Brio

The thing with bop items is that they failed with Frozen Shadoweave specifically. Things such as [Sunfire Robe] make sense. You get to use your profession to make your gear. They just need to do it with all professions, which would be good. I don't think anyone would complain about seeing recipes drop, as long as they didn't take away an item drop. Not being able to use your crafting profession to make stuff (that you would actually want) is not really fun.

 

Mideci

I can't agree more. Right now, it seems fairly ridiculous to have professions. You certainly do get a stats bonus and for hardcore players that's worth it, don't get me wrong. But for regular players, it seems like a gigantic waste of resources to level the profession for a fairly small -- in terms of your overall stats at lvl 80 -- bonus. These professions are by and large inconvenient or impossible to make money with, especially versus gathering, where serendipitous moneymaking is all-but guaranteed.

Everyone gets that Frozen Shadowweave was a mistake. But there needs to be some kind of middle ground where you can make some of your own gear and upgrade it as you go through the raid zones with zone-based drops. 3 slots worth of gear out of 18 is hardly game-breaking and would make being a tailor or leatherworker or blacksmith truly interesting. 30 or 40 stat points doesn't feel very interesting.

 

Addled

If you're right, then I dislike this new shift.

I'm planning to level a restoration shaman for WotLK. He has Leatherworking and Engineering. From Engineering, my shaman has a gathering profession (mote extractor) and a decent epic helm. What does the shaman get from Leatherworking? Almost nothing. I get Fur Lining - Spell Power - Spell - World of Warcraft , which also takes up the enchanting slot on my bracers. Plus, since Tailoring makes the leg spellpower enchants, I have to purchase them from a Tailor.

Where exactly is the benefit for anyone to spec BSing, Tailoring or LWing? All the crafted gear from professions seem to be BoE, might as well chuck the profession onto an alt and pick up a gathering profession, since they have pretty decent bonuses.

Can anyone post an inquiry on the beta forums, asking about this?

 

• Falk

Er, the crafting professions seem to have better statistic perks than the gathering ones. But I agree with you. And don't read too far into it - stuff may just not be implemented yet.

 

Axanor

Didn't they state at Blizzcon that they were going to implement pattern drops later on? (ala Sunfire Robe, the Belts/Boots from TK)

 

Linnet

The point I don't see with professions is making them such a tedious grind to level. You're already limited in how many you can take, having the grind as well just puts a barrier into non-hardcore players swapping tradeskills if they want to try a different bonus.

Druid: Peace

 

Ziggurat

Yes, they said raids will continue to drop new and higher level recipes.

 

kysta

I agree somewhat. The grind, in itself, is fine. The problem is that with each expansion the process of grinding means more and more "legacy" materials are required. For a level 80 character, it's silly to be forced to go back to newbieland to farm your copper and tin ore to re-train Jewelcrafting, as an example. This results in some very backwards economic situations where, as an example, wool cloth is 8g per stack while netherweave is 3g. It would be nice if there was some alternative path that only involved "current" materials, that is materials available from the latest expansion area.

 

footloop

But will those be BoP, or will they be more like the belt of blasting?

 

Negg

No BoP gear is absolutely a good change, the whole idea of adding BoP items each patch to keep profession bound items interresting was ridiculous and quite bad to be honest. Just let Professions enhance gear you get through one of the many other ways.

Only gear that professions should add is maybe a start up set, to help people that hit 80 to start working on other things (raiding or PvP).

 

Valerys

As a raiding main with JC and enchanting, how painful will it be leveling JC in Northrend without mining? I do have a mining alt, but he is likely to be put on hold while I level this character to 80. I believe there are some JC dailies, will I be missing out on much if I'm not able to do them while leveling?

 

• Chicken

The Jewelcrafting dailies are needed to be done for access to the vast majority of recipes for superior quality gems, as well as access to the profession's exclusive perk.

I'd go into more details, but it's easier to just link WoWHead: Dalaran Jewelcrafter's Token - Item - World of Warcraft

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

 

Vaccine

I like the move away from BoP items I think. As a member of a cutting edge Sunwell guild before it disbanded I saw all my guild (and I do mean all) reroll leatherworking during the month or two leading up to TBC. I saw all my healers reroll alch as their other proffession for the new Trinket. I saw all DPS casters reroll tailoring. I can't see how this is good design or that it was ever intended, throwing thousands of gold at proffessions every 6 months to pick up the flavour of the week.

Having a very finite number of limited perks for each profession allows much tighter balance between them. It also means they don't have to weigh things up every time they add a new weapon or armour pattern. We saw Sunfire Robes patterns going for 5 figure sums, people even transferring servers to obtain the recipies, which is madness. If all raid recipies are BoE they allow every player to spec for the profession that has the passive benefit they want, it means once a pattern drops your guild has it forever, you don't have to wait for multiples to kit out all your raid.

It does kind of dilute professions now but I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

 

Mideci

What positives are these? I'm lost. Basically there is no reason to have any specific profession. They all give more or less the same number of stat points.

The problem with Sunfire robe patterns was the insane rarity of them after they removed the Essence of the Immortals questline due to endless crying on the part of low-pop servers. The problem wasn't that it was BoP.

Professions without BoP gear become diluted to the point of utter vanilla-ness. Like a lot of Wrath appears to be headed, for better or worse.

 

Kilted Raven

The alternative is what we've seen lately, where players who are on progression level content feel obliged to spec into particular tradeskills because they are optimal.

I'm a leatherworking shaman, not because I want to LW, but because I can't in good conscience pass up on the drums when my raid needs that buff on tough fights.

It's unfortunate if things are being homogenised slightly, but if you put any one tradeskill above the others then things are homongenised anyway because all optimal players will spec that way. Like the poster above where his entire raid force switched to Leatherworking. Too much of a gap between tradeskills and you get essentially the same result as them all being bland. It's a fine line.

Personally I'm happy that I can now go and do inscription. It's not purely optimal, the offhands don't look that useful to a caster Shaman. But I won't feel like I'm giving up a large raid buff to have what I feel is an interesting tradeskill.

 

Mordekhuul

After the Blizzcon announcement that they plan to have glyphs and keybindings tied to each of the two specs in their dual-spec system there is already significant whining on the boards that this will kill the profit of Inscribers.

From a who-cares-about-inscriber-profit perspective, dual-spec will be a hell of a lot more fun if we don't have to carry around 800 glyphs and re-apply them all the time.

Is Inscriber's only real profit around selling glyphs, really? Seems like even if they removed the glyphs as being attached to each spec that would be a pretty weak profit method anyway. One hopes they'll have some other means and we don't have to re-glyph every time spec changes because enough whining detaches glyphs from spec.

 

Zaniel

Inscribers will also be able to sell the Vellum, which allow enchanters to put their enchants directly onto the AH for consumers to buy (without needing to find the enchanter first). I predict that these recipes will be quite profitable, as I know many, many enchanters drooling just waiting for them.

Inscribers also can make scrolls, which will likely continue to be heavily used as consumables become less and less important (no more potion chaining? might as well use a scroll to try and maximize!).

Outside of that, and Glyphs, I'm not sure what else inscriptors will need to make a profit. That's still a good list.

 

Ivriniel

Checking these Quests and reading the wowhead comments I am a bit confused, I assumed the JC dailies are for Jewelcrafters only wowhead comments seem to suggest otherwise?
Sadly I lack a beta account, and wowhead has no flag that shows if a profession is required for a quest.

Can anyone confirm that non JCs can do these quests to aquire tokens to buy Dragon's Eye ?

 

Stopokingme

Only Jewelcrafters can. The quest items needed all require jewelcrafting to produce the end good, i.e. Scourge Curio.

 

Copernicus

People had maxed out professions in Vanilla WoW, where they did nothing. Professions themselves are simply fun. Just like random achievements that do nothing are also fun. It might not be fun for you, but there's enough people in the game who like them to keep it around.

BoP gear is coming, it's just not a priority and won't be better than raid gear (like Sunfire Robes were). The badges option would probably be the best place to put the patterns or mats for the pattern to control the leapfrog aspect of them.

My only real complaint with professions (aside from tailoring/engineering having lousy perks) is that the gathering plus crafting professions should offer a reasonable bonus. Double gathering should be discouraged, alchemy and herbalism should be encouraged.

 

KMad

I do the daily on my druid, she's 450 JC. But the NPC has no quests available for my other characters, non-JCs cannot earn the tokens.

There's also a drop called Damaged Necklace that gives a JC-required quest. You repair it with a chalcedony and bring it to the daily quest NPC, he rewards you with gold and a token. It is repeatable and I was still able to turn in the daily on the day I turned in the necklace quest. I've never seen it drop but non-JC friends gave me two.

 

Kirion

They also can make cards.

42.

 

Ambika

I hope you are sitting on a mountain of cash to buy ore then.

I found that I could wander around, mine the ore, dig for gems and then level. The initial daily quest requires 6 or so gems. So you'll ether have to buy them from the AH or pray a guildy is nice and give them to you.

The gems you'll be getting will easily replace any/all epic gems that you are using right off the bat. Greens replaced Epics within an hr of hitting the starting zone for me.

 

songster

Oh don't worry, I'm sure you'll find it.

There it is!

 

Exewut

That's not a positive.
The real attraction to professions is not the random +x stat bonus, it's creating new items all trough the game's cycle and selling a few items with profit, if you care enough to find the items that sell well (low lvl enchanting rods, heavy knothide armour kits...). The easiest way to achieve this is to have a 2/3 set that isn't best in slot (which is a mistake they've made before) but guaranteed to get after you've finished leveling to the cap, and then to introduce a set of a BOP patter/BOE item and a BOE patter/BOP item. This is basically the sunwell system before they removed the gate opening mechanism which gave easier access to the patterns.
I feel like they're throwing away the child with the bathwater here. Mediocre BOP profession only epics aren't bad at all, silly overpowered ones like frozen shadowweave are. But the situation of frozen shadowweave is very hard to reproduce because it's a combination in 2.0 of horrible itemised epics, unrewarding and hard raid game, sockets taking too much item budget, horrible scaling of affliction and spriest with crit/haste and school specific damage. Models like the armor smith breastplate, most of the BS weapons, the LW sets (if only they were upgradeable) all worked fine.
The references that professions sucked in vanilla are wrong too. Every profession had fun gimmicky items back then, and items that were actually useful while leveling. They quite moved away of that model in TBC and made professions give benefits in endgame while being completely useless for the leveling game. Now in WOTLK we'll have professions that just give you an extra enchant or 3 more powerful gems. It's a shame.

edit: TLDR professions should help latecomers gear up and be on par with raiders. They need to create gear inflation. Just adding everything to badge vendors gets old very quickly.