Game Design Professions So Far

It's been 2 days since I've started completely no-lifing Wynncraft. There were other things added in 1.18 but I want to solely focus on professions since this was the main thing added and the main thing I've been doing these past two days.
Now there are things that I love about professions so far. But there are also things that I hate about professions so far as well. I want to give my feedback in hopes that it may change some of the game design of professions. Keep in mind that this feedback is meant to be constructive and I don't mean to offend or belittle the content team, if I accidentally do so that is.

Before we start, these are my current profession levels so you can level on my current experience right now, as I know that what my feedback may be may not apply in later progression:
Gathering:
- Mining: Lv. 38
- Woodcutting: Lv. 42
- Farming: Lv. 45
- Fishing: Lv. 39

Crafting:
- Scribing: Lv. 30
- Jeweling: Lv. 30
- Alchemism: Lv. 30
- Cooking: Lv. 31
- Weaponsmith: Lv. 30
- Tailoring: Lv. 30
- Woodworking: Lv. 1
- Armoring: Lv. 30
Total Levels (As of 1/20/19): 478 (Including Combat Levels. Ya, I went jack-of-all-trades for this sorta thing.)

Good things about Professions so far
1. Improvement of RPG feel: What I mean here is it improves the feeling that I'm playing an RPG, nonetheless, a good RPG. The professions improve the "roleplay" aspect of the game, especially how gathering and crafting work. It gives something to talk and brag about with other players and sorta helps bring the community to life some more. Things like Cooking definitely appeal to my RPG side of making cool meals. It would've been cool for food to be like a "stand still and regen really fast" kind of thing but for now I think it's fine right now.
2. Improvement of the Economy: This one is very obvious. Before professions, a lot of the items you picked up from normal mobs were junk items, and you dumped them on the ground unless you needed them for special places like T4 hidden chests. Now each junk item (And most likely every Misc. Item idk) is now an ingredient, and useful in crafting items, whether it be for increasing your level faster or for actual crafting. Coupled with the new materials and tools, it allows for more things to be bought and sold, making the market feel not overwhelmed with just Legendaries and Mythics.
3. Improvement of Builds and Gear: This is another obvious one. It's safe to say that Crafted Items will be very useful in making more unique builds that suit a players needs due to the amount of ingredients and materials available. That's all there really is to say about it.
4. It's fun!: Whether it's crafting or gathering, doing your professions either while you're leveling or doing them because you have nothing else better to do is oddly satisfying. It's a good time killer and you feel you have something more productive to do other than grinding legendaries or mythics. Professions were definitely a good way to get players back in the game, as it gave them something else to do on the side-lines, if they want to do it of course.

Bad things about Professions so far (Yes I know it's longer than the good things)
1. Progression: This is a very huge negative for me so far. That is the progression for professions right now. As I had progress through the professions, I noticed a strange occurence when going up in tiers of materials and crafting: As the material tier increases, the success rate of refining those materials goes down and the amount of materials to craft items of that tier goes up (This occurs approximately every 2 tiers of materials [Increases at T2, then T4...]). This creates a very odd and bad gap of progression as it becomes harder and harder to craft items. Now it would be one thing if it was just one or the other, but both heavily slow down progression right now, as you need to gather a lot more unrefined materials to level up. It becomes annoying at times to do this as professions become more and more time consuming and the endgame crafting items are made to seem much, MUCH further. Now I do support of having progression be harder as tiers go up, but I'd rather not have both active. Perhaps have it so only the success rate goes down and the amount of materials to craft items is completely static? That seems logical.
2. Starting at Level 1: This may be more of a personal thing for me. I started playing 1.18 at level 102 (I was level 101 before the update), but I had to start my professions at level 1, which was kind of a bummer. I understand that professions are new for everyone, but starting at level 1 makes me feel like I'm leveling my character all over again, starting from Ragni, and ending (hopefully) in Ahmsord. It also doesn't sit right because I feel like higher level characters should start higher than level 1, as they've progressed so much through the game they should know at least a thing or two about professions. Perhaps start max level chararacters at level 70 for professions? Or perhaps do an equation like levels / 1.5 or something.
3. Few Resource Nodes: This is kind of a minor gripe for me right now, but I feel like resource nodes are in too small of amounts right now. If you look at Woodcutting, they basically have the entire world as their grinding spots, as almost every tree in Wynncraft has been made choppable, which is actually really cool. However, Woodcutting obviously has WAY more nodes than all of the other ones. Farming I had sort of expected to get the same treatment, like make at least 1/3 of the crops in a field in Maltic or something harvestable. Mining and Fishing are also too few, and it definitely feels this way in the later levels when you need lots of materials to get a decent amount to craft a decent amount of gear.
EDIT (Of 1/21/19): Resource Nodes could also give you a different number of resources each time, like in a 1-3 range. It definitely feels strange to chop down a really large tree and only get one log. (A minor addition that would also be cool is if you could get special ingredients when you harvest. Perhaps something like Birch Tree Bark which increases Defense on armoring by 1?)
4. Unrefined Resource Weight: I'm sorry to say this, but I feel this is just an unneeded mechanic in general. I see no purpose in having unrefined resource weight at the moment. The only purpose I see it for is to cap players on endless farming, which makes no sense as resource nodes are client-side so there's no need to worry about a player stealing all of the trees in Nivla by deforesting it. It also hinders progression more, as it makes you have to go back and either store them in your bank, or refine them and THEN put them in your bank. I would like to believe there is a purpose to this mechanic right now, and I'm opening to people telling me what it's for, but for now I don't see a point of it in the game.

So these are all of my good and bad things on professions right now. Overall right now I think they were a fantastic addition to the game. The things that I noted as bad are Quality-of-Life changes that I (and hopefully some other people out there) would like to see in the game to make professions a bit easier and more fun to play and use. They are in a really good position right now in game and have lots of potential (ex. Profession Quests, Special Profession Recipes, Quests that require crafted items?) to be turned into something bigger outside of the "craft anything" ideal.
I'm really satisfied with this update right now and I thank all of the content team for putting this entire update together. I hope you find this to be constructive feedback, and hope to see them be bettered in future patches.

- Novalescent

 

The given justification for resource weight is to limit the flow of raw materials into the market. (as mentioned a few times by GMs)

 

If you mean the weight also applies to how many unrefined resources you can put on the marketplace, I can understand that. However I don't believe that should limit the player's inventory with it.
A bit of a fuzzy answer, but an answer nonetheless, so thank you for the reply.

 

I think the higher ressource cost for crafting and lower refining success balances out the fact that the higher level your gathering is, the more you need to gather to level up

 

Yes, that is a factor that I can understand, however since both are being changed at once, it makes it much more harder and much more time consuming to level professions than it should be (At least in my opinion). It overall encourages more grinding than I hoped should not be, and hopefully to some extent you can understand how painfully long and annoying it can be to grind for hours on end, maybe even for an entire day, to get to the next tier.
Like I said in my feedback, I believe that only lowering the success rate would make more logical sense and make profession grinding a bit easier and less time consuming.

 

First of all i think this is a fairly comprehensive post so good job :)
I agree with you on the point that they need to make it the same amount of materials per item no matter the tier because it feels like the later stage daggers should be the same size right?

 

I have to agree a lot with you in almost everything you pointed out.

Spoiler: Material cost and refining rate

When going up a profession, the refining rate decreases, material cost increases, unrefined weight increases, gathering speed decreases, that's too many ways of slowing down progression especially during stages where you're just trying to level it up enough so the things you crafted are actually useful.
The material cost goes from 1+2 to 2+4, 3+6, etc, even if I don't have a problem with how much it costs, you always have leftovers of 1 or 2 of the refined material that you can't use for anything and takes up more bank space. Gathering speed should stay the same since it's how every game works when it comes to speed like this, but there should be some changes to the refining rates and material cost.

Solution: Material cost should stay the same at the lowest tier that we have now while refining rates can be adjusted accordingly to balance the material cost, making higher tier materials have lower rates to be refined makes up for the need of higher material cost.

Spoiler: Experience gain in professions

The idea of having an instant boost for higher leveled players is not unheard of, but it brings some problems as well. The system currently benefits low leveled players in some ways because they can sell low tier materials, ingredients and tools that are obtainable for their level, creating circulation in the less rich demography. Travelling to various resource spots to gather materials is part of the gameplay/adventure and it should stay that way, but the more frustrating part of that is you have to stay in an area for hours before moving on to the next. The grind kills the fun part of the progression.

Solution: As suggested by someone else before me, not an original idea but there should exist a profession xp multiplier for players with much higher combat level compared to the various professions. A player with lv102 combat should have a 1.92x multiplier when gathering lv10 barley, while a player with lv80 combat get 1.4x multiplier when crafting a lv40 dagger. This retains the whole progression with just slightly less grinding.

Spoiler: More resources and nodes

The availability of resource nodes is not too low but the imbalance between woodcutting and the other 3 gather prof. renders them less desirable to grind for since less nodes are there. Players should be rewarded more for leveling their gathering prof., currently you get faster gathering speed but the nodes still regenerate at the same rate. This isn't a problem for woodcutting since you have more nodes to harvest, but for the others, you have the same rate gathering lv10 barley as lv50 farming or lv100 farming.

Solution: Similar to what you suggested, players should get more than 1 material for every harvest, but only when they have higher gathering levels. So a player with lv90 mining should get 5 unrefined andesite for every node mined, which means 1 extra material for every 20 gathering level increase from the node's level. As for the imbalance between woodcutting and the others, more nodes and resource areas would benefit everyone.

Spoiler: Unrefined material weight

For the weight, I see why it's to limit the flow of unrefined materials into the market, but the weight itself makes some materials be more expensive than necessary since it's harder to transport the items around, even in your own bank. People have said if you don't want to grind the gathering prof. then you can just buy from the marketplace, but in order to level crafting prof. you need large sums of money to buy the materials which isn't helping poor players get into the economy. The update is designed so players can choose various roles to play as such as lumberjack, fisherman (fisherpeople smh), armoursmith, etc. It is optional if you want to gather or craft or both, but focusing on crafting is much harder as resources get quite expensive, part of which attributes to the lack of supply of materials, what I mean is lack of market saturation for materials. When there is a huge quantity of an item flowing into the market, which the weight is preventing, prices like powders drop because there are so much of them. Why is this good for materials? Cheaper materials means it is easier for people who crafts to obtain more materials which in turns allow for more versatile play-styles.

Solution: Removing the weight or at least tweak it so that it is not as much of a burden during the gameplay. Increasing the flow of raw materials in the market allows for more reasonable pricing and better circulation of such items, which at the end benefits the multifarious roles in the economy.

TL;DR: Material cost for crafting stays at lowest tier amount, refining success rates lowered to balance out material cost, profession xp gained scales with combat level, more resources per harvest from nodes per 20 gathering levels, more nodes compared to trees, removing material weight.

 

I've found that the amount of resource nodes for each type is fine (woodcutting has been hardest actually due to some types not being clumped together). You just have to find the right spot. There hasn't been any resource (excluding woodcutting) without 7+ nodes clumped nearby that I've encountered so far.

 

Update
I am now lvl 70 fishing, 68 woodcutting, 63 scribing
I do think that the material cost for crafting is fine, the higher costs, lower refining success, and all that is completely balanced out by the higher number of STUFF you end up with.
Tbh if you get a lot of ingredients(which is really hard for scribing plz add more) honestly crafting leveling is the least of your problems.

AND OMG PLEASE ADD ANOTHER WAY TO LEVEL OTHER THAN SITTING THERE MINDLESSLY
AFTER LVL 60 ITS UNBEARABLE

 

Ya I'm also now higher level (591 I think?). I noticed that level 40 materials had the same refining success as level 30 (Not sure if it's going to decrease at level 50 or if it's going to stay constant.) The only issue now like you said is the mindless sitting there trying to grind unprocessed materials.

 

i know it's 70% success chance on level 80 materials, idk about 90-100 but i would bet it's 70% chance too