Professions Straight from LeCraft!

I'm so tickled that Jon LeCraft was the presenter of the Professions information on the WoW panel - woot! Some day I'd like to have an actual conversation with him to ask all my burning questions about crafting, but for now this will have to suffice. <I'm SUCH a nerd!> Now let's get to the goodies:



Archaeology

(I already hate spelling this word!) is considered a Gathering profession and is going to unlock paths within Path of the Titans. There will be opportunities for unique rewards including vanity pets, instant travel to dungeons and unique recipes for other professions.

It will also have a quest-style journal that allows you to track the artifacts you've found (I think, tried to screenie that). Also, when you collect enough of one type of artifact you'll be able to do something more with that. That part was a bit unclear, sorry. Will try to review that on the rebroadcast and see if I can make better sense of this.

Reforging

A new ability that will allow players to customize their gear more cheaply (according to LeCraft) than gems or enchants. All of the major gear professions will be able to reforge: Blacksmiths, Leatherworkers, Tailors, Engineering and Jewelcrafters. Examples given were that Blacksmiths will be able to reforge plate gear and Engineers will be able to reforge trinkets and ranged items.

Reforging will enable you to modify the stats of an item. The example given was that you could reduce one stat by half and move that value to another stat you prefer. The restriction to this would be that you cannot move the extra points to a stat that's already on the item. Meaning you could remove armor pen from an item and add +hit. But if the item already had +hit, you'd need to pick something else to add to it, like expertise. Also, you'll be able to reforge an item multiple times (no limit currently set) and players will be able to reforge items for each other.

Multi-Gains

They are planning to introduce the concept of multi-gains, which means you would be able to get more than one skill point for making a better quality item. According to LeCraft, we'd be able to make a blue quality item and get 5 skill points for that versus making a lesser item (no example given, presumed to be green) and getting 1 skill point. The idea being that if you opt to make the nicer gear, you'd get more skill points for that. This would also do away with the need to make crap items just for the skill point - at least I hope so!! I've always been an advocate for making nicer items that you can sell, even if you have to invest more materials into that item. Now it appears that they'd be willing to reward you for the larger investment - I'm totally behind that idea!

Gathering: Will also have some form of multi-gains for these skills as well. No examples given for how this would happen, perhaps mining an uncommon ore would grant extra points. I'm totally guessing here, there was no elaboration.

Engineering

Bringing the fun back by giving more toys, pets, gadgets and convenience items like Jeeves and the Wormhole Generator.

Fishing: Big changes INC - more fun INC. Gag order ensued (tomorrow INC!).

Next Tier: The next tier of professions will indeed be an additional 75 skill points. The next rank is stated to be named "Illustrious". Personally, I think this is a pretty sad title compared with "Grand Master". They have 12+ months to think of something better ;) Maybe we should do a naming poll of some sort...

Woodcrafting: I can't remember the exact phrasing of this, but the basic plan is that this is at the end of the line of professions that would be implemented. The more likely scenario given by LeCraft is that they would add bows to Engineering. I guess I won't hold my breath on this one, <sigh>.
Posted by Kaliope at Friday, August 21, 2009
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11 comments:

  1. YAH! i can redo some of my gear to suit tanking or dps on my pally bs now! (vs having gear drop for one set when i need the other) and taking some int and moving it to +hit? hee hee hee my main hunter (also my lw) is going to have fun, and prob raid more now!

    thanx for the updates kaliope!

    cant wait for more info, ESP ABOUT FISHING!
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  2. the one thing i was most excited about was teh one thing i forgot to mention! i LOVE the idea of multi-gains! and i will GLADLY put in the time and money to gather the higher mat cost of blues and epics if i get multiple points for it! (i hate making 5 or 10 or 17 of the same item to get to teh next tier)

    and i am really interested in how it would work with gathering, esp skinning. maybe skinning an elite? (i hope not! lol)
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  3. Thanks for all your efforts; please keep the info coming!

    YMMV, but I was disappointed in the multi-point stuff. Professions in WotLK are pretty trivial; you get to 80, drop your gathering professions, go to the AH, and in a couple of hours you are at max profession or at least 440. You might have had to craft 75 to perhaps 100 things. And that is being simplified? Max profession in under an hour with maybe 20 items? Not the direction I was hoping to see things go.

    I am especially looking forward to the fishing changes. One of the appeals of fishing was how it was shunned by the short-attention-span twitchers.

    Till tomorrow and thanks again.
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  4. Hagu: While I agree with your sentiment about power-leveling professions, I'm not sure amping up the difficulty of skill-ups is the right solution. I remember blacksmithing in Burning Crusade and I don't think anyone wants to go back to that. I'd prefer they find some other way to make professions rewarding and enjoyable. I'm thinking of writing some posts in the near future to talk about issues like this, to get the community thinking about what professions *should* be instead of what they shouldn't be.

    But truly I'd like to see a system that would reward folks who work harder at being the best. Not just faction grinds or daily quests, but maybe even something like Archaeology where you can research/discover secret recipes. I heard about something in the Starcraft panel that really excited me and I'd love to see it implemented for WoW. I'm pretty sure they said that Diablo has RNG item generation. Wouldn't that be great for professions? If we had some sort of RNG possibilities with professions then theoretically we could diversify and learn how to make unique items that no one else has. I'd much rather see something like this happen than just making the leveling process harder to keep the min/maxers out.
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  5. I did not get what you were trying to say with the woodworking part. There will be woodworking but not for bows?

    Reforging sounds interesting because it could allow you to stay at the hit cap without regemming whenever you get a new item.

    And it will make it even more harder to create a BiS list, which is good as it should allow for more diversity what the chars wear.

    Also, Dying curse with 36 hit/36 spellpower... Can I have it now? :-)
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  6. I really dislike the hit 80 and craft to max skill in 1 day. My suggestion would be to put a cap on how many skill points you could gain per day. Kind of like the way crafting of some items like Titansteel can only be done once per day.

    That way, skill leveling a profession takes some time, not just a ton of money.
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  7. I think this is another case where the problem is WoW and its focus on the final level. So like fishing, one typical item at "red" skill might always give you a point or more, but you might have to do 40 at 524 for the last point - diminishing returns. Except WoW is all about how level 79.99 or 449 or w/e is so irrelevant so this would be painful. Clearly diminishing returns are a good mechanism.

    There is also not leveling but also discovery - I liked the original inscription - discover a glyph a day. The patch method of deciding when you want to buy 40+ book of glyphs at 3000g each or wait till 100g each or 20 was annoying; it was just a tax but not as annoying as the BoP recipes drop in Sunwell/Ulduar. because not every crafter is clearing Ulduar every week. BoE from there just go to guildies and then they hit crafters after the demand is mostly gone. Actually JC is isn't bad, do a daily get a token for a pattern.

    But there are three issues - leveling, getting the patterns, discoveries, and making money - i think diminishing returns for the former and cooldowns for the last 2.
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  8. BTW, a guildie who went to Blizzcon said that in order to diminish crafting further while doing something ineffective but visible towards gold farmers ( sorry my editorial ) there were going to be new AH limits and other things? Have you seen anything on that?
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  9. Concerning Woodworking -- I believe the message was that, by itself, woodworking couldn't create a wide enough array of items. However, if a separate system were introduced (housing), it might have a place in WoW (creating furniture). As it stands, it won't be part of Cataclysm.

    Other professions can create the remaining "uncrafted" items just as well. Engineering can make bows and crossbows, if they are themed appropriately. Blacksmithing could make metal staves.
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  10. Jon: I agree with the idea that Woodcrafting does not have enough product viability with the current item types in the game and clearly they're not interested in trying to make it work at this point. I did catch that part about adding items to other profs instead, but since they made no firm commitment to do so I decided to leave it out.

    Hagu: I've heard nothing about AH limits or anything else like that. I haven't been watching the blues like a hawk, so there might have been something in there. I'll definitely do a post if something like that comes up.
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  11. I look forward to Woodworking. I am on an RP realm and especially Staves are extremely rare (and therefore horribly overpriced like 200g for a lvl 14 staff) at lower levels. It would be a huge improvement to have them crafted. It also makes sense to let engineers finally craft bows, since we also craft arrows. Housing, especially on an RP realm would be a big thing. I hope they're going to introduce it. Can't wait for it.
    Thanks for this great site and all the information you provide to the community.
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