If somebody took a time leveling profession on an alt, he should be able to benefit from it (even on his other character). The disparity between crafting main and crafting alt is already covered via many means (you named them). There is absolutely no need to artificially require even more intercation by following enchanting-like system, because it is plainly annoying for many people.
And as for special gathering routines - there were Hyjal Mining nodes ^_^.
The hyjal gems were also available trough black temple drops though, and now badges.
The sunmotes and hearts of darkness fall into the quite useful category, and there's patterns that use them for most classes.
It would have been interesting to see an enchanting recipe or 2 that used them as well though.
Sometimes it's early in the morning where there's nobody online, it's great to just be able to log an alt then.
But yes, If able i prefer to make my own stuff in general, it saves time and grief.
If i don't have a pattern, then guild members are the second spot to look which generally pays off.
For WotLK, I'm sure we'll see something similar to the hearts and sunmotes again, we can't be sure whether the sunmote system will be used again, personally i think it's quite useful that way. For other materials, even if they're available only in raids most such materials will end up in the guildbank and not really benefit the individual crafter.
-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.
Right now I'm surprised by how powerful these Glyphs are. The Healing Touch one is huge, for example, though it arguably won't change Resto playstyle very much. But at the same time, I can't help but see some of these as further precipitating the erosion of class uniqueness.. which is a debate in and of its own right, I suppose, along with the fact that the devs seem intent on making the game require skill by making abilities more and more complicated so that optimal rotations become more difficult to determine on the fly.
However, my excitement about glyphs are largely dampened in the same way my excitment about the new talents are - there will almost surely be a cookie-cutter glyph set to go along with your cookie-cutter talent build. Unless good glyphs are actually difficult to attain - and if they were, the complaints would be endless - then I'm not sure if they'd add much to the game that couldn't have been added through new talents already. Personally, I'm a fan of interesting gear and set bonuses that force you to change your playstyle as you progress in order to remain cutting-edge, like with a lot of Mages switching to Arcane when they got 2/5 T5 bonuses. I don't think you'll ever see much diversity in high-end builds, which is why I don't think introducing new options will genuinely lead to more customization, but I think if Blizz makes it so that your playstyle has to change several times throughout your character's progression (and not just because spec X outscales spec Y), that'd be interesting.
Okay, this is getting kinda tl;dr. But the overall point is that I hope the more radical glyphs become fairly rare items that you acquire through endgame PvE or PvP, and then you take them to Inscriptors (maybe with some other mats) and have them Inscribed with whatever ability you want. And then you adjust your playstyle. And as you continue to progress and get better glyphs, you have to do this several times. The alternate goal of glyps, promoting a diversity of customization, is probably a lost cause..
I would personally favor more interaction. I can see the point if your server has the usual channel 2 spam, but on our server it is quite ok. Perhabs they should introduce better options for advertising or searching stuff than a channel. Maybe you could pay an NPC to announce what you offer or seek for a small fee and this could only be heard in trade districts.
There are many ways to promote interaction and the "I want something and I want it now" is always a bad approach. Every rogue wants wargleaves and you can fill in other stuff. The problem is that channel 2 is bad tool and not that interaction is bad by itself.
Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde
My gut feeling (and only that) would be that Inscriptions should be "poppable" for a gold fee, either paid to an Inscriber or some NPC. The glyphs end up in your inventory so you can swap them when respeccing. Seems like a fairly nice solution to me.
I would personally favor more interaction. I can see the point if your server has the usual channel 2 spam, but on our server it is quite ok. Perhabs they should introduce better options for advertising or searching stuff than a channel. Maybe you could pay an NPC to announce what you offer or seek for a small fee and this could only be heard in trade districts.
There are many ways to promote interaction and the "I want something and I want it now" is always a bad approach. Every rogue wants wargleaves and you can fill in other stuff. The problem is that channel 2 is bad tool and not that interaction is bad by itself.
A crafters hall with the auction house npcs and some form of advertisement system, as well as a forge, a trade goods vendor and other things crafters may want, could be a nice idea. Problem with this is that you actually have to travel there, which is the nice thing about the trade channel. An ad system would solve the problems the trade channel have with worthless spam though, it's near unusable on some servers at peak hours.
That's the thing though, I doubt there's a single alchemist, enchanter, leatherworker or blacksmith who will be willing to make any lvl 1-300 craftables for you unless you bring a decent and out of proportions tip along with the mats.
If you can look at your alts for the more mundane craftables then you save them a lot of time, and yourself a lot of frustration trying to find someone to make the item for you. If I need something simple, i want to just make it and have it ready within minutes without having to spam a trade channel for the possible chance of getting scammed out of my materials, or bid on the AH in the hopes of winning the bid or paying a dozen times more than the item's worth.
I guess you could put it like this; If you compare two characters, Adam and Bertrand, with the same profession and Adam has invested 20% of the time/effort/gold that Bertrand has in the profession, Adam should not be sitting on 90% of the financial viability. The purpose of all the limitations I've mentioned above is to prevent that.
Legacy items/Leveling items are not, for the most part, relevant when push comes to shove, or should not be (yes, I am remembering the enchanting rods here) at any rate. But even if they are, I'd say there's no such thing as an "out of proportion" tip. Supply and demand.
I'm inclined to say that the main reason people spend time in trade isn't too much inter-dependancies, but too little. Outside of our guild's - and depending on your guild, sometimes not even that - most of us aren't tracking who has what. There's no social networking of crafters to ensure that when you want your goods, you can get it, because there's "always" the auction house. And when the auction house isn't an option, the problem isn't that you have to look for one as much as it is that you have to look for one over and over again because you had no reason to stay in touch with the last guy you found. A system to help with this - be it an in-game billboard, or an out-of-game trade forum - would be quite an awesome addition, but I don't think the lack there of or an overabundance of inter-dependancy are the problems.
Whomever was in charge of tailoring in BC did a bang up job. You could easily equip any cloth based class for the end game for the most part with just everyday work. The other professions were not so well served.
Nah they made a crap job, the cloth dpsers got a dps set that was onpar with t5 for t4 content which is simply stupid, otherclasses got screwed over, warriors had nothing, not a single epic dps armor piece to craft. We did get weapons though, but it wasnt nearly as big of a upgrade as the whole cloth seth was and you needed vorxtexes from ssc/tk to complete the weapon which made it balanced. Rogues/druids had a few pieces they could farm for pve dps I suppose, although I dont know how good they were at the time. Holy paladins had 1 item to craft and retri/prot pallys had nearly nothing at all (correct me here if im wrong)
So in my oppinion they fucked it up completely from the start
Nah they made a crap job, the cloth dpsers got a dps set that was onpar with t5 for t4 content which is simply stupid, otherclasses got screwed over, warriors had nothing, not a single epic dps armor piece to craft. We did get weapons though, but it wasnt nearly as big of a upgrade as the whole cloth seth was and you needed vorxtexes from ssc/tk to complete the weapon which made it balanced. Rogues/druids had a few pieces they could farm for pve dps I suppose, although I dont know how good they were at the time. Holy paladins had 1 item to craft and retri/prot pallys had nearly nothing at all (correct me here if im wrong)
So in my oppinion they fucked it up completely from the start
If i recall correctly : The rogue LW pieces were very much inferior to Tier 4. Mainly because our T4 was almost on par with the T5 set.
The epic craftable offhand sword inferior to a lvl 70 blue. Excepting the third tier, but by then there was the S2 arena sword.
Druid gear was pretty decent, the blues were among the better tanking gear for a good while. But most replaced by T4/5.
So, the cloth was probably rather strong compared to the other professions.
Cloth users won't complain about it, but making tailoring mandatory as it was for early raiders or rerollers wasn't exactly optimal.
Originally Posted by Vihermaali
This was already stated in the WotLK thread, but I'll put it in here too. Alchemists get "Alchemical blood" -effect in WotLK: basically it seems to increase the effect of flasks, elixirs and potions you can make by ~15-20%.
This will mainly affect PvE. It also gives a reason to have alchemy on your main char.
Still worthless for rogues, and probably most other classes then.
Especially since the potion chugging nerf makes the trinket worth less as well.
Currently a 20% to the flask stats would give 24 AP, which is 12 stat points.
Compared to 8 AP + 8 agi + 8 stam enchanting gets. or 2x20 in WotLK.
Not to mention the benefits of having something that's "always on" vs something that's both less good, doesn't work in pvp, and isn't likely to be used while grinding.
Last edited by Zurgat : 07/29/08 at 10:48 AM.
-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.
This was already stated in the WotLK thread, but I'll put it in here too. Alchemists get "Alchemical blood" -effect in WotLK: basically it seems to increase the effect of flasks, elixirs and potions you can make by ~15-20%.
Keep in mind this is only a 25 spellpower buff with the new flask, which is the current buff enchanters get of ring enchants. Nice and more versatile, but not a replacement for the alchemist stone.
I am personally hoping that the inscription glyphs will be something you learn and then drag and drop to the inscription slots to activate. This is so respecing does not become even more annoying. With the talked about change to allow 2 specs that a player can switch between it would seem like a step backwards to need to purchase new inscriptions every time a player swapped between these two specs.
While a casual player might not care that much that his inscriptions were not optimized you can bet that it will be a big deal for raiders. This will be especially true if we see more instances like Sunwell where the number of healers, tanks, and dps can change dramatically from one fight to the next.
I really don't think there's anything that can be done to make the crafting professions more profitable than they were in BC. Primal Nethers for a long time were a big source of crafting profitability, so if there is something similar in the early stages of WotLK, that will be true again. But there are several things working again professions that keep them down.
1) The leveling process. So many people hand out free enchants, free crafting, and so forth "with your mats" in order to level faster. Thus, for anything but the absolute endgame enchants, there's almost always someone around who will do it for free. Not only that, but it creates an environment where people expect to get things done free.
2) Guilds. The typical behavior in a guild is to do the various professions for free for your guildmates. This means unless you are in a very small guild (which may become more common in WotLK), or you need it immediately, you can usually just wait around for a guildmate to do what you need for free. This also creates a general perception that crafting doesn't have much value beyond saving a little time.
3) Tipping. People are cheap and stupid. Even though you can make 30g in ten minutes quite easily, I've frequently had people decline 20g fees for enchants only to spam trade for 20 minutes looking for someone who will do it cheaper. The worst part is that crafters commonly offer their servers "free with tips," thus making the entire process random and unpredictable when it comes to profiting. And again, we have the environment created that things are free for "just clicking a button" but it would be nice to get a tip. Never mind the costs of patterns, hours of farming, and so forth. See a pattern here?
Basically, the problem is as much the players as it is the game design. Anyone who thinks that enchanters are going to make more money listing enchants on the open market is deluding themselves, people will just undercut each other, not to mention the 20g or more mat cost of the scroll to put the enchant on. It will be just like every other craftable item. People dump thousands of gold into patterns just to be able to do them for their guilds and treat it like an expense, keeping those prices so high that you'll rarely make money back on buying one.
The best thing Blizzard did with professions in BC was make them useful to have as an individual, with the added bonus of being able to craft things for other people. Every profession is profitable to a certain extent if you try hard enough (though none compare to gathering, but of course gathering is getting a lesser bonus as well), but the real benefit is to your character. They are expanding this even further in WotLK, for which I heartily applaud them.
3) Tipping. People are cheap and stupid. Even though you can make 30g in ten minutes quite easily, I've frequently had people decline 20g fees for enchants only to spam trade for 20 minutes looking for someone who will do it cheaper. The worst part is that crafters commonly offer their servers "free with tips," thus making the entire process random and unpredictable when it comes to profiting. And again, we have the environment created that things are free for "just clicking a button" but it would be nice to get a tip. Never mind the costs of patterns, hours of farming, and so forth. See a pattern here?
A "20g fee" isn't a tip. A tip is extra, which the other player may or may not give you. While it is nice, it should never be expected.
Does anyone else see the direction were going at with these profession builds?
I can already see having to level up tailoring or leatherworking every time I get an upgrade for pants, leveling up smithing to put a socket in a new weapon, then leveling up jcing to make a jcing gem for that socket. Then Ill have to level up enchanting to enchant my new ring, then releveling alchemy and inscription for those buffs in order to maximize dps/healing/tanking.
It seems were completely moving away from professions being a choice and going to becoming a class and spec defining decision, at least for end game raiding. It just seems to me that what was started in TBC will become much worst now.
Unless everything is equalized, which it cant and wont be from what weve seen so far, youll have professions that stand out and are optimal choices for a given class and spec. For gathering professions, unless you have the buffs they give scale with each newly added endgame raid instance, they quickly become obsolete and really worth nothing as we upgrade gear. Sure 25 crit rating or 35 stamina is great as you enter Naxx, but if youre making BiS tailoring/smithing/lwing recipes from each tier, youll quickly outpace that and make that bonus null in the 2nd or 3rd tier. And if in each new tier you dont have a BiS crafted available to you, it really defeats the purpose of having those professions.
For myself, this is all exacerbated by the fact that if I do have to change a profession because X profession gives such a benefit to my class and my spec, then I have to drop either tailoring or enchanting to do so. Which means that I lose out on rare crafted recipes that I either grinded out or farmed in an instance that people wont be going back to anymore. At the very least Id like to see full crafted memory so that this doesnt happen.
Another thing which needs to be addressed in some way is tailoring and cloth drops. Id like to see some kind of benefit to drops of cloth if a tailor is killing a mob vs a non tailor. Tailoring for too long has the items needed to craft drop from mobs around the world, but anyone can farm these items. There should be an advantage to a tailor farming cloth vs a non tailor. Maybe something along the lines of 2x normal cloth drops if a tailor looted a mob vs non tailor. Something so that my tailor main has a reason to farm for cloth, so that if I need to farm for cloth, I can actually do so.
Maybe they should expand the system they use in the armor crafting professions to counter the "New ring? Have to relevel enchanting " effect. Like here: [Robe of Eternal Light]
The enchant on your ring would look like: +20 Healing (Requires Enchanting (350))
Same for the JC-only gems and for everything that is for one profession only but can be used after dropping, like the new Leatherworking only enchants, socket from Blacksmithing (don't know if this is BS only), and so on.
So you would have to choose one upgrade (or two) and don't have to level up every time like Masaren mentioned.
Blacksmithing, Tailoring, and Engineering are not yet implemented
Blacksmiths can add 1 socket to weapons which do not yet have a socket.
Meaning dual wielding players get 2x +20 stats from gems. Unless the sockets also apply a bonus of +2 agi or +3 stam or such.
I'm not sure yet whether they'll be able to add sockets if the item already has some of it's own.
Also, interesting about those leg armors, i wasn't sure about those before.
The names also seem to have changed in beta, compared to alpha.
* Jormungar Leg Armor - Increase Stamina by 45 and Agility by 15.
* Jormungar Leg Chitin - Increase Stamina by 50 and Agility by 18.
* Dragonscale Leg Armor - Increase Stamina by 72 and Agility by 35.
* Nerubian Leg Armor - Increase attack power by 60 and critical strike rating by 15.
* Nerubian Leg Chitin - Increase attack power by 70 and critical strike rating by 18.
* Protoscale Leg Armor - Increase attack power by 100 and critical strike rating by 36.
Last edited by Zurgat : 07/29/08 at 12:19 PM.
-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.
I can already see having to level up tailoring or leatherworking every time I get an upgrade for pants, leveling up smithing to put a socket in a new weapon, then leveling up jcing to make a jcing gem for that socket. Then Ill have to level up enchanting to enchant my new ring, then releveling alchemy and inscription for those buffs in order to maximize dps/healing/tanking.
It seems were completely moving away from professions being a choice and going to becoming a class and spec defining decision, at least for end game raiding. It just seems to me that what was started in TBC will become much worst now.
Unless everything is equalized, which it cant and wont be from what weve seen so far, youll have professions that stand out and are optimal choices for a given class and spec. For gathering professions, unless you have the buffs they give scale with each newly added endgame raid instance, they quickly become obsolete and really worth nothing as we upgrade gear.
For myself, this is all exacerbated by the fact that if I do have to change a profession because X profession gives such a benefit to my class and my spec, then I have to drop either tailoring or enchanting to do so.
I see all professions giving different kind of bonuses, what are. Well, bonuses. I'm Alchemist/Herbalist and I can take everything Sunwell can throw at me (haven't killed KJ yet, but seen first hand what he can do in low %'s). And after finished still left standing asking for more. While having no unique JC items, with no LW drums in my party, with no special tailoring items or extra enchanting enchants.
While I understand that only way to increase your performance as dps may be gearing up, I doubt Blizzard will ever do so tight dps check that would require doing what you describe. Even one of hardest dps checks ever, M'uru, was nerfed (fairly) soon after release.
Unlike popular delusion implies, you can do Karazhan with full dungeon blue raid that has 0 professions. And repeat all the kills. This applies to all raiding levels (meaning they only require loot from previous tier). And will most likely continue to apply in WotLK.
Preface: My Rogue is a jewelcrafter/miner, my Resto Shaman is an herbalist/potion alchemist.
I'm pretty happy with the alchemy changes so far. I've never really had to chain pots, being my alt the toughest content I do on him is T5 and I don't find it to be necessary. That said I definitely can't relate to Sunwell healers, but I see this as a similar "nerf" to the 2.1 battle/guardian elixir change. It will really help people who don't want to have to spend hours farming pots every day so they can match the level at which a given encounter is tuned.
Alchemical Blood looks pretty good, and should allow Blizzard to make some new alchemist stones if they choose to go that path again, with new special effects. I could see them doing something that when used, gives a partial benefit of the flask/elixirs you have equipped to your whole party (i.e. Rogue is using a 35 agility/20 crit elixir. He uses his trinket and gives 50% of the benefit, 17 agility 10 crit, to the party for 20 seconds). Obviously this is pure speculation, but seeing as they gave all alchemists AB, hopefully they won't get rid of alchemy trinkets altogether. It would be terrible to have a profession that is 100% consumables/transmutes.
I'm thoroughly unimpressed with the mining/jewelcrafting changes on the other hand. The stamina buff is nice, but overall useless for most players. I have friends of every class who mine because of, well, the cash. So this helps the tanks who mine, but what about the other classes who would rather have a more useful buff without dropping their professions (skinners get 1.25% crit at 70, I don't know how much that equates to at 80). Jewelcrafting will still be a huge money maker and I plan to dump cash on getting every pattern early, but I'm disappointed that Blizzard hasn't gone in a new direction with it. It appears to be the same green/blue/epic/BoP gems and probably the same types of trinkets (mp5 with a mana-over-time buff, AP and stealth with a used +AP buff, etc.). Can we have some more actually useful crafted accessories?
EDIT: While I'm here I might as well throw in my thoughts on inscription. In my circle of friends people are already talking about jumping ship of their professions to grab inscription and go with that. The thought of having a knockback on their attack or an extremely shortened cast time seems too great to resist. I really hope Blizzard doesn't go overboard with inscriptions. Will all of them be self-only, or just some? Either way, they need to balance the self-only inscriptions in a way that isn't overpowering. I think they did that well with ring enchants in TBC. 40 healing/24 damage/8 stats/4 weapon damage was nice, but was it required? Some may argue that it was, but for the most part it was fairly balanced.
Another thing which needs to be addressed in some way is tailoring and cloth drops. Id like to see some kind of benefit to drops of cloth if a tailor is killing a mob vs a non tailor. Tailoring for too long has the items needed to craft drop from mobs around the world, but anyone can farm these items. There should be an advantage to a tailor farming cloth vs a non tailor. Maybe something along the lines of 2x normal cloth drops if a tailor looted a mob vs non tailor. Something so that my tailor main has a reason to farm for cloth, so that if I need to farm for cloth, I can actually do so.
That makes no sense. Currently, no craftng profession has its gathering profession for free like Tailoring and Enchanting does. Leatherworking/Blacksmithing/Jewelcrafting/Engineering/Inscription all require a second profession to support them. Why would a change to make Tailoring even more self-sufficient make sense?
On the subject of permanent vs. swappable inscriptions: I kind of like the idea of permanent inscriptions that are reasonably expensive. While we've seen that major inscriptions are going to be quite powerful, I get the feeling that they may provide an interesting and useful counter to the flexibility of easily swappable talent specs. Let's look at the "powerful" example we've seen so far:
Glyph of Healing Touch - Decreases the cast time of Healing Touch by 1.5 sec., the mana cost by -25% and the amount healed by -50%.
My question here is: Does that say what I think it does? Clearly, it makes HT faster to cast. However, the mana cost and amount healed are less clear to me. Presumably, they're both "in the same direction". So either it makes it faster to cast and cost 25% more but heal 50% more, or it makes it faster to case and cost 25% less but heal 50% less. My presumption is that it costs more and heals more.
In either case, however, there's a trade-off here—either more speed for more mana spent or more speed for less healing done. You're changing a core spell in a pretty fundamental way, and you get to do this kind of major change to two of your spells. It seems to me that while there might end up being "standard" inscription builds for different roles, this isn't going to be as big a hang-up as having entirely different talent builds for different roles.
So, what I expect to see happen is for people to have two specs (swappable out of combat on a cooldown?), and a set of expensive inscriptions. The inscriptions define their specialty spells, the things they're the very best at. But, a druid who has one spec set for healing isn't going to be hamstrung by not having inscriptions for healing--they'll still be a very solid healer. They just won't, for example, be specialized in healing touch for very fast heals.
So, instead of "I'm a feral druid" or "I'm a resto druid", you might have somebody who's "I'm a feral and resto druid, specialized for fast healing." They can bring it hard in both roles, as long as they're geared up for both roles. It's just that they can bring it slightly harder on the healing end, particularly when there's a need for speed. And, with luck, the spec choice can be made between fights. Finally, perhaps, the holy grail of flexibility in raid composition without swapping people in and out or respeccing regularly?
On the other side, if Blizzard does things right, people will change inscriptions over the course of their character's life. The easy reason is "Oh look, better inscriptions are dropping off of bosses in T8 instance A." The more complex reason is that as the stat mix of gear changes, and as experience changes, I think we may find that the same inscriptions that were optimal at one point aren't optimal at another. And more importantly, it's my hope that it's actually worthwhile to have different inscriptions represented in raid, rather than same inscriptions.
Really, we'll just have to see. Given the rabid min-maxing nature of people, it'll probably turn out less rosy than I would like. But still, I hope.
While I (and most people, I'm sure) don't really enjoy having to farm for mats for stacks of pots and the like, I can't help but feel that it's going to lead to problems. The difference between this and the elixir/flask change is that those provide a constant, static buff. Pots are more dynamic, in that you mold them to the current situation. The other problem? The benefit vs the cooldown. On my pally tank, for instance, I don't use very many health pots, but I use mana pots fairly regularly. On my warlock, I use destruction pots in ZA runs, as well as anywhere else I can get a shaman in my group.
I guess what concerns me is the possibility that while I may gain some use out of Mana/Health pots even with the change, things like Haste/Destruction pots will no longer be used. After all, what's the point of blowing your one pot for the fight, if something randomly comes up and negates you being able to use it? Some sort of 'Move out of the Fire(tm)' effect springs to mind as one example.
I'm going to have to wait and see about this...while I like the reduced Drums, this seems like too much on the surface.
Blacksmiths can add 1 socket to weapons which do not yet have a socket.
Meaning dual wielding players get 2x +20 stats from gems. Unless the sockets also apply a bonus of +2 agi or +3 stam or such.
I'm not sure yet whether they'll be able to add sockets if the item already has some of it's own.
Currently, the datamined spell to socket weapons is not restricted to items the blacksmith already owns. It also uses the "permanent enchantment" slot on an item... which is probably why it's not yet implemented. It is reasonable to assume that socketing weapons (and maybe shields and off-hands) will be the perk that blacksmiths get, but until the ability gets implemented or the datamined spell makes the item soulbound, I'm not going to include it on the list.
07/29/08, 8:36 AM
" effect. Like here: [Robe of Eternal Light]
Similar Threads
