How to fix professions for Mists of Pandaria: An open letter to Blizzard
by Fox Van Allen 
Mar 12th 2012 at 3:00PM
Ladies and gentlemen who love the economic arts, today's column isn't for you. It's an open letter to Blizzard's game developers, with me begging on bent knee for them to improve our collective professions for Mists of Pandaria. Of course, you're free to read it too. In fact, I hope you do and add to it in the comment section.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a letter of complaint. Blizzard got an awful lot right this expansion, and I'm not going to be shy giving credit where credit is due. But there's always room for improvement. So let's roll up our sleeves, point out what needs fixing, and then hold the folks at Blizzard responsible for what we get next expansion.
So, you with me? If so, let's begin.
Dear Blizzard,
Tailoring, leatherworking, and blacksmithing
My first profession ever taken was tailoring. Seemed like a natural fit -- I was getting cloth drops all the time, regardless of whether I was looking for them or not. I've learned since that the profession gets a bit more complex, of course. And since then, I've also learned that there are a few things to be desired about the profession.
Now, hey, Blizzard -- just between you and me, let's have a talk. These guys out here who read my column and level tailoring love feeling useful. It's more important than making money. And it's hard to feel useful these days given how you've been treating tailors, leatherworkers, and blacksmiths in Cataclysm.
When this expansion first went live, all was good. You had all sorts of stuff to make on the path to level 85 and 525 skill. There wasn't huge demand for all the wearable greens and blues, but there was some demand. And even if we were only making that gear for ourselves and for guildies, we felt useful, dammit!
Then came patch 4.0.3 and 4.1. You brought out new patterns for tailors, leatherworkers, and blacksmiths to learn, but only hard-core raiders had access to the materials. Sure, we could buy materials on the Auction House, but as I previously established, they're out of reach for the crafting proletariat.
Patch 4.2 had a few epic recipes "for the rest of us." They were welcome additions, but they were just so damn grind-y to get access to. I mean, I like having new dailies, but the way you forced me to have to run them so much to gain access to something so basic bothered the hell out of me. I resented having to run the dailies, and I shouldn't have! Because they were fun. But there's nothing fun about having a gun held to your head.
Patch 4.3 went back to the same ol' of patch 4.1 -- the good stuff was for established raiders only. Even us Raid Finder users got shafted in a way we shouldn't have -- Raid Finder end bosses should be dropping Essence of Destructions, not now-useless Chaos Orbs. Heck, we can't even get the outdated Living Embers with our JP or VP. Why not?
Come on, throw the more casual players a crafting-related bone here. If you're going to put new epics in the game like you did in 4.2, don't make existing players have to jump through so many hoops to get them. The gating mechanism to get the Chaos Orbs and Dreamcloth would have been more than effective at keeping the epic flow limited. And once 4.3 comes out, don't keep access to the old 4.2 epics so limited. We want to craft. Let us craft.
But hey, don't think I'm all complaints, here, Blizzard. The way you handled PvP gear was perfect, constantly updating the ilevel of the previous tier of gear. It kept an old recipe fresh. Maybe you could extend a similar mechanism so that those of us who just dinged 85 (soon 90) will have a lower-priced option for skipping the terrible gear grind?
Inscription
Man, Blizzard. If you did something right with regard to professions this expansion, it was with inscription. Mysterious Fortune Cards were a stroke of genius -- you created something with steady demand. And it wasn't just because MFCs were fun. They were useful ways to get your endgame food buff, too. Let's keep that idea around for next expansion. It's a home run.
It's hard to keep inscription fresh, especially since the real purpose of the profession is backing up the stale glyph end of the game. But that's not to say the glyph business is impossible to rescue. If you're going to keep glyphs around, it's time to go all in. Bring out new minor glyphs -- Glyph of Shadow was a great item for us scribes. Play around with glyph mechanics a little and give interesting new major glyphs. Edit prime glyphs to make the "wrong choices" -- and come on guys, we all know there are glyphs that no one takes -- more interesting.
Meanwhile, you're so close to a hit idea with your Scroll of Intellect IX and the like. When Mists of Pandaria introduces Scrolls of [Stat Name Here] X, you should make them competitive with what alchemists get with their selection of flasks. They won't be as good because they don't persist through death, and they have shorter duration to boot, but that's OK. They're a different product. They're marketable. The have a lot of untapped promise. Let's make them shine.
Engineering
Blizzard, I do understand what you're trying to do with the profession. You want it to be filled with neat stuff that only engineers have access to. Got it -- it's a decent model, and I say you should keep it.
That said, engineers need at least a little bit of love when patches 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3 hit. Is there any reason you didn't provided new engineer-only head pieces for 4.1, 4.2, and 4.3?
Engineering is a lot of fun -- a good option for those who don't want a profession that's a huge money-maker. But come on, don't make it something that's useful only on day one of a new expansion. Give engineers some love all year long. (And yes, I want you to have Marvin Gaye playing in your head while you read that, baby.)
Miners, skinners, and herbalists
Again, let's talk about what you guys at Blizzard did right for Cataclysm. The basics were solid -- you tinkered a lot with node spawn rates but finally found a decent balance. And you came up with cool bonuses. Being able to transform into a plant was both useful and fun. Being able to find a mining pet was brilliant. Top-notch job with these two.
The only criticism? No doubt you game developers already know what I'm going to say: Kill the phased herbs. It's weird when someone you can't see gets an herb, but it's weirder to see an herb disappear when you get close to it because it's phased. Let's also be careful about nodes placed in mid-air -- that one Twilight Jasmine node in Twilight Highlands frustrated more herbalists than you probably even realize. It tricked us so many times -- even us experts got suckered in to trying to collect it a few times, even after we were pretty convinced it was impossible to get.
Oh, and lastly, I have a really good suggestion for the skinning profession. Could you please finally, finally, finally give skinners a decent bonus for leveling the profession to 600? Critical strike bonus is just ... it's just awful. If you're going to balance and standardize most of the profession bonuses, you really should take the extra step to balance them all.
Jewelcrafting
I'm not going to hit Blizzard hard on jewelcrafting here. There's a lot of good stuff in Cataclysm. It wasn't perfect, but I appreciate your attempt to pace releasing new gems. You upgraded meta gems one patch, gave us epic gems in another.
My critique here: Work on the pacing. If you're going to have blue gems available for 5.0, make your meta gems available in 5.1. Then, in 5.2, make epic gems available for raiders much like you did in 4.3. But for 5.3, you should open that epic gem market up to the public at large. It just feels weird and uncomfortable to still have red gems selling for as much as 3,000 gold each.
We're at the end of an expansion. Those extra 10 intellect, strength, or agility shouldn't be as brutally expensive as they are. I hope that's something we can all agree on -- such a small benefit shouldn't be permanently unaffordable.
Enchanting and alchemy
I'm not exactly sure what to say about the enchanting market. On one hand, I want to say that the profession had trouble with pacing, just like jewelcrafting. But on the other, I think that the enchanting market was pretty smooth throughout Cataclysm. We got all the best weapon enchants early, but it worked. Prices stayed appropriately expensive for the good stuff and appropriately cheap for the not-as-good stuff.
Part of me wants more new enchants as new patches come out, much the same way tailors and blacksmiths get new patterns. But the other part of me didn't really mind not getting them in Cataclysm.
Alchemy, meanwhile, performed similarly to enchanting. We didn't really get new stuff as the expansion progressed, but that was OK. Potion making remained profitable. Transmutes remained worth it. And one final compliment: Refreshing the alchemy specialty quests was a great idea, and I don't think you get enough credit for revisiting stuff like that. Bravo.
... now, your turn to chime in
Listen guys -- and I'm talking to you commenters now -- this is crunch time. This week's press event means that Blizzard is in prime development mode. If we want our voices heard on the economy, now is the time, because they don't tinker with economic matters the way they do with class balance. (Which is sort of a shame, but I digress.)
So, sound off. What did you think Blizzard did right this time around with professions? Are there any mechanics you want to stick around? And on the flip side, what profession needs the most TLC from developers? How would you fix what's wrong?
Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.
Filed under: Gold Capped, Economy
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 11)
Magma Mar 12th 2012 3:08PM
Everything felt/feels prohibitively expensive. Doesn't seem to matter which prof it is, crafting everything is way more expensive than it should be. And I understand with each expansion it might go up a bit in price, but in cata it was/is freaking ridiculous. As you pointed out, epic gems should not cost even 1000g at this point. The inferno rubies? Still 150g-300g? Ridiculous.
ryan Mar 12th 2012 3:31PM
This. The cost of even the PVP gear was absurd, seeing as it's aimed at people who just got to 85 and don't have buckets of cash lying around.
I think the main advice for Blizzard is not treat crafting as just something raiders do to get stat bonuses. Some players get a lot of joy out of crafting, and items like the Embersilk Dress and Engineering items can add a lot of richness to the game, even if they don't provide bonus stats.
terph Mar 12th 2012 3:48PM
Thing is, I feel LK had a great solution to this problem already. Allow people to buy epic gems with excess JP. That way, everyone can eventually get themselves gemmed out, but they still have to do a little work to get there.
Noyou Mar 12th 2012 3:56PM
Don't forget the PvPers. They should be able to get the uncut ones not the crappy pre-cut ones.
Glaras Mar 12th 2012 4:15PM
I concur! I really don't understand how you can say that enchants are "appropriately expensive" when you simply cannot afford enchants that are virtually a requirement of the levels of output that people expect. Caster DPS, for example,requires Power Torrent, and that enchant is going for over 2K on my server. The mats are insanely expensive, and that is largely due to shortages in the Celestial Essence market, caused by the fact that nothing drops in the HoT 5-mans but epics that all DE into Maelstrom Crystals.
And I have to echo what was said about the gems. Everyone except warrior and pally tanks use red gems almost exclusively, resulting in hyper-inflated prices for those stones. The epics? As was said, they shouldn't be running 3K, but on Earthen Ring-US, it's not unheard of for uncut Queens Garnets to still be pulling 6K+
ahsanali Mar 12th 2012 4:45PM
I see people saying that enchants are selling for 2K gold and inferno rubies are costing more than 300g and this is ridiculous... are you not participating in the economy?
If inferno rubies are that expensive, then perhaps you should get some ore and prospect it? Or transmute carnelians? If you don't have a JC or an alchemist, maybe you can go mine some ore and sell it for it should be selling at 6g each to support inferno rubies at 300g. it means that you can hop on your miner, mine some ore and sell it for decent money. Or you hop on your herbalist and farm up some heartblossom?
If enchants are so very expensive, do you not see an opportunity in the enchanting trade to make some money? Perhaps if you have a BS you can farm/buy cheap ore into stormforged shoulders and DE them for heavenly shards?
High prices on goods only seem high until you can figure out your niche in your server's economy. Once you do, the high prices no longer seem so high. Prices will always seem unreasonably high if your only means of income are dailies.
Twill Mar 12th 2012 4:46PM
I just want to add that while this comment applies to virtually everything, it especially applies to skinning and leatherworking.
Farming skins sucks. It sucks a fucking load of suckyness. Good god, I hate it. However, the price of a piece of leather relative to metal and cloth is absurd. It's stupid pricy. Thus, leatherworking gear is also stupid pricy. Its FAR more expensive than cloth and metal stuff. This is only going to get worse in Mists with ANOTHER leather class.
PLEASE. Make the amount of skins per-recipe drastically reduced. It's something like 100 mobs = 1 item, PLUS other mats. I really don't want to spend 10k gold on a blue 377 BoE, or over an hour farming for it.
Lipstick Mar 12th 2012 5:11PM
Inferno rubies are only so expensive because -everything else- that JC's cut is pretty much -not- needed at the moment. Nearly every gem slot on gear is -red- which means that there is no debate about what to socket. People use if we're lucky 2 non red gems for their meta activation and some dps metas don't even require that!
So yeah 250-300g is expensive per gem, unless you consider that every other gem is worthless ... so it just -seems- more expensive, where as if the price per gem were spread out more evenly amongst other colors it wouldn't seem that bad. It's just not, because the one gem people want -- has a lower drop rate than any other color which is in turn pretty much worthless. {Not all realms are the same there are a few orange gems worth anything and 1 purple one worth anything, but everything else is like 3-5g each. With the deposit from the ah taking their cut it's almost better profit to just vendor them all..}
So while I enjoy the raw stat boost on my gear + free set bonus for using my best gem, I feel like Blizzard really did JC's a disservice by making so many red gems on gear.
Linda Mar 12th 2012 5:14PM
Twill, do you realize that your desires are nearly the exact opposite of what skinners want? Someone who pays for their flasks or epic gems or 30k BoEs or legendary daggers or VotS by skinning would prefer much higher demand for skins
Chance Mar 12th 2012 5:51PM
The prices are driven by the players, not Blizzard. Could blizzard do something to lower the prices via making epic gems available to buy with VP? I'm sure they could try, but I really doubt it would knock the AH price down to dramatically. The BoE valor bracers and boots still sell for around 5k give or take, people would be expecting a similar number for the epic gems they purchase with their Valor Points. As for rare gems, well, they would be sold for JP I'm guessing and again, the price would not drop as much as you would expect.
Gems, glyphs, flasks, and enchants are PURELY player driven markets. Whether you go into a non-heroic 5 man to solo mobs and farm celestial essences, run around twilight highlands grabbing ore and herbs to prospect, mill, or uhhh.. potionize.. it is all something done by a player. The only way for the market price to be lowered is for you to invest a lot of time into farming up insane amounts of the product you want to see drop in price and list it on the AH for what you believe is a reasonable price. You will need to do this daily, for months, until finally you run to the AH one day and notice your stock being the most expensive auction listed.
Now this isn't so true with epic gems as it is with every other material seeing as any player can only receive a maximum of 8 epic gems per week without buying any, and letting them become a rare prospect from pyrium would be nice, however, the argument does hold true for enchants which seems to the focus of the comment. I deck out all my 85s in BiS enchants and make a little extra cash by farming green level items at the start of each patch. I'll also camp the AH and buy any ilvl 272+ weapon that is listed at 10g or less. Is it amazingly awesome and fun to do this? No, not really, however I do have the option to pay the 1 - 2k gold per enchant should I feel its not worth my time to save the gold.
Twill Mar 12th 2012 7:15PM
@Linda
"Twill, do you realize that your desires are nearly the exact opposite of what skinners want? Someone who pays for their flasks or epic gems or 30k BoEs or legendary daggers or VotS by skinning would prefer much higher demand for skins
"
1- I'm a skinner. I have skinning. I don't do it, because it sucks. I would do it, but it SUCKS.
2- In general, no. Your assumption that there is a high demand is false. Instead, with prices so high, people GIVE UP AND GO WITHOUT. I would have LOVED to buy my Resto shaman a full set of PvP 377 blues. Unfortunately, the cost of one is the same as the cot of the entire cloth set. So, I WENT WITHOUT. It's only better to have a low supply if the demand maintains. In this case, most people just say "fuck it" and don't get in to the market at all.
TL;DR -
I've looked into this. Skinning sucks. Don't think that a small amount of economics will make it seem okay. It's not, and should be better. Far, far, far better. If skins were easier to get per-mob, the skinner would end up selling more. The net profit would go up.
Read this. Think of the current skinning market as a "price floor" because the supply isn't where it should be. It's like there is a skin embargo or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elasticity_%28economics%29
Twill Mar 12th 2012 7:17PM
@ Chance
The reason epic gems cost a lot is because YOU CANNOT FARM THEM. They come from a raid instance in a limited amount. If a red uncut epic gem was available for 1000 JP, it would cut the price in half immediately, and reduce it even more.
cmichaelcooper Mar 12th 2012 8:50PM
One man's opinion incoming...
I think the fundamental change that needs to happen with professions has little to do with what has come before. The problem with professions is that the model of receiving 95% useless fodder for leveling and 5% useful patterns at endgame is frustrating and tired. WoW has been around a long time, and at this point much of it's player-base simply wants to inhabit the world, play the game how they want to play it, and feel rewarded for that. At this point, crafting needs a major overhaul if it is to be seen as anything more than a gold sink that you must pay to be raiding optimal, or have a few toys.
I submit the idea that the crafting system could be overhauled to provide a more dynamic crafting environment, using the mats that are currently available. Instead of training specific recipes, you would learn how to combine the materials at your disposal to achieve different results depending on the combination of materials used. This system could still be min-maxed, meaning it would still be profitable on the AH, but those of us who might want to make crafting a more exploratory experience would still have avenues to make crafting more interesting and enjoyable.
brain314 Mar 12th 2012 8:51PM
As a jewelcrafter, I can say that the price of inferno rubies is entirely determined by the players. They prospect the same as everything other gem, but because infernos are BiS, their prices get jacked up. All other useful gems sell for around half that. And I can also say that I don't really find crafting infernos that profitable either. I can buy an uncut ruby for 130g and sell it for 140g, or I can cut a 20g emerald and sell it for 50g.
Nobar Mar 12th 2012 3:11PM
http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/03/02/a-case-for-transmogrification-and-reforging-engineering-pets-in/
My comment.
Nuff Said.
Nina Katarina Mar 12th 2012 3:12PM
On aesthetics, I would love an option to turn off the visual effect from a weapon enchant. When I have Landslide on something and I go flying, I leave a little smog trail like a helicopter. I feel like Pigpen.
I want portable anvil and a forge. They would be a great Engineer thing - a one-use item that they can sell to people, and a BoE reusable item that anyone could drop wherever they are. It'd be great for levelling, when you want to reduce the amount of crap in your bags but don't want to go back to town yet.
Magma Mar 12th 2012 3:52PM
"I realize this thread has been around for a while but the topic is still relevant. As many of you may or may not know, weapon enchants have been a feature of World of Warcraft since the beginning. Providing iconic and recognizable looks to various enchants is something that’s added an element of uniqueness to the game and to your character. However, we do understand they can sometimes overpower the aesthetics of the awesome weapons you can obtain in game now. It’s certainly something we have discussed with the developers recently and we’ll be looking into potentially allowing an enchant toggle. If and when such a feature is introduced, we’ll be sure to let the community know as soon as possible."
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3393349558?page=4#67
Yaroukh Mar 13th 2012 10:09PM
I find it weird that Blacksmith can not repair gear, at least plate.
Noyou Mar 12th 2012 3:24PM
One of my biggest disappointments was having to wait until almost the end of the expac to get the engineering goggles. Hopefully they will not repeat this with Mists.
jmyoung Mar 14th 2012 7:16AM
how was this the fault of the game maker?