Nemantopia

The book seems to be a fairly clear indication that something is in the works for the profession grind. I've had to conclude that while the grind is an annoyance, it's also what props up the market for old world materials, since reputations turn ins and twinks only carry them so far (and only on certain servers at that). Plus, it's not precisely a QoL feature...even the more expensive professions can be leveled with fair ease fairly quickly...this includes the annoyance of finding nodes for the mining gaps and sometimes relatively cost-prohibitive gaps in crafting professions. The only real complaint would come from double-crafting folks who don't know how to vary and hawk their wares effectively (and who refused to make enchanting one of them, forgoing most of any possible synergy). Even considering material costs, I'd consider the actual annoyance and hassle to be having relearn all the recipes (at cost). If the focus is on relearning professions, as opposed to leveling them the first time, I'd propose a system like the existing (but newish) spell-learning system. That is, you never forget the spells themselves (recipes you paid for or went to great length to obtain), but you can only use/access said spell when the prerequisites are met. In the place of having the necessary class talents, it would be obtaining the appropriate skill level. So, you still need to buy/obtain materials to level it, but most of the actual hassle is gone. This also has the side effect of not speeding up learning a profession the first time

Of course, knowing the devs never choose a simplesque solution unless more than one is presented, another method would be to extend the range of level-ups for targeted recipes. This could lower the actual [gold] cost by extending the range that recipes less demanding in high quantity of basic materials and/or that lack harder to obtain materials. Similarly, both gathering and crafting professions can benefit from extending the range that converting raw materials (as in, into other raw materials like cloth to bolts of cloth and not a final product, you dingbat) provide skillups. I know that even though the cost/time ratio is in the favor of finding my own thorium, leveling a miner with excess gold I would be friggin ecstatic to just throw money at the problem to avoid the boredom of finding rich-thorium veins so I can just hit Outland already. I'm silly like that, and so are plenty of other people, although I guess increasing the range/probability of small thorium nodes skilling up would work too.

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Generation 28:
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andastra

Well, Blizzard needs to keep making leveling previous levels easier with any new expansion they released. It follows that profession grinds should be eased up as well. For new players and people making new alts, they should be able to level a character and have their profession keep up with their level without doing anything special.