crafting order system has to go along with the huge amount of knowledge points required to do something meaningful with your profession
I am not fully sure where I stand with the crafting. At one point I was super against it. I thought the knowledge took too long and the players who sat in trade or did no worthwhile content were getting the edge while I'm out doing the top end content and getting held back because of it. I think early on it'll always feel like that no matter what they do. I still have my complaints here and there about it, like one work bench in one city is kinda lame. Would like to see one in Stormwind. But I'm pretty far into all the profession trees. I can really make just about anything.
I have barely done anything with DF professions because it's too time consuming and boring(and my main thing to do when playing is collecting things, so making gold is not my prio).Over all there is too much research needed that I don't want to deal with. I just want to play.Chasing points to spend in my profession trees on all my characters is too time consuming and grindy.All these new profession stats you need to take into consideration are also driving me away.I see all these people barking their services in trade. I don't want to do that, and I don't want to deal with the profession order system. I just want to craft something and post it on the AH.Blizzard finally got rid of boost sellers in trade chat... only for it to be filled with endless profession order spam. Being able to chat with people with the occasional person selling something in Shadowlands was so nice, I miss it.I still make gold, but not by crafting and selling any DF items. At the same time I won't need as much gold nowadays: rare TCG items are given for free via Twitch, and they have added quantum items that I can (hopefully) farm in coming expansions to get the super rare BoE items instead of buying them from AH.
Making bank in DF is easy tho? Like, to break into commodities in most profs requires ~25 skill and a level of KP that you can get off the vendors. Alchemy or cloth CDs have trivial startup costs and offer a decent profit per craft, and bulk commodities in these areas are generally modestly profitable provided you actually bother to learn how multicraft and inspiration work. This just seems like more whining from people who are annoyed that you can't just spam your prof to top level and then get given free gold anymore, tbh.
The crafting system has been a failure on nearly every level... They made a system that encourages scamming and bad faith trades when they could have easily left profressions as they were with emblems acting like upgrades in shadowlands.Instead they wanted to make it a mindless time gate. It is argubly a worse system then the idea of making patterns rare drops for raiders in tbc.
The auction house rework failed to resolve the issue of babysitting your auctions and cancel scanning every 30 seconds being the best/only way to actually sell things.
I’ve been playing since Vanilla and I’ve never actively tried to make gold in WoW but every expansion I end up with quite a bit more than what I started with, except this one. So yeah, I’d say the average player got screwed this expansion for sure.
I've also been playing since Vanilla, but never made more than a few thousand to tens of thousand per day from my profession (LW), selling materials or trying to sell whatever I pick up in my adventures, or crafting bits that weren't sold as transmog.At the start of DF, using my Leatherworking, I was able to get a few good tips to cover what I felt was waiting in trade chat, messaging people, etc. Then came Lariat. I barely made 300ish LW crafts worth not even half a gold cap, while a Jewelcrafter friend sold Lariats and made a gold cap or two. There was no demand for LW items, and prices plummeted on various crafts. I even had a forum thread advertising my craft, posted in various discords, and I would probably get an offline order or two every day or two. You would have to actively spam in trade chat, snipe people or spread by word of mouth to get something.I love the region wide AH, because after a day of playing, I can just dump my materials, and they get bought. I'd love to have a full region wide auction house, to be able to benefit from better prices for rare items and more competitivity. In the end, lower prices benefit players and collectors, even if they move their gold making from sniping/owning a certain niche into just providing region wide materials, crafts and items. But it's a difficult thing to balance, there are more gold sinks than ever.
I mean the core of the issue is the patterns, knowledge points, bugs, AH cancel scanners, and the time and gold investment required to turn a proper profit Starting with all the rare drop patterns, like sporecloak for instance, people who were able to or were lucky enough to get the patterns early on netted a lot of gold, and still do due to the rarity of the patterns. Something that they are very dismissive about yet is a very big gate to cross given if you do not have the gold to buy the pattern off the AH, given they typically go for 1 mil+ gold. Then you are at the mercy of RNG, which blizzard also decided that adding super rare drops to the game was a good idea, when it was not honestly. Then you also have the issue of knowledge points, which is somewhat resolved with the renown vendors, yet still takes a very long time to grind out, especially when you need to be able to branch into the various trees to be able to start to turn a proper profit. That also cannot be reset ever, meaning that you are locked in from the start and if you invested into something to try and turn a profit and got screwed by RNG, then you are locked out of making gold for a long time until your able to level up another path to try and turn a profit. Then you have cancel scanners that post and cancel auctions constantly, driving the price of goods down lower and lower, and at times even intentionally posting items for silver or copper amounts. So, they can use TSM to buy any auctions that people post for the incorrect price and reset it to higher than it was before. Then try to hide behind “LUL git gud scrub, should have paid attention”, I’m sorry but no, you INTENTIONALLY did that and brought harm to other players, and even negatively impacted the AH for however long you kept reposting those items for the incorrect price. Which in turn impedes the ability, thanks to the new AH, of players to be able to sell their goods for a period given it only allows you to buy mats at the current low price. Then the final issue is when people abuse bugs and etc., like when dracothyst transmutes were abused and caused the market to rapidly crash for them, to the point where you have a very razor thin margin of profit with them unless you have a ton of alchemists with resourcefulness maxed out to retain a lot of the spores you’re using. So, it all comes down to time and gold investment, and while it may be "easy" for some to make gold, it’s hard for the mass majority of players due to the time investments required and the numerous alts required to even match what these "small goblins" are making day to day. Followed by needing a large investment and a ton of research to even be remotely successful if you try to follow what the above players are suggesting, presenting another huge barrier to cross. All in all, while I like being able to craft max level gear, it also has presented a major burden both cost and time wise as you must do so much just to gain one piece of gear. Followed by having to deal with an entire rank system that makes little to no sense if I am being blunt, and only aims to time gate things further to entice players to throw tokens at the problem to solve it. Along with creating problems that should not be problems in the first place, especially when they decided to make the AH region wide.So yeah, it is not as simple as the above wants to try to make it out to be, it is a very complicated and lengthy process that takes a huge time and gold investment that people simply are not willing to do not because their lazy. It is because the returns are not there for them in the end and that is a major issue with the WoW economy, it is poorly constructed and heavily influenced by all the botters and auction cancel scanners that make profits razor thin if you produce your own goods or try to farm mats. While taking advantage of other players and their own goods to make huge profits for little to no work at all.
Maybe I'm mistaken but what amount of gold constitutes a "small goblin"? I've played the AH in previous expansions, I've done the skinning and LW and Legendary making in SL. I'm much more casual these days and even then, through the dragon riding world quests plus the two in caverans, on 5 toons thats 30k gold in a single week. And the entirety of that takes about 30m-45m and a majority of that time is to fly in the area...is 30k gold per week/ 120kg a month considered too low for a small goblin? I understand not everyone has 5 toons leveled up but you don't even have to be max level to get the gold rewards.
we need the mission tables back
Right now at this very moment, the cost of Dracothyst mats and the price of Dracothyst on the AH are so close together, it's not even worth it. The only way to save money on Dracothyst transmutes on my server is to farm the glowspores myself and I don't necessarily have that kind of time right now. My Chronocloth/Azureweave alt is barely doing any better.The only ones winning are the ones farming the mats and selling those.
People are always complaining about the intricate systems being the problem with out really giving thought to just how much of a difference there is between the average "good" player and the insanely mega wealthy goblin cartels with literally billions of gold. If you take a look at the graphs of people buying out and resetting the Phial markets higher those people are spending 5-10 million gold an item on the buyout process and probably getting 300 to 400% returns or more. All of the AH bots that post one herb for a low price and then snatch up people who unwittingly match it also come to mind. And yet the crafting order system or knowledge points are some how to blame rather than a completely unregulated economy succumbing to vultures as is the fate of anything unregulated. Hah.
I have played since MOP. Actually played a bit during TBC on a different account. I always made fair money selling Herbs. No longer. With the changes in Herbalism nodes and the global AH, it's a waste of time. I have maxed several professions. I get the occasional crafting order. It's hit or miss whether it's worth it. But most of the time I see nothing.OTOH, I have spent a lot on mats and recipes. I have also tipped generously when I post a crafting request. So the money is circulating more than it used to. But it's kind of like the economy at large where there are the super-rich and everyone else. If they had something for sale like the Brutosaur now, I wouldn't be able to buy it. I think the system in and of itself has been a success. Professions are more challenging than they were in the past and that's a good thing. But tying recipes to raiding and dungeons is a big fail. I am a crafter because I'm not good at that. I can't see them making raiding dependent on crafting. Not sure why it's ok the other way around.
Dragonflight gave enough gold to the small goblin that was clever enough to be ahead of the competition with crafting this expansion. However once 90% of crafters catched up small goblins' profits died to random players that were able to craft the same things with small goblin but didn't really value their time and tanked everything to get tips instead of decent gold.
