Let me first acknowledge and send out a word of appreciation to those of you at blizzard who are reading these and successfully passing along the feedback to the relevant people and implementing changes. I know these forums can become a bit vitriolic, but many of us left feedback about the treasure shuffle and that was fixed and professions are better for it.
However, and I regret that I did not include this in my original post, the work is not quite done.
Profession shuffle still exists and what’s worse is that the profession shuffle that does still exist is going to be a lot easier if you already have a huge pile of gold to back you up. The way it is used on the beta and in theory crafting currently, you drop and pick up professions and go through their recipes or go through their resource nodes, etc and collect as much artisan’s acuity as you can from each one before switching back to your main profession. [EDIT: The ability to be able to do this with alts and funnel that to a main crafter has been fixed, huge huge W blizzard, thanks.] It’s time consuming and unfun, even for those doing it and it has lead to many content creators to declare that they will not even be crafting anything or putting anything on the AH during the first week or so and instead focusing solely on the shuffle. Some others, with the gold to pull it off, are fully planning on completing shuffles on their main crafting characters multiple times per week, to take advantage of AA from patron orders.
This feels exploitative, and I don’t say that in the sense that people doing it should be punished but rather to point out that it specifically undermines the intent of artisan’s acuity to control the speed at which tiers of quality are able to be crafted, to put crafters of all levels on a more even playing field and most importantly to control where in the progress of raid and mythic progression that crafted items find their place, with those crafted items being balanced around that. By shuffling, crafters are able to time travel a couple of months into the future of item progression pacing and the impact this will have on RWF and m+ pushing can’t be understated. This is also primarily why people are concerned about what will and will not be available during early access – if you can get 3-4 days head start on shuffling, the cost of EA might literally pay for itself in terms of bnet balance.
Here’s my stake. I want to engage heavily with the crafting system. I will shuffle if I have to. But I want what blizzard wants in this case. I and a surprising number of other people want to engage with crafting the way it was intended to be engaged with, pacing with AA included. I want to enjoy that process as well. All I am asking is for the opportunity to do that, without having this huge gap between myself and others. People who have 10s of millions of gold already, multiple accounts, a lot more free time (and I have a decent amount, even) will always be ahead, regardless and I accept that and I actually have no complaints about it. That seems natural. Profession shuffling does not.
As for how to fix this, I’m not sure what the best way is but even the most minimal change will have a huge impact, such as only allowing the person requesting the tool/equipment craft to supply the AA. [<< EDIT: This change was implemented yesterday. YES! Nice job getting on the ball with this!] Alternatively, you could also perhaps limit the amount of artisan’s acuity you can receive on a character, so that you cannot receive additional AA by switching professions. This already kind of works that way with the weekly profession quests – you can only do 2 profession weekly quests per week, no matter how many professions you learn/unlearn. Maybe these aren’t the best methods to accomplish this goal, I don’ know. But if you can accomplish this goal, that’s really the only thing that matters.
Thanks for your time and thanks for the response to feedback.

Kaivax
Community Manager

#29 – Aug. 21, 2024, 11:30 p.m.

With a hotfix that is now live to all realms, all Dragonflight profession first craft experience bonuses no longer apply to player-characters at or above level 70.

Kaivax
Community Manager

#34 – Aug. 21, 2024, 11:49 p.m.

Hambrick:

this was just a convenient thread to post it in

Yes, and we want to get the word out to players who might be counting on leveling through The War Within using first craft XP bonuses.