather my profession organically grow with a variety of things I'm doing, rather than have wow-professions open on my 2nd monitor.

[Teufel 331]

11 minutes ago, TyZone said:

I only read the first half, but I do hope they double down on what they claim of their intent here: make professions more fun and engaging. Create multiple ways of strengthening or leveling your craft. I'd rather my profession organically grow with a variety of things I'm doing, rather than have wow-professions open on my 2nd monitor.

Out of curiousity,did you enjoy Legion's approach to profession design? I.e. the quest part.

[Avengingturd 1]

I just wish gathering professions got condensed into a single profession, feels bad that crafting is so cool (or going to be) but you're just a dumpy herbalist and alchemist. Sure, you can supply yourself. But in a game that is becoming more streamlined for alts, seems less and less engaging as everyone is slowly becoming engi/alch because no one would farm for other profs they could try- imagine if everyone had gathering (maybe even as a secondary) and every alt actually slowly gathered mats for you to use on your one armorsmith or leatherworker.

[darkgreenwax 412]

6 hours ago, Teufel said:

Out of curiousity,did you enjoy Legion's approach to profession design? I.e. the quest part.

I'm pretty sure I did! I say "pretty sure" because I don't recall ever being annoyed by any of it. I liked talking to NPCs and doing quests in certain zones. I remember talking to a moose man in the mountains for LW or BS and I remember talking to a ghoul elf in a cave for something else. But I enjoyed it more than just purchasing exact mats for a recipe guide to afk max your prof.

[VictorVakaras 83]

Here's an alterative way to gear, but you still have to do content that you're trying to avoid (raiding, mythic plus, pvp) to get  the materials. 🙄 

[Starseed 113]

2 hours ago, VictorVakaras said:

Here's an alterative way to gear, but you still have to do content that you're trying to avoid (raiding, mythic plus, pvp) to get  the materials. 🙄 

what content do you want to do if not raiding,pvp or m+? normal dungeons? open world stuff? i would say what ever you get from a normal dungeon or a quest should be more then enough for that

[Prophet001 598]

11 hours ago, Avengingturd said:

I just wish gathering professions got condensed into a single profession, feels bad that crafting is so cool (or going to be) but you're just a dumpy herbalist and alchemist. Sure, you can supply yourself. But in a game that is becoming more streamlined for alts, seems less and less engaging as everyone is slowly becoming engi/alch because no one would farm for other profs they could try- imagine if everyone had gathering (maybe even as a secondary) and every alt actually slowly gathered mats for you to use on your one armorsmith or leatherworker.

I disagree.

FF being an omnicrafter shouldn't make its way into WoW.

[TheJayco 17]

I've been thinking for a while that professions should be a good way for "bad luck protection" in raids. Instead of just adding in badges, valor, etc. Give the bosses items that drop where eventually, even after a long period of time, you can craft an item that you're missing. When I was playing 6 nights a week doing dungeons and raids, I still had times where I would have a single piece that was much lower item levels than the rest because it just never dropped.

[Avengingturd 1]

4 hours ago, Prophet001 said:

I disagree.

FF being an omnicrafter shouldn't make its way into WoW.

Haven't played FF but I guess the solution does not have to make every gathering profession (3) into one, but might be to move gathering off of the primary profession list. No one gathers on small servers and they're plagued with bots or mat flippers. There needs to be a really good incentive for someone to gather (let alone an incentive to take a gathering profession) and the areas shouldn't be as divisive material-wise (region specific ore/herbs) unless there is another incentive to go back to each area even at end game content. This would also indirectly combat botting if players themselves are actually gathering to add to the market.

They talk a lot in various interviews about making the player experience more focused on the progression that is necessary and fun, and I love professions (have a maxed crafter of each kind) but gathering couldn't be more of a chore in current WoW since you have to go out of your way to farm mats to barely craft 1 item in some professions. Being able to do current content and passively gather would be nice like we see with elethium ore and first flower in new areas, but beyond that we just see price hikes in other areas of the market due to lack of farmers or reasons to farm.

There's only 3 gathering professions, but they just don't seem worth taking at the moment unless you're willing to spend your free time brainlessly farming materials for gold. Make gathering profs secondary at least so that everyone has 1.

[Calysia 229]

4 hours ago, Avengingturd said:

Haven't played FF but I guess the solution does not have to make every gathering profession (3) into one, but might be to move gathering off of the primary profession list. No one gathers on small servers and they're plagued with bots or mat flippers. There needs to be a really good incentive for someone to gather (let alone an incentive to take a gathering profession) and the areas shouldn't be as divisive material-wise (region specific ore/herbs) unless there is another incentive to go back to each area even at end game content. This would also indirectly combat botting if players themselves are actually gathering to add to the market.

They talk a lot in various interviews about making the player experience more focused on the progression that is necessary and fun, and I love professions (have a maxed crafter of each kind) but gathering couldn't be more of a chore in current WoW since you have to go out of your way to farm mats to barely craft 1 item in some professions. Being able to do current content and passively gather would be nice like we see with elethium ore and first flower in new areas, but beyond that we just see price hikes in other areas of the market due to lack of farmers or reasons to farm.

There's only 3 gathering professions, but they just don't seem worth taking at the moment unless you're willing to spend your free time brainlessly farming materials for gold. Make gathering profs secondary at least so that everyone has 1.

That would take away a source of gold for those that do just gathering plus it would remove having to make a choice...something that's been watered down more and more since Classic. Those that craft as a gold making venture are more than happy to pay gatherers to supply their mats.

[Calorat 78]

14 hours ago, N3ilo said:

what content do you want to do if not raiding,pvp or m+? normal dungeons? open world stuff? i would say what ever you get from a normal dungeon or a quest should be more then enough for that

crafting gear needing mats from dungeons, raids etc, to make gear for those instances  is just more gatekeeping, just like the gear dropped in those instances being needed to progress to the next level is also gatekeeping.  just because a gatekeeping system is what WoW uses doesn't mean it's a good system.  Its just the system a lot of people have gotten use to and like because their self esteem is so low that being able to brag they have better gear than a casual player makes them feel better about themselves

[Starseed 113]

4 hours ago, Calorat said:

crafting gear needing mats from dungeons, raids etc, to make gear for those instances  is just more gatekeeping, just like the gear dropped in those instances being needed to progress to the next level is also gatekeeping.  just because a gatekeeping system is what WoW uses doesn't mean it's a good system.  Its just the system a lot of people have gotten use to and like because their self esteem is so low that being able to brag they have better gear than a casual player makes them feel better about themselves

nah buddy thats just how rpgs work you lvl up and get gear to face you foes wich in turn makes you stronger and gives you better gear to fight against tougher foes. how do you want it to be? every one can just go into any raid and fight the monsters? how do you progress if not by getting stronger to fight the bigger evil guys

[Migol 433]

Quote

It is absolutely the case that we plan on having crafted gear be able to compete with top end gear from other sources, and in some cases even be best in slot.

Pushing X to doubt here.

We've heard this before, and they always, ALWAYS back away from it.    At best you get a good SOULBOUND item for the crafter only, or more likely you get normal-heroic tier as the absolute cap.     And you have some professions (Inscription) that never even get the higher ilevel crafts that others do.