“Give me a child and I’ll shape him into anything.”
B. F. Skinner
Dirty Cauldrons
My brother could tell me because I always forget. There is the well-known term for a reward system that doesn’t always reward and makes you want to keep going. It rides on Pavlov who did stuff with chickens. The idea is that if the reward system is not always 1 to 1, then we are more likely to keep doing the task.
It would make total sense for the World of Warcraft to fold this into their systems to keep us happily playing. And they have. One might posit that they have gone too far and tried to make it every part of their game: from gear drops to plucking flowers to scrapping for expulsom.
During the Beta, the Wowhead economy guys wrote that it appeared, to them, that the profession designers and those who balance it all were not the same team. We see this in the extremes of the profession design in Battle for Azeroth.
A few days ago, a hotfix came down the pike so that Hydrocore could (might) drop from the last boss of a Heroic Dungeon. Yay, I thought. This is something that I can queue for and not go through the tedious process of acceptance from other players.
I got one! Now I can make the Mystical Cauldron for my raid team. I’m stoked. The cauldron also needs five expulsom. When I was questing in the zones, the rewards often offered things that would be scrapped and (maybe) I would earn an expulsom.
So, I made my cauldron and proudly placed it down for our raid.
Today, I need five more expulsom. The hydrocore can (maybe) be earned by running a quick Heroic. My zones have been quested out so I am relying on World Quests. This is really bad, I am going to kill mobs to get a piece of gear so that I can scrap it in the hopes of earning an expulsom.
Rank Two for this recipe “greatly reduces the amount of materials” which means fewer flasks but one still needs five expulsom.
That is a nasty grind. I find myself impatient with the long slow flight paths.
There are several players in my guild who: farm leather to make wrists to scrap and scrap and scrap to try to earn expuslom.
The answer is obvious: don’t do it. This is a shame, I like giving presents to my raid team.
This is a very dirty design. It is not well done or elegant or fun. Crappy design, crappy play.
Coffee Cakes and Crits 
People are willing to work for a reward. But not necessarily the professions themselves but the materials required almost have an old man with a fishing pole dangling a dollar, oh, you almost had it.
What the system did for me with Tailoring and Enchanting is just drop me away. Enchanting is at maybe 77-78 from turning in Enchant world quests where I need to make 3 of an enchant. That’s a decent amount of mats to burn through for a +1 skill up. For me to level it to max would require me to burn through all of my savings. So until they make a change, there it will stay.
Tailoring is worse. I need hydro cores and Expulsum to make a 355 piece, once I do, I believe I learn the recipe to make a 370, that takes 50 Sanguisel and Expulsum. Once I make that, I get the recipe to make the same piece of gear as a 385, that requires 250 Sang and a lot of Expulsum.
Or I can just abandon my professions entirely, not let completing the ranks, or making myself decent armor put me in an even worse mood. On top of all that? I don’t even know if it would be good secondary stats.
I am willing to bet that when 8.1 drops, there will be a sweeping change to professions. Call it a feeling. Because right now they have just made them useful only to people with servers hours a day to farm mats.
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Yeah, I don’t know — dial up the drop rate?
I think that once you make your piece that you can … scrap it to get some of the mats back?
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Yeah, I’m not sure. It’s so far out of reach I don’t even feel like bothering. I mean LFR by the end will be at least 370-385 gear. Less frustrating to just wait it out.
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And just like that they announce big changes to professions. Sucks we need to wait for 8.1 though.
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Ah, come on, is this for real? I rather go back to when we had to farm BoP Black Lotus then!
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I went and added it up for you Alunaria. For me to make a pair of 385 gloves, I need to make the two lower pairs first to learn the recipes. So here’s the total material required to get the one pair of gloves, that I can’t even sell.
45 Embroidered Deep Sea Satin
135 Deep Sea Satin
135 Nylon Thread
120 Expulsom
15 Hydrocores
272 Sanguicell
At a 75% drop rate on the final boss of a heroic dungeon to get the Hydrocores, I would need to do 20. At a rate of 1 Sanguicell per wing of LFR, I will need to do 69 wings or a little more than 17 full clears. Just to make a pair of gloves. To make the pants, it takes the same. So 40 heroic dungeons and 34 full clears of LFR, and since there is a reset once a week, it’s 34 weeks.
So yeah, professions are in a really bad place right now.
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My goodness, those numbers are nothing short of bizarre! Oh, changes have been announced to be coming soon? Just a reduction in mats, or? Still, gosh, though, how did this make it to live.
I have been thinking about earlier times, however. Where mats were hard to come by, and crafting items with professions were mostly for those outside of raids, as a way to get “okay” gear – that would never match the quality of what dropped inside the raids.
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Exactly. Every expansion prior to Legion had recipes to make a couple of good pieces. It just took time. For Tailors there was a 1 piece of cloth a day. Usually it would take 3 weeks making that 1 piece of cloth. And the materials were in the world. Legion started the “need to do Mythic dungeons”, The Arcway, and the one in Suramar city. I think people begrudgingly did them, I’d did twice, it was one piece of gear, and it could be sold, plus it was completing 1 final boss in each. Putting it all behind raiding multiple times and multiple Mythic dungeons, sounds like design teams weren’t talking. Someone offered to run me through the first 3 raid bosses in Heroic so I could get a guaranteed 30, when I mentioned I needed 550, they were floored. On top of that the odds are I would get a piece of gear at 385 doing all of those runs before I could make a piece of 385. Lol. I hope they really sit down and think about what they want professions to be, and what effort is required for the reward. And they do it soon.
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Anchor weed that takes 5 for the raid flask is so hard to pick, think my wife got 5 in 1 hour doing a loop and hundreds of everything else, sells for around 1,200g each. So flasks are really expensive. I know it’s only the beginning, but they really ramped up the time sink.
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My main is enchant/tailoring. I am not even trying to level up anymore. Enchanting my own stuff. If I am in guild group, I offer enchants, but I have little of the high level mats so it’s the simpler ones. Doing the odd world quests to gain a level (in case mats are not too much). Blizzard has managed to make professions worse and worse (they must be really trying). I would be surprised if they could make them even worse next expansion (“the last 20 levels of fishing requires you to hold the fishing rod backwards while dancing”). I feel really nostalgic about making the Robe of the Void back in the day. (Still got it in bank…)
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““the last 20 levels of fishing requires you to hold the fishing rod backwards while dancing”
That’s pretty darn funny!
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Well, I am trying to help Blizz with worse ideas than they already have 😉 As for achievement, there should be a “the Inane” for people making professions irrelevant, boring and pointless. 😉
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Lol, that sounds like an achievement in the making!
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