With the release of Dragonflight expansion, the developers aimed to renew and expand the depth and relevance of the profession system.
Crafted items became more relevant and versatile, and progression through the system was meant to feel like steady improvement toward meaningful goals.
Until then, players would usually max out their professions right after the start of the expansion. In the best case, a handful of crafted gear pieces were relevant after the first raid opened. And making high end items relied on heavy RNG (Legion and BFA) or massive vendor costs (Shadowlands).
Now that the system has been expanded with The War Within, players still have some big gripes with it. Progression feels dragged out, especially for crafting professions. The catch-up is demotivating for players who start later in the expansion. The patron craft orders can help but feel really stingy.
A Lot of Players Are Fed Up Right Now
After two and a half years with the system and almost a year in TWW, a player posted his dislike of the system on the main WoW subreddit on July 28th. It saw resounding approval.
Alright Imma say it, the new profession system is AWFUL. It’s time-gated, artisan acuity is unnecessarily difficult to get, and there are SO many knowledge points you need to do so little.
byu/otterchaos7 inwow
Most popular complaints targeted the overly long progression and a catch-up system that feels unhelpful. Others raised concerns about the UI itself making the individual process of crafting more complex. But in this case, changes to the UI can always improve things. The issue of progression indicates a clear problem in raw numbers. So let’s take a look at these and explore why completing a profession tree takes so long and why catching up feels so off-putting.
What Do The Numbers Say?
Listed below is a split of the professions into gathering and crafting. We’re looking at the maximum amount of points required to complete the knowledge tree for each profession. The requirements range from 400 up to a staggering 865 points for Blacksmithing. Crafting each item once or gathering it for the first time rewards a single point.
Skinning is the only exception, it seems, and isn’t really impacted by this. Most first crafts are rather trivial. Certain rare drops and PvP-specific items can be quite expensive to help cover these points.
Vendors hand out extra points after hitting certain reputation levels and spending acuity, which is yet another bottleneck early on. If you had already completed the reputations on your account this feels like free starter points.
Each profession has 8 treasures spread throughout the world that reward 3 points but no acuity. In Dragonflight, each major patch added two additional treasures, which is not the case for TWW.
Once a month you get 3 points from quests at the Darkmoon Faire but those barely make a dent. The remaining required points are then solely locked behind weekly activities. Profession quests are a weekly source. And two weekly drops from random treasure chests or wax lumps would cover for crafting professions. Meanwhile gathering professions get limited weekly points from just using them. Another source is treatises from Inscription. Those can be mass-crafted and stacked ahead of time for weekly use. The rest comes from patron order rewards. And with that we are at the main issue of the system.
As we can see the total required weeks for any profession without taking breaks can be anywhere between 28 and 42 weeks. If you are using every possible source.
Those weekly points make up between 69.6% and 82% of all required points. The benefits from Darkmoon Faire bonus points rarely save you more than a week of progress over several months.
Patron Orders – A Fix That Became a New Problem
Crafting all items for the first-craft bonus in Dragonflight was tricky, since you can’t always find someone who provides the item you need. So the developers brought in random orders from NPCs that would cover most items. They can provide a good chunk of points compared to the rest of the weekly sources. Either 8 or 12 points each week. Most of the time, not all materials are provided by the NPC’s order. And some crafts could cost players several 1000 gold.
These orders also offer another band-aid fix. If you are behind the current maximum of points from weekly sources up to 3 extra orders show up for you. Each one rewarding another point. This way players could get to the current cap. But again, it could cost you a fortune before you catch up.
21 points extra each week in comparison sounds like a lot. This clearly reduces the total time required, if you’re far enough behind that you get orders until the cap. A reduction between 52.5% and 63.6%. But it shouldn’t have to be this tedious, forcing you to log in every single day. Something that isn’t required if you never miss any of the orders that reward 2 points. Those only pop up twice a week. So catching up later is more demanding than progressing from day 1.
Why Gathering Professions Are So Much More Fun
If you picked up a gathering profession in the middle of Dragonflight or TWW, it was fairly simple. All you had to do is “just grind” and you would catch up to the current cap within a few hours. You’re out in the world, doing what you’re supposed to do. So the graph for required weeks until you catch up in a gathering profession would just show a simple “1” each time.
How Can They Improve Crafting Progression?
One suggested solution from Reddit comments was spammable Patron Orders, beyond the cap of 3 per day or 21 per week. These would offer points until you catch up with everybody else. That would also drive up material requirements throughout the expansion. In such a case the NPCs should also provide more. But that could also turn catching up into a tedious task of endlessly clicking through menus.
An alternative solution could involve spawning problems around the world that need solving.
As a crafter, you could track these down, maybe on the map. You then provide your skills or sometimes materials to get it done and get progression points as a reward. And these should also be doable until you get towards the current point cap.
In Conclusion
Gathering is fun. Crafting is not. Patron orders can help cover all first crafts. But they should not be the only – daily limited – source of catch-up. With housing on the horizon the profession system will see even more use.
Let’s hope the devs will work out this major issue before Midnight’s release.