Tobold's Blog
Thursday, June 25, 2015
 
Crafting in 6.2

I only had a short look at the new World of Warcraft patch up to now, concentrating on the crafting part. I used to make items like hexweave essence, greater hexweave essence, and powerful hexweave essence. These now all have been replaced by the "new" hexweave essence, which can be applied multiple times to a crafted item to bring its ilevel up to 685. Beyond that you need the new mighty and savage hexweave essences, and those need the new resource felblight. (Replace "hexweave" by other terms like "truesteel" for other professions than tailoring).

Apparently the devs were of the opinion that felblight somehow would "fix" crafting in WoD. I disagree. I was seriously disappointed to find out that you can't buy felblight for primal spirits, like you can for all other crafting materials. Which means that the *only* way to get felblight is gathering resources in Tanaan Jungle. Really bad idea, as that will just lead to node camping, and people being angry at each other for "stealing" nodes, especially once we get flying. And of course a lot of people abandoned gathering professions, as those were kind of useless before the patch.

The crafting resource requirements for the basic essences has been lowered, and the production of those resources has been sped up. I don't think that actually changes anything. Prices will adjust according to the new balance between supply and demand. Although I am not yet convinced that the new production speed between the craft-specific resource, the sorcerous element needed, and the savage blood is in balance: I have the impression that I now have far too many of the craft-specific resources and not enough elements and blood to craft them into essences. Which is a problem because there is no way to "grind" monsters for elements and blood, so you can't adjust relative production speeds.

Other than the mighty and savage upgrade items the patch brought no new crafted items. Which means that we are still stuck with making the basic crafted items and upgrading them with essences. And we still can't wear more than 3 of those, which basically turns crafted items into a "filler" for slots you couldn't find other items for. I really don't see how patch 6.2 has done anything to improve crafting, it still isn't very interesting but more of a passive money maker.

Comments:
I got the impression somewhere that we'd be able to harvest it via Barn as well, but apparently that is not the case. I guess I give up on crafting...
 
Not only that, but the Felblight can be sold in the AH. So we're back to 10 hour a day farmers flooding the market.

This is a HUGE step backwards.

I also have to wonder about the people who designed the new shipyards. I have a chance to build ships that have equipment pre-installed that I can't make and install on other ships. Equipment a vendor will sell me if I had the blueprints for. I sent a ship on a mission with a 36% success chance (As opposed to decommissioning the ship. How about THAT for a slippery moral slope.) and it wins. I send 2 on a mission with a 100% chance and they LOSE. WTF?

As far as I can tell? The "shipyard mini game" is not a game at all, it's a scripted sequence with predetermined losses and wins. Sure, that's probably not the case and it's just badly designed and buggy, but that's what it looks like.
 
I remember back in ancient times when games would make it so that if someone else got to a harvesting node before you, it would just disappear and you would get nothing except angry that some random person just took something you wanted. Damn all these other players, why can they just let me play my mmorpg alone without bothering me?

Why did we ever put up with that crap? o.O
 
So I wrote this long comment and then my browser lost it all. I'll just summarize because I don't' remember it exactly.

The shipyard seems to be designed to force people away from the "alt-friendly" mentality. It takes a significant time investment to gather all the blueprints, and then it takes a significant amount of resources and time outfitting your ships with the different abilities they need to complete the missions reliably.

Combine that with the fact that the rewards from the shipyard are pathetic at best for the amount of time and resources involved and there is really only one conclusion: It's only worth your time for achievements and the legendary ring.
 
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