The Egotistical Priest
An irreverent and opinionated discussion of the many classes
in the World of Warcraft gaming universe.
The Success of Wrath of the Lich King (Part 1)
by Vonya
The Wrath of the Lich King expansion has been out for a while (maybe some of you have heard of it?) and the first major content patch is on the horizon.
I’ve done the questing, I’ve done the raiding, I’ve done the instancing, I’ve done the theorycrafting, I’ve done the achievement-ificationing, and I’ve done the tradeskilling. (I have not done the pvping, nor do I ever intend to).
I think it’s about time I sat down and formed an opinion on the most recent expansion.
Was Wrath of the Lich King a Success or a Failure?
Money
From a money standpoint for Blizzard, of course it was a success. We’re still playing, we’re still paying, and they’re still building Scrooge McDuck towers full of gold coins for their company swimming parties.
I thought I’d get that out of the way first, because that’s not really the kind of success that I’m interested in.
Based on what I know of Blizzard, it’s only a fraction of what they would probably consider real success themselves. You and I are fickle customers. Blizzard has to not only be the best option available, it has to be the best option even over new games that come out. They have to engage us for more than just now, they have to continually build new content that we, as players, enjoy and will stick with.
Sill, can’t argue with dollar signs. They line up so neat and tidy.
Current Score?
1/0 Blizz
Tradeskills
How successful were tradeskills in Wrath? This one may actually need to be evaluated on a tradeskill by tradeskill basis.
Cooking? Fail. Lots and lots of fail. Why? Because if your chef didn’t have a fisherman who owed you a favor from that time that you helped them dispose of that body, you were in dire straights. I tried not to pay attention to just how long I had to depend upon GREEN recipes to skill up, and I certainly don’t want to dwell on the large number of mats required for some of those green skillup attempts.
Add to that the fact that the feasts are BoP and my hunter is not a raider. I have my cooking maxxed out on the character that I do my gathering and fishing on, but she can’t supply my raids with fish feasts.
Granted, our new shadow priest (Hi Regard! *waves enthusiastically*) has cooking maxx’d, so I help out with fishing for them, but it seems to me that I should be able to hand a plate of salmon over to my priest so she can offer it to our raids. What’s the point of maxxing cooking if you aren’t a raiding toon?
However, I love the idea of the daily cooking quests giving tokens for recipes. I’m not a huge fan of the “every chef in Dalaran is looking for a cheese wheel, but we will only spawn one every five minutes, BWAHAHAHAHA” philosophy of the quests, but I do like the quest => token => fun recipe schema.
Jewelcrafting was fine up until the point where I needed to start doing daily quests to get tokens to buy patterns. Not a fan. Sure, now that I’m level 80, actually killing the mobs isn’t that big of a deal, even though it’s on my healy priest. But the TRAVEL involved is ridiculous. My hunter goes downstairs to pick mushrooms. It takes her maybe two minutes, tops, and the only thing she has to worry about are those squirrely gnomes and their blinky-mushroom-stealing ability and maybe having her hoof temporarily change color from stepping in one of those questionable puddles down there.
My priest, on the other hand, has to hop a flight out to somewhere and then go kill mobs for a while until something drops. This can take anywhere from five to ten minutes (and I HATE dpsing on my priest! I know it’s not hard, it’s just…I have a hunter to do all this messy killing stuff! My dry cleaning bills are epic!)
I am not a fan of the time-consuming quest => token => one of many required recipes schema used by the jewelcrafting.
I would certainly have more issues if it weren’t for the fact that I had three miners supplying me with ore to get gems from.
Enchanting was a huge pita. HUGE. The sheer volume of mats required for some of the enchants was mind-boggling, and it seemed like getting dust and spinners was three times as difficult in Wrath. Because we do a LOT of instances, getting the shards was easysauce, and I was able to buy pretty much every enchanting recipe my little heart desired. If the recipes had cost spinners and dust, I would have had serious SERIOUS issues.
I feel horrible for those enchanters who don’t have the ready-made shard-farming group that I did. It’s one thing to say a daily quest is a time-waster in order to buy jewelcrafting recipes – what do you do when you need to disenchant blue gear in order to get recipes? Blue gear doesn’t drop after killing a few shoveltusk, it doesn’t drop after picking up a few mushrooms.
Blizz agreed with me on the enchanting mats and did a serious nerf to material requirements, but I was already maxxed at that point and can safely complain about it. *winks*
Herbing was difficult at the start, and then became ridiculously easy. Herbs were few and far between in the starter zones, but leveling eased up considerably after a certain point. I think it was poorly balanced, but not catastrophically so.
Alchemy wasn’t too bad – or at least if it was painful, it was moderately enough that I don’t recall being stuck on anything other than the need to farm eternal fires to create metagems so that I could move forward, and an odd reliance on fished up mats (again) for pygmy oil at the beginning.
I’ll have to rely on comments to tell me about the other tradeskills in detail.
I love that they gave BoE recipes to Tailoring and Engineering. I think that particular move was a huge step forward for both.
Anyrate, based on my personal experience, I’m going to give Blizz a FAIL on Tradeskills for Wrath.
Current Score?
1/1 TIE
As is so often true, I find that I’m typing too much to keep adding all of my various criteria in a single post. Expect more on Thursday!
March 10th, 2009
They did an excellent job of making tailoring more of a moneymaking trade than it was before. Also with the addition of armor and weapon vellum, they’ve made it so when practicing enchanting, I can make money instead of just enchanting my bracer a billion times. You’re right though, it was sort of hit or miss with some of the different trades.
March 10th, 2009
Leatherworking got several nice sets of gear targeted at a broad customer base (read: feralols, rogues, trees, boomkin, hunters and shamalamadingdongs) as well as those leg armour kits that damn near everyone wants. Plus the LW only gear is HOT HOT HOT. The bracer enchant alone is worth the price of admission and the leg enchants are available long before you can actually make them for other people AND for significantly fewer mats. Add the entry level PvP sets we can make, plus the ghetto purples are actually pretty good and salable, which is always a bonus.
Skinning got two words: Arctic Fur. Nuff said.
For the all new tradeskill, Inscription is actually a bit of a yawner. The glyphs are nice and all, but making money is a ridiculous pain, as you have to research which classes are using which glyphs and then try to make money from those glyphs because nothing else sells. The skill would almost be a total loss if not for two things: vellum and shoulder enchants. The vellums are really the main source of money for scribes, as they are what enchanters use to sell enchants. Yay for intereliance on tradeskills! This is something I wouldn’t mind seeing a bit more of, though it’s a dangerously fine line that can very easily get out of hand if used too heavily. Tradeskill interdependence should be useful but not critical for leveling. I digress, however. The other big win in inscription are the scribe-only shoulder enchants. Not only are they significantly better than the enchants you get from SoH, but you can get access to them long before you would get access to the SoH rep grind, as well. This alone makes the whole skill appealing, especially if you have a low tolerance for rep grinds.
Overall, I think most tradeskills were improved, but there weren’t enough top end recipes available at release. We’ve been promised more in future patches, but we’ll have to see if they actually deliver on that.
March 10th, 2009
I stalled out on Engineering long before I was able to get my goggles. Actually, I stalled out a few points before I could make my Gnomish Army Knife, which now sells for pathetically low on my server (grr arg)… and why did I stall out? Because most of the recipes rely on ridiculous amounts of COBALT.
I don’t play in zones where that stuff comes up. I got a bunch of Saronite, and then tore through that, and realized the best way to skill up was through TRULY ridiculous amounts of cobalt.
I liked the trinkets I got (Noise Machine and Sonic Booster) until I replaced them, and I still want to level to the point where I can make a Mechano-Hog, but I don’t know if I ever will, given the difficulty I have in making and maintaining cash levels in the game.
March 10th, 2009
(Hi Vonyari *Waves*)
I tend to level professions as an after thought upon capping 80. At any rate, the difference between a fish feast and a great feast is designed to be (for the most part) an inconsequential bonus for the same reason that buffs were reworked to encompass all raiders, weapon oils were removed, and potion sickness now exists. In TBC, all encounters were tuned taking into account ALL consumable options and bonus effects (food, oils, enchants, flasks, potions, drums, etc.). The philosophy in WotLK seems to be decidedly more casual, in that there are assets in the game to aid you in your PvE abilities, but most are optional and the price of admission is lower.
To get the personal buff food with the same effects as fish feasts, you’ll only have to spend a reasonable amount of time in front of the stove. If you absolutely must see that cooking skill at 450 though, then yes those last 40 points will make you cry.
March 10th, 2009
Well, tradeskills were a lot easier to level than they were in BC. Especially Jewelcrafting. *You* may have liked depending on lucky drops or paying zillions at the AH to get blue quality patterns, but I didn’t care for it. Yes, there’s some world drop patterns now, but they’re just a small fraction of the blue-quality recipes, not all of them.
Blacksmithing was expensive, as usual, but I can make my epic wares for anyone who wants, not just me now. Yes, there were some before, but they either required 25-man raiding, immense drop luck (0.01% drops favor those who play the most, you know. More kills, more drops) or tons of gold at the AH.
Tailoring’s taking lots of cloth, but, I’m ok with that. As far as the enchanting, I’m not having much trouble, but, I’ve been feeding the enchanter alt greens since the beginning from my warrior main.
March 10th, 2009
Cooking is easier, unless you insist on 450. And, they’re fixing that in 3.1.
March 10th, 2009
Leatherworking.. they did give us some nice things (FINALLY), I admit that. If they’d just up the drop rate on Arctic Fur a tad, I’d be the happiest hunter you’ve ever seen. The only thing that bothers me at all is that my specialization is useless. Why am I a dragonscale leatherworker when I haven’t gotten a new pattern for it since BC? Rawr.
March 10th, 2009
@Asara
Yeah, the lack of spec-specific gear (for all tradeskills that have them) makes me sad. I’m an elemental LW from way back (Stormshroud, what?) and while the Primalstrike set was nice in BC, I had rather hoped there would be a comparable version in WotLK. Hopefully, we’ll get that love in the coming patches.
March 10th, 2009
Re: LW Specialization BoP gear…
Primalstrike was terrible, and was everything that was wrong with LW in TBC in relation to the vastly overpowered sets availiable to Tailors, and vastly OP weapons availiable to Blacksmiths. I’m told the Mail stuff was decent enough, but the Primalstrike set was just bad, bad, bad relative to what was availiable from Kara, or even BoE LW blues like the Fel Leather gear.
That out of the way, the biggest issue I have with professions in Wrath is that /everything/ is so easy to get. In TBC, I made my coin as an Enchanter because I was ‘The Guy with Mongoose’ (as well as being ‘The guy with Soulfrost’, ‘The guy with Sunfire’, ‘The guy with Executioner’, ‘The guy with Boar’s Speed’, etc. etc. but I digress) – in Wrath, the cost of getting every pattern that’s relevant in the game is a few hundred gold in Dream Shards. Tops. The same is true of Leatherworking, though the cost is a bit higher because Arctic Fur is a bit more rare. Point is, any schmuck whose levelled his profession has Berserking, and there’s no differentiating factor to allow me as an enchanter to place a premium on my tradeskill. Alchemy has it’s discovery mechanic, JC has several world drops, several boss drops, and the JC Token system that ensures a decent amount of differentiation between the skillpanes of various JC’s – those that just want to sell their dragon’s eyes and cut the gems they use will have a significantly narrower range of patterns than those that have put effort into a variety of reputations, of buying all the token patterns, of running a variety of instances. Those JC’s that have done that, can in turn, justify a nice fee on their rarer patterns, say with /pride/ that they have ‘everything’ because it’s an actual accomplishment, and really, I find the time spent maxing out a profession, digging up recipes, and trying for that brass ring to be ‘fun’. It keeps me engaged with the game to have something to strive for, something to farm. I have no reason to log onto my Rogue outside of raids and grinding obscure and painful reputations these days (frostborn exalted here I come!), simply because there’s nothing left for me to farm for, nothing left to attain. For that to happen so early in the expansion frustrates me, because I’ve essentially ‘run out of content’ when I could have easily been busy working on a Profession that feels painfully underdeveloped. I had every enchanting pattern in the game /before/ I hit 450 – and I wasn’t leveling my enchanting leisurely as somebody needed stuff – I was painfully grinding out points chasing a Realm First Feat of Strength, which means that it was easier to collect all the patterns than level the profession.
March 10th, 2009
Yeah cooking rocks. Remember when you ate stuff for a cooking buff that lasted 15 minutes?!? Plus feasts for group buffs. The only issues I had leveling it were around 290-300 (grinding desert worms) and the gulf between about 60-80 when i actually had to farm kodo or something stupid to get high enough to cook the 80+ levels of other stuff I had saved up (Raptor parts mainly).
Herbing is easy. I’m assuming from your comments you levelled it not long after release when the starter zones were packed. Alchemy also.
Enchanting is mainly painful because each time i enchant something it effectively costs me 100+ gold because the mats are so expensive. i.e. i’m better just selling them than bothing with leveling enchanting. For example your high-end Runed Titanium Rod requires Infinite Dust (40), Greater Cosmic Essence (12) and Dream Shard (8). At current prices on my server thats about 500 gold worth of mats.
I hate tailoring. Sure from time to time I can make some money for it, but there are a alot of tailors on my server (Nagrand). Levelling it is extremely painful. Everything requires a lot of raw materials. The worst thing is that it makes very few things of use. Cloak and cheaper leg enchants are it. None of the items themselves are ever useful because by the time you can make them they are far inferiour to the items your get from questing. If you want the full stroy check out this post http://bobturkey.wordpress.com/2009/01/09/wrath-tailoring-for-priests-my-experience/
March 11th, 2009
I’m calling tradeskills a win, compared to TBC. The main reason? No epic BoP sets. The BoEs are okay, but easily replaced instead of “lasts into BT” quality. I crafted spellfire, 2x shadoweave, primal mooncloth, belt + 2x boots of blasting, the T5 healy boots, the healy head and something set and the boomkin set. Maybe more. I am SICK of grinding primals! And I’m so happy Blizz didn’t repeat that.
Cooking and enchanting were a little unhinged at first, but they’re much better now. “Never buy version 1.0″ – it often pays to wait a little after new stuff is released for the corners to be knocked off.
Cooking is in a much, much better state now than at TBC launch besides; there’s an outstanding variety of recipes and well, dailies exist.
Fishing has actually been “stealth-buffed”, it’s become massively easier to level and the raft of achievements has really gotten a lot of people into it. Definite win.
The only major screwup imho is the JC dailies. As you say, the travel is stupid, coupled with the cold weather flying means I don’t even do mine on my JC alt.
I’m peeved that LW only has feral leg enchants, but I can buy epic thread for just a bit more cash, so it’s no big.
The other good thing Blizz have done is give all trades a perk which is roughly equal. Sure you can get a bit more out of JC+BS, but it isn’t gamechanging. They’re even giving engi some stat perks in 3.1, for you gnome-lovers.
March 11th, 2009
So far i’ve only seriously levelled tailoring and enchanting (though I’ma little casual about the chanting got to work on that) — I quite like having lots of BOE things in tailoring to sell but I also dislike it as at 70 I had 2 maxed out tailoring priests (yeah yeah I am crazy) because one was in PMC and one was in FSW — not sure what to replace the FSWs tailoring with as yet. She’s still wearing the FSW and as far as I can make out even thought thats now a BOE product you still need fsw tailoring to wear it so I can’t drop it til i’ve replaced the gear (could bewrong on this and if I am I’d be very happy for someone to clue me in). Emoni’s second skill is skinning. I’m debating jc or inscription on her but I think I’ll probly give her herbing to feed higher level herbs down to lower levels to level faster.
Anyhow so far i’m enjoying WOTLK, I think there are too many times in it when i’m thrown into a vehicle and not actually playing my character BUT I know a lot of people LOVe that.
March 11th, 2009
I still haven’t maxxed Tailoring or Enchanting.
But then again, there is absolutely no reason to.
I have better gear from Naxx than I could make and I can easily get another enchanter to do stuff.
In TBC there was a good reason to level them – the things you could make.
Bliz seem to have forgotten to include those…
March 11th, 2009
I am a Miner/BS, I love what Blizz has done for me. Leveling through Vanilla WoW as a BS net me 0 usefull items, I didn’t wear a single thing I could make until level 65 and that was from my armor smithing spec. It lasted 2 levels. At 70 I wore another from my Armorsmith spec but it too was garbage for me as I leveled as Prot and it was decidedly DPS gear. However in Wrath, BAM! Tanking gear out the hoop! at level 70 you could make a full set with better stats than gear from Kara, then as you level you gather DPS stuff from quests but as a Tank if you weren’t wearing a full set of crafted gear you were undergeared. The best part is none of it was BOP, I could give it away. The DPS gear was pretty decent too, I was so happy that after the Core game and 1 expansion Blizz finally made being a BS not useless. I could go on forever on how great it is now, maybe I should post it on my blog…
March 11th, 2009
Long time reader, first time poster. I have tailoring on my priest and leveling it a was the biggest pita! I made bags till I was blue the face, I made a couple purples without getting points and the 4 day cd on the cloth is just ridiculous. Not to mention I’m not sure it was worth leveling at all because there are no more recipes to get at 450 and none drop anywhere. I got so mad about not having gotten any points after making three sets of epic gloves and several bags that I petitioned a gm. I knew the answer before I did it but I had to rail at someone over the frustration.
March 11th, 2009
Vonya, what pov are you looking at for this? Blizzards, guilds, pvp’rs, or individuals? I think you will find “success’ is measured very much differently by all of those groups.
March 11th, 2009
I have to say so far I love what they have done to tradeskills. I’m a JC/Enchanter and just started up Herbing/Inscription on an alt to make some more money and have a shot at the Nobles Deck. I love the idea of dailies for cooking and JCing, seriously I didn’t have a problem at all with travelling for the JC daily because in the end, it allowed me to get good patterns without having to raid and depend on RNG for them. The whole rare drop pattern thing had always held me back before, now I can choose myself how much time and money I want to invest and get rewarded for that little extra work.
Also Enchanting didn’t seem to bad honestly, there were a ton of green drops, I never vendored any of them and ended up with a lot of mats. Now abyss crystals and shards are another story but when you are in need of those to keep up, you usually are organised in a guild or grouping up regularly so you should either be able to make the money to buy them or DE them from drops. It just takes a long while if you have to do it all by yourself, that is true.
All in all I’m loving almost everything I’ve seen in the expac so far (I’m a Blizz fangirl more or less though, to me it seems they always make exactly the changes I want them to), only thing I have a problem with is what was already mentioned earlier, the whole vehicle thing. Yeah I suck at them and I don’t enjoy it, I like using my toon to do things, not random abilities I just get tossed at me. But it’s just a minor thing really.
I’m just waiting for the fishing dailies now, then it’s gonna be perfect. Oh yeah, epic fishing pole, the best thing they could have added, imo.
March 12th, 2009
The tradeskills my mail/alts that are currently at 80 or close enough involve:
Enchanting/Tailoing: Yes we all know how expensive enchanting is to lvl (always has been), and is what my main has so she didn’t have an alt to suply her greens, lucky enough she did have guildies to do so
i am glad they reduced the mats for a lot of the formulas (even tho as Vonya i was already maxed when that happened… but yea >.>) as for tailoring the main gain i had from it was making green items to DE, and at max (or rather on the last few lvls) getting my flying carpet and being able to make the epics to guildies or alts that weren’t uber geared back from TBC)
Herbalism/Alchemy: My 2nd 80, so by the time i was actually lvling her the starting areas weren’t packed with people herbing the hell out of them, it was actually rather easy cause you can pretty much max it from the first areas (Borean/Howling/Dragonblight), now the 7 day CD that they initially had on the Research for alch was… yea >.> specially considering it was the only way to get new recipes that didn’t come from the trainer, i’m glad they reduced the CD to 3 days and also less mats to get it done.
Mining/JC: This is pretty much the char i’m working on atm, to actually max mining you have to go at least as far as Scholar Basin so it actually takes a bit of time unless you wanna do some suicide runs there as a lowbie
. As for JC i actually like what they did with it, sure you can only get 1 token a day, but that sure beats the hell out of having to buy almost every pattern off the AH cause it was a world drop, also you can get almost all the dailies quest items from Howling Fjord (the only exception is the Elemental Armor Scrap which you can get in Dragonblight), so if your JC is already high enough to grab the dailies you can solo them even if you’re not 80 
March 12th, 2009
Enchanting: Lucky enough to have a couple of suppliers of green gear to DE, and even the occaisonal shard. Win column: Vellum. Lose column: Need for dream shards and pay-off for maxing. The value of Vellum outweighs any draw-backs to enchanting as now you can level in the black or even profit, before it was all losses except for whoring yourself out on trade – even if you had loyal guild customers.
Tailoring: Lucky enough to have multiple suppliers of frostweave. Climbing upto 450, though it seems pointless right now. A little bit of planning can go a ways in easing the pain, and I think I am about even money on it. The need for dust whilst also levelling enchanting is a bit of a drawback and a source of synergy at the same time (able to DE greens for dust). The 4-day cooldown is a pain, but is also why the ebon/shadow/moon cloth has market value. Considerations: T4 recipes sucked-#$@ too, so T8 and T9 stuff will offer some pay-back.
Anyhow, now that I’ve arrived at 450 enchanting I need to find ways of repaying my suppliers in-kind – I’m thinking free Abyss crystals whenever I upgrade an epic as I have a few scrolls of my fav. enchants stashed away and I already bought the 450 recipe (that costs a number of abyss crystals). Pay-back for help with my tailoring is easy, once I hit 450, I’ll give-a-way a bag every chance I get.
March 12th, 2009
hmmm, what did I mean by T4 recipes? What I meant to say is T5 recipes and above were where the real pay-back happened in TBC. The FSW and PMC sets also gave pay-back.
March 16th, 2009
The JC dailies are the easiest thing in the world. Every single mob type except the shoveltusks are a 1 minute flight from Dalaran.
Complaining that your low level alt can’t do the JC dailies is ridiculous. Would you rather have to run heroics and raids for them?
Max level benefits from professions do and should come to main characters that are at max level.
They did screw up enchanting at launch, by making dust so much more scarce than essences or shards.
March 17th, 2009
[...] expected it to? Vonya sets out to find out in what has turned into a three part post: you can find parts one and two on the site now, and part three is set to come out tomorrow.So far, the answer is yes: [...]
March 18th, 2009
Mining is win, Blacksmithing is epic win, compared to TBC.
Inscription is ok, although the mat cost for Darkmoon Cards, since they are random in what you make, reliant primarily on Snowfall Ink, mats found as a rare and random drop from milling, and Eternal Life, made from 10 Crystallized Life, a rare and random drop found while herbing, is…a bit high, basically forcing you to the auction house if you want to make any headway. Glyphs are not really a good way to make gold, in my opinion, and any attempt to sell Vellums has been unsuccessful.
I really think Enchanting got the short end of the stick, overall, but maybe it is just that itisn’t as overwhelmingly good as it used to be.