Shakes

The problem with BoP items is balance. If you make them too weak, then they're not worth the cost (see the T6 patterns that require 1000s of gold worth of HoD for questionable upgrades over drops). If you make them better than what you can get from raids (see tailoring early on in the expansion) everyone complains that raiding feels pointless.

It's a very fine line making the BoP items useful without being required. I think this is why there is a push to make the perks item enhancements (ring enchants, leg patches, unique gems, etc).

 

• sadris

Making the recipes require BOP raid-only drops fixes this problem. It was done for SSC/TK-level patterns.

 

Copernicus

For making crafting/gathering more worthwhile, give the appropriate gathering profession another minor boost if they have the right crafting profession.

 

urotas

You can make each raiding tier give an item slightly better than the equivalent from a raid boss. There are several ways you can control how you get the recipe/materials such as :
1. Killing a specific boss frees an npc, who'll teach you the recipe
2. You can buy the recipe after obtaining a specific level of reputation with the instance's faction (revered for ashtongue deathsworn/scale of the sands for example)
3. Recipes are random drops from trash or bosses
4. Recipes are universally available, but require special items only dropping in the raid instance

Personally I'd prefer some of 1, 2 or 4. By linking the recipe to actually doing the content, you can make them appropriate upgrades for the Tier level. If you link the recipe to reputation, the crafter can also be sure he'll get the item by doing the content. I didn't personally like the Sunwell system of extremely powerful and rare boe-recipes.

One problem with linking professions together is what to do with enchanting and tailoring? Enchanting is it's own gathering profession, and tailoring gathering is universally available. I wouldn't mind seeing gathering and crafting professions linked together directly, so being a blacksmith would already give you the skill to mine. Alternatively you could just make the gathering skills available to everyone, and give everyone 2 crafting profession slots. I doubt we'll ever see something like that implemented, though.

 

Vasala

I like the idea of melding the gathering skill in with the appropriate crafting skills. Then if you are a blacksmith you can go mine the ore you need without worrying that by sticking with mining you are hurting yourself in raids. The other plus to this is that the maximum skill for the gathering skill could be linked to the crafting skill. So if 300 is the maximum you can currently achieve with blacksmithing the mining would be capped there as well. This way there would be a bit more effort needed to reach the highest gathering ability. It would also allow players more choices without having to add more profession slots as the three gathering skills would no longer exist as separate entities.

As to what would happen in that situation if you unlearned a skill it would just depend on whether or not you still had another profession that granted you the same skill or not. If you were say a blacksmith / engineer and dropped the blacksmithing you would still have mining from the engineering side though it would be capped at the engineering max level if the old blacksmithing was higher. If your other profession did not involve that skill you would no longer be able to perform that gathering skill. Relearning could either give it back at the previous level or require it to be relearned (or a combination where the max skill was remembered but only the max allowed by the crafting skill could be used until the crafting caught back up.)

I admit that some of this idea is aimed at making things a bit more difficult for the gold farmers with their dual gathering skills. Sure they would be able to adapt to it but it would at least make things take a bit longer for them as they keep coming back after the ban waves. I don't think it would be that bad for the normal player since they would potentially gain the benefit of effectively one or two extra professions over the current system. It would also give the current crafting professions more of a stand alone ability like is currently enjoyed by Tailoring and Enchanting.

If things were melded then there would be no need to give the gathering skills extra bonuses since the bonus would just be based on what craft they were part of.

 

• Chicken

It really depends on how exactly it'll work though. If it works like prospecting where you need a specific herb for a specific type of pomace then yes it'll most likely cause somewhat of a price inflation unless the herbs most required are the Northrend equivalent of Ragveil. If it works more like disenchanting where the itemlevel of the herb is what determines what pomace you get, then herb prices will also go up, but mostly for the herbs that aren't really used for potions often (As those are typically cheaper).

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Thallsring

To address something else than expanded bag/bank space (which incidentally is awesome), I wonder if there is any word on racials at this point? I've checked the beta site on wowhead and from what I can see, racials remain unchanged, which brings up the

Tauren racial and tanking.

While I do realise that health values are not going to increase as drastically as they did going from vanilla to TBC, but it will increase. With 10 new levels, flasks, spells and God knows what effects the revamped itemization has on stat allocation, I don't think it will be unlikely for a tank to waltz around with somewhere between 26,000 and 30,000 health (more likely the latter) once we start hitting raid zones.

That's 1,500 health right there for Taurens. While Blizzard can obviously not tune encounters on the assumption that all tanks are Taurens, because of the Alliance gimpage in this area and the style choice of certain horde tanks, I am wondering if we are entering yet another chapter in the "All Horde tanks should be Taurens" saga. Are Deathknight tanks destined to a bovine life in order to ensure their edge in recruitment situations and will encounters start to show increasing favour towards guilds with Tauren tank, because they just have that extra leeway?

While I don't mind a racial that increases health, just as in the TBC discussions, I still think Blizzard should change the racial to a static value, as they did with Bloodfury, to ensure that raiding with Tauren tanks isn't a formulae to "cheese" encounters.
To a lesser extent, I suppose the % based discussion applies to Expansive Mind (the Gnome racial) as well, though this doesn't affect tanking.

 

Roywyn

Bear in mind that Orc/Human tanks can get 5 expertise, which is 1.25%/2.5% threat, or ~40 rating which means you could socket 60 stamina. Night Elves get 1% dodge, which also would be ~40 rating or 60 stamaina gemmed.
No doubt, Tauren still win the tank race in situations where max HP is king.


But look at non-tanks.
Orcs - Blood Fury depends on level. It also "scales" with your hit/crit/haste/APen. It's just a little bit of scaling, but still.
Also, Orcs have +5% damage, which is a nice scaling for very pet-heavy playstyle (BM/Demo).
Trolls - 10-30% haste for 10s every 3m. Not much, but it scales. Just think about what that means to a mage who pops it stacked with 7 other cooldowns after a 3rd slash on Brutallus.
Gnomes - 5% int is pretty nice for arcane mages. Not so much for warriors/rogues/warlocks/other mages.
Human - 10% spirit on the other hand became pretty nice in 2.4, and won't get worse in WotLK.
Draenei - a 1% hit aura party-wide is nice everyone auto-caps.

So, as you see, there are many more stacking/multiplicative talents than just 5% health.
Horde/Tauren win the "Tank HP" meter, if that's what matters.
But another 5 free expertise for tanks in a DPS/TPS race can be huge (not so much in wrath since you can gem-cap if necessary), and 1% dodge in avoidance stacked gear (80%+) isn't exactly terrible either.


For non-tanks, there are no or very few clear-cut choices.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

Rate-my-WotLK-spec! If it's not listed here, it's probably not worth it: http://elitistjerks.com/846078-post4020.html

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.

 

• Chicken

The 5% extra health bonus only really becomes more powerful now if the amount of damage bosses deal relative to the total health a tank can expect to have goes down as well actually. It's certainly a powerful racial, but if we have 20k health and a boss hitting for 4k or 30k health and a boss hitting for 6k the increase to survivability provided by 5% extra health remains the same.

Or in other words, Tauren tanks are likely to remain just as desirable as they are now. Raid encounters are designed around the stats we can be expected to have, so an increase in the amount of health players have will also result in an increase to the damage players take.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

Shuth

I'd rather they not follow a similar system with major enchants like they did with KZ and random drops. I'm still running it waiting for enchant formulae to drop. I'm hoping they follow a similar route to ZA and have them drop from multiple bosses.

 

mclem

It feels like dwarves get a rather raw deal out of this. A little frost res, a little +crit on ranged weapons, and stoneform. Stoneform is very nice as an emergency button, but I'd guess the cumulative benefit is far less than that of either the extra health from tauren racial or that from gemming. On the bright side, at least stoneform scales nicely.

 

zirky

I'm not quite sure I agree with you. Currently, there are tons of daily quests to make money. There used to be a time when people farmed herbs and ore for gold. Now, everyone just hits up the Isle or Netherwing Ledge. Speaking from a fairly backwater-raidingwise server, since the release of the SSO dailies, the supply of farmed goods (primals/herbs/ore) has dropped dramatically causing prices to sky rocket. I highly doubt that with the inception of daily quests, the entire sever population immediate dropped their gathering professions to pick up engineering. People still gather; its just more as they stumble upon it as opposed to making a concerted effort to farm; this is a trend I don't see changing.

I really like the idea of tying a tying gathering to crafting. It just seems to make logical sense and gives that much more reason to level a crafting. The downside that I can see is having say a combination of blacksmithing/engineering/jewelcrafting. With gathering "perks," its considerably less beneficial to have a double mining based profession set.

 

mclem

I've been wondering about the best options for a tank; do we know yet if the +socket from blacksmithing is only available to the blacksmith themself? If so, I'm thinking mining (+35 stamina) and blacksmithing (+30 stamina from the extra socket) might work out the best pairing - or are there any traits to other professions that I'm not taking into account?

 

Scurn

The new Jewelcrafting gems count as every color. So that 45stamina gem can be used in a red or yellow socket so the stamina gain and meta requirements are exagerated over just the 15stamina increase.

 

• Exewut

This has nothing to do with prospecting, but everything with the fact that:
- gathering professions aren't all that good
- goldsellers are getting banned
- dailies are making sure that inflation is skyhigh

The only way to fix their economy is to either remove dailies or to make dailies give raw materials instead of gold, or to make sure everyone has a gathering profession somehow. (only 1 creating profession allowed, every profession gets treated like enchanting/tailoring (gathering skill in the profession) or people get 1 extra slot that is restricted to gathering professions only).

 

Adrammelech

The BoP JCer gems and trinkets haven't been revealed yet as far as I know, though I agree, currently smithing and mining is looking very nice for tanks.

 

Zurai

It's the latter. Every herb up to Mageroyal yields Alabaster Pomace, right now, while the next "tier" yield Dusk Pomace. (note: names may be off, I can't login to check my DK at the moment)

 

Sydane

The thing is, there's only a certain amount that you can increase the influx of raw materials, even with an infinite number of farmers. It only takes 2-3 people to farm out an entire BC zone currently, anything more and people are just sitting around waiting for respawn. You see similar things in the elemental plateau, it's a great source to farm motes for basically one person per type, any more than that and it's not creating more items, just distributing them differently. Even with the fact that a huge amount of the gathering professions have been dropped for raiding, there's still going to be more people in those zones, especially early, than the respawns can keep up with. Even with a gathering profession, it's virtually impossible to self-supply all the mats needed for the related crafting profession. So demand is going to be high, and people are sitting on huge amounts of gold already, so prices are going to be high.

It's nice to see some bonus being given to the gathering professions so you don't feel like people in raids with them are a complete drain (after all, no one would want to run Hyjal with no miners, and yet ideally you wouldn't want any). The percentage of people doing the crazy act of leveling five professions to max just to be absolutely ideal is actually extremely limited, I see people in SW guilds all the time that still have gathering professions, and not everyone in the game picked up leatherworking as much as the theory on this forum says they should have. 35 stam or 25 crit is a nice bonus but it is hardly game changing considering most tanks will probably have in the realm of 1500 or even 2000 stam. Compared to the benefit of having superior BoP gear as well as a stat bonus, crafting still is a bigger gain overall, but gathering doesn't get completely left out this time.

Prices are going to be high, gold is going to flow like water, and it really won't matter. Figure the dailies will give 25-30g each roughly. 100-200g per stack for herbs and ores seems pretty much inevitable.

 

Douglas

Yeah, I've thought this for ages. The solution I came up with probably isn't practical -- effectively, have NPCs watch the auction house, and whenever items are availalbe for less than a particular price, they buy them all up, and whenever market value goes over a particular price (or availability drops to 0), NPCs start listing the items. (Just don't have the NPCs use buyouts, so players always get "dibs" over NPCs instead of competing.)

This would let Blizzard set a range in between which the price of every BoE item would fluctuate, never going below the low or above the high. IMHO, it would improve the game, but I can't see Blizzard ever doing it.

 

Douglas

Stoneform is going to be pretty interesting in PvP in Wrath, I think. Remember, DKs use a lot of diseases, and when you activate Stoneform, all poisons, bleeds, and diseases are removed from you, and you become immune to them while stoneform is up. I think it's not impossible that horde will end up whining about Stoneform the way alliance whines about Will of the Forsaken, once everyone and their cousin is playing a DK.

 

Valerian

While the gold income from dailies is bad, the worse aspect is people are doing the dailies for money instead of gathering. Thus the supply for gathered mats decreases as well, further increasing the price. A lot of people do NOT realize how to optimize their gold per hour and thus dailies look like "easy money" even though doing another activity may in fact result in more money (its also immediate which helps).

Further, while there is gold inflation on the AH in terms of goods, this inflation has no real effect on repair costs/respec costs since these are fixed. Our now inflated gold still holds the same value when it comes to these, which is a benefit in and of itself of more available gold.