The War Within has started development, but so far we don’t know much about what we will see. Blizzard has said they are planning to keep the same knowledge system, with new talents and work orders. They do want to improve it, so I though I’de get on the horn and talk about some of the issues with the current system and how it can be improved.
Inspiration is king
Inspiration is a stat that makes professions really wonky. I think in general that quality should be reserved for gear, and removed for other items. That being said it does make enchanting and gearing very cheap, as it guarantees the market will be flooded with cheap quality 2 items. Overall Blizzard might value this as it makes it easier to sustain very good, but not quite max output for casual players. The problem as goldmakers is of course that inspiration and lack of quality creates extreme barriers, where eventually you need a fully minmaxed profession build to even eke out the smallest possible profit on the region wide AH.
HSV only?
I feel like letting Hidden Skill Value, or making inspiration completely static would be a good way to level the playing field a bit. If everyone has the same rank 3 rate it will be a lot more equal, and more players will have the opportunity to utilize professions.
Catch up system
This is the biggest one. TWW needs some form of catch up for profession knowledge. The fact that you are just permanently behind with no hope of getting up to speed in reasonable time if you start late on professions is really bad. This feels awful for everyone.
Public orders?
Public orders have been absolutely awful, and are right now mostly a scam to get free items from players who are desperate to complete orders for their weekly quest. It’s clear they’ve learned some lessons with crests, which are perfect for public orders. I would want to see a reversion to force players to supply all mats, and preferably add more incentives to put up public orders. Either through turn ins or “mandatory” items like the crests.
Knowledge trees
I hope they scrap the generic skill nodes. Have skill be more recipe specific only, similar to the final nodes, and tie the ability to craft these items at all to some other unlock. Whether it’s locked behind recipes from reputation or somewhere else that would be a good change. This would significantly reduce the required setup to at least be competitive for one item type for new players, which alleviates the extreme knowledge requirements we saw in Dragonflight.
On the more casual end I also think these changes would help:
– Remove knowledge gain from crafting every recipe, swap to giving a small chance at knowledge points (up to a cap I guess) for all crafts that are still orange difficulty. Rewarding people for crafting everything (even those that are resource inefficient or not in demand) results in the market being flooded with the low-demand items, so almost every craft is worth its vendor price since crafters are rewarded with Knowledge Gain & XP (if not max level) for first time crafts.
– Remove crafting order quest reward. The combination of having the weekly quest reward but also the public craft limit says to me Blizzard had no idea whether people would interact with this system at all… but I think crafts should be market based rather than encouraging people to make at least 5 crafts even if it’s a bad offer (your solution to require mats for public orders would also help).
– Remove 2×4 farming & duplicate node tapping. The resource economy is totally messed up with >100,000 of resources sitting on the AH at any given time because loot duplication allows this stuff to be farmed over 5x more than “intended”. Loot should not be duplicated for each party member, nodes should be single use.