Saturday, August 15, 2015

What I Want From Legion Gold Making


So the new WoW expansion has been announced and the buzz has begun. This article is going to be an opinion piece of my impressions of WoD gold making and what needs to change in Legion.

WoD Goldmaking
WoD was supposed to be an ultimate revolution in gold making. From the beginning, early stages of the Alpha, we were promised a profession revamp, and there were many interactions between the developer Hwoo and the Consortium gold making community. You can go back and read some of the conversations if you'd like, but the basic gist from the gold making community at the time was we were being "heard" by the devs. We all had a sense of optimism heading into WoD that everything would be more interesting, and new challenges would arise from a "new profession system", and gold making had finally reached a golden age.

Unfortunately, that's not what we were delivered. What we got at launch felt like a half-baked product, and left a lot of professions high and dry. Gold making with professions really took a hit this expansion. Maybe it took all those mindless shufflers out of the equation and left the market to those seasoned vets, but it killed the profitability and interesting choices of many professions. Jewelcrafting is probably one of the last professions someone will suggest now, and it had been a king for a long time. Not to say that one profession should be that OP that it's the default suggestion for new gold makers to have always, but they basically took it out back behind the shed and shot it in the head. Enchanting still had some profits, but slots were reduced. The 3 big crafting professions (Tailoring/LW/BS) were reduced to daily CD making machines, with not many interesting choices from there. Sure it was easier gameplay to not have to enchant/get a belt buckle/get leg armor for every new piece you got in a raid, but it killed some nice routes for those 3 big guys. The gold making game has become dull.

Legion So Far...
So far we have not heard much about Legion and the Devs have seemed to realized that WoD as a whole was a disappointment to many players, and are focusing on not making promises they cannot keep. To me this is a good sign, hopefully transparency continues moving forward. What we do know about professions so far is this (via MMO-Champ):

  • There will be a quest line for each profession.
  • There will be some system changes to professions as a whole to improve the UI and add new functionality.
  • The professions team for Legion is the largest that Blizzard has ever had for WoW and lots of new things are coming. The team heard the feedback about Warlords professions.

The quest line could be the same as this expansion, and honestly I did not find the quests all too interesting, and it didn't really add any gating, so they didn't help gold makers much. Thus far though, it seems like they're at least making some corrective steps to change professions, with the UI and new functionality (whatever that may be). It's nice to hear that they've got the largest team ever for professions, but that could just mean 2 interns instead of 1. I jest, but I'm hoping they stay true to that last point, and introduce some new and interesting profession choices and make sure that "no profession is left behind". All professions (sans gathering) should have interesting choices, and I hope they can accomplish that.

What we were all expecting for WoD was a new professions system, not like Wrath -> Cata -> MoP where it was basically the same mold moved up an expansion, but a new system that would challenge what we knew about professions, and change how we thought about making gold. Creating new complex problems for us to solve and new and interesting choices to make. It really fell short of that expectation.

I personally would love for Legion gold making to make me think again. For a beginner, it may still do that now, but once you get that formula down, it's mindless. I'd like new interesting problems to come out of Legion gold making, and I hope the Dev team can deliver. I also hope that the garrison theme does not continue with these class halls. They claim that the professions team has heard the feedback about Warlords professions, but I honestly hope they can move forward and correct them in a meaningful way, but only time will tell! What do you want to see the most in Legion gold making?

Cheers,
Phat Lewts

3 comments:

  1. All that needs to be said about WoD gold making is summed up in the three month gap between your posts. There has been nothing to talk about!

    As someone wise once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.

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  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. I have made close to 88 million gold in WoW since Cata and I think it is safe to say that this xpac (for me) has been a lot better than some, and not as good as others. While I don't like how my professions kept me in the garrison, or that I had to craft via primal conversion, I really did like the amount of things I could make and sell - especially the high end (6/6) items. I really like having so many options to sell that I can pick a market and thrive, even if others are thriving off different markets right beside me. I don’t have to craft every single market just to bring in a million inn sales a week (which is where I like to be right now.) You say that we lacked the amount of items to craft but, I feel we had plenty. I think your main gripe is really that some professions were underutilized, and that is definitely true but I feel that there are tons of things to make with the professions that were good. Like blacksmithing for example, I make tons of armor and weapons and I absolutely love the diversity. Jewelcrafting, not so much. Leatherworking, not so much. So I get what you mean by lack of items but I think all they would have to do to fix that is bring the other professions up to par.

    As far as gating - I don't care much for gating, or making people work hard to start crafting. I also don’t like doing questing for crafting. What I do like is having lots of items and materials to manipulate, so much so that people aren't required to cover tons of markets to make good gold. I think that is a great thing and I hope whatever they do in the xpac keeps with the current quantity of options, instead of dumbing down the numbers. As I said earlier, I also like having TONS of things to craft. I think if they added a ton of things (things that players actually want on a daily or weekly basis) to craft, they could forget about all the quests and bs time sinks and just give us what we really want – things to craft that sell. You don’t have to make crafting interesting if there are tons of things to sell because people will be busy experimenting with markets and actually earning gold, vice doing time sink things that become a chore anyway. It would also be cool if professions gave you a perk too. I know some people don’t agree with that but, I miss the days when I profession would give you something unique.

    A final gripe for me is that whatever the system they chose, I hope they don’t punish crafters like they do now with the primal system. I actually do more work crafting now (or did before I started getting others to craft for me) by crafting via primals, and make less profit per item for doing so (i.e. use tons of mats) – simply because the CD mechanism is too slow to make gear at any reasonable rate.

    Anyhow, that’s my two cents. I liked the post and share a lot of your thoughts on the issue. I have been a long time lurker at stormspire and just wanted to start being more active in the goldmaking community – so here I am.  Thanks for all you do and for all of your time and effort. A bunch of us appreciate the mentorship.

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