World of Warcraft Profession Overhaul

• Author: Jim Franklin
• Date: December 30, 2015
• Updated: January 4, 2021
• Expansion: World of Warcraft

If there is anything that I would love to see done for the next expansion, it would be a World of Warcraft profession overhaul. Even before Warlords of Draenor and the garrisons which made any kind of sociable profession system complete pointless, it was still a little sketchy. Often, people would just level a profession for selling materials or leveling enchanting, the only profession of any worth.

I’ve written this similar post about this, oh so many years ago now, but a lot of what I said then remains valid, and now out leveling your professions is even easier to do. You can even ‘attempt’ to catch up with your trade skills once you get your garrison but that is one boring slog from there, and with such little reward at the end. I understand why people don’t.

I’m a big fan of professions in MMO‘s, and believe that they should need time, effort and a little luck to become the best. The maximum skill levels of professions shouldn’t be something that anyone can get to easily.

So this is my idea. Firstly, we’ll leave the gathering professions as they are. To be honest the way they work now is sort of ok, and as they say if it ain’t don’t fix it.

I would allow tailors, blacksmiths, leatherworkers to be able to break down equipment, in a similar way to enchanters, except of course they won’t get dust and essences, they’ll receive some of the materials back.

Now, for the fun part of my World of Warcraft profession overhaul, every profession now includes a large portion of experimentation, and the world would now become abundant with hundreds or thousands of new animal, plant, and mineral parts that can be collected, and used within your profession.

So, you’d have your basic recipes that you learn from the trainers, and you can experiment with each of these recipes by attempting to add one or more of the various bits discovered on your travels.

So, if we start with something easy, such as you kill several spiders and accumulate some spider venom. Now a weaponsmith can attempt to forge a blade with this poison adding poison strike, but the chances of success are fairly low, as the forging process destroys it, though a failure increases your success the next time. This same venom can be used by an alchemist to create poison resistance potions, First Aiders could create inoculations

Bark from certain trees, applied to pieces of armour would give extra protection or as the hilt of a weapon would increase your chance to hit.

Once you get to a high level, you reach a point where you can’t buy any more advanced recipes and schematics, you can only explore and investigate with new materials and try to get better things for yourself.

I would also see, all the professions working more closely together, so that the only way to truly advance in your craft is to see what else there is to offer out there from the other professions, and to figure out the best way to use them.

So, there you have it my World of Warcraft profession overhaul that will bring all the professions back working with each other, remove some of the dull grind, and now give every profession something to sell and make some money on. You’d have to play with the success/reward of each of these interactions to make it worth the effort, but imagine a whole new world of crafting to explore, imagine going back to the other expansions lands to find that perfect part for your new armour, or weapon. Imagine finding recipes that are unique to you. It’s not a flawless system, by any means and it raises a few questions I haven’t addressed here, but something needs to done with the World of Warcraft professions to make them worth it, or if not just remove them altogether.