My Opinion on The 1.20 Update's effects on Professions and the surrounding Community

Introduction
Hello, I'm GraphicNovel. I'm a Wynn player who's done way too much proffing for my own good. I don't post much on forums because I generally don't have much to say worth making a thread about, but I felt like making this thread to voice my opinions on the current state of professions. For simplicity's sake I will refer to the current state of profs as 1.20 profs, even though I will talk about changes not strictly from the 1.20 update that are from the patches that came after. Before anything else, this is not a guide to professions. If you are looking for that, there is a great thread made by @Crokee that I will link here: https://forums.wynncraft.com/threads/a-comprehensive-guide-to-professions-v1-3-0.268901/. I feel it is necessary to add that this is going to be the opinion of someone who has gone far past any reasonable profession level, which means my opinions might not represent the experience of levelling profs from 1-110, the level most reasonable people stop at. Again, not biased at all. I think that's enough rambling so it's time to get to actually talking about 1.20 profs. The main things to go over are: Gather XP/Speed Ingredients, Guild Gathering XP Boosts, how both of those have changed the Proffer/Hunter Dynamic, and T3 Level 100 Materials from TCC. I'm not going to talk about champion rank because we all already know how much it changes getting access to bombs anyways, and I don't think I could say anything new about it. There are also new tool textures I guess.

One more thing, This is going to be a long post, if you don't feel like reading all of it, I will put a single sentence TLDR at the end of this post.

Gather XP/Speed Ingredients
The Gather XP/Speed Ingredients (GXP and GSpeed for short) were an extremely sudden addition to the game when they were introduced in a patch back on April 21st of 2020. They were rather controversial back then to put it lightly. They were removed shortly after this, and it was definitely because of the backlash and not because they were released by accident in the first place (they were very unfinished upon the first release in April, I was kidding in case you couldn't tell, sorry for confusing anyone). They were reintroduced with the 1.20 update, this time quite a bit less powerful then they were before. In April the armour and accessories gave 200-300% total, this time they give about 164% if I recall correctly. This time they were much better received for the most part due to this large nerf in power.

I personally think that in the 1.20 incarnation, the gathering ingredients are a great addition. I'm of the opinion that gatherings were disproportionately difficult in comparison to craftings, at least at the higher levels. I'll get to my opinion on how much easier gatherings are as a whole later. But by themselves I think the ingredients are great. They make a nice circle, where the higher level your craftings are, the easier it is to get better gathering equipment. Although notice how I said easier, because you can still buy them off of trade market. But don't mistake that for a negative, because selling gxp items adds a new source of revenue for high level proffers, something we need very badly for reasons I will get into later.

Gather Speed is a bit more complex, because it does not make the nodes respawn faster like Prof Speed Bombs. This makes sense because GSpeed adds speed in the same way that levelling up does, in that it takes less clicks to finish gathering a resource (node for short), but it limits the usability of GSpeed, in that your gathering location has to have enough nodes for you to continuously gather (cycle) for it to be effective. I also forgot to mention it's only on consumables. Overall I think that GXP/GSpeed Ings are a great addition to profs, although that's my opinion and I would love to hear what anyone else has to say about them.

Guild Gathering XP Boosts
In 1.20, guilds were changed massively. I will not touch on that because this is not a guild thread, but one of the additions to guilds were bonuses you can put on territories. One of these bonuses was a gathering xp boost. In the 1.20 Hero Beta, the boost was originally going to be 300%. It is also worth adding that there are two seperate Gather XP Bonus IDs, the one from crafteds, and the one from gathering tomes, and this guild boost. The latter of which is multiplicative instead of additive, making the 300% boost even more significant than it seems. This is where the opinionated part of this section starts.

Dear Salted or whichever staff member added this,
WHAT WERE YOU THINKING??? 300%? WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS?

I have needed to type that for about 8 months. Despite my anger at this decision, it is worth adding that the devs did not expect a guild to be able to actually hold onto Silent Expanse permanently. This is because SE is a literal straight line in terms of territory connections, making it almost impossible to hold onto. However, through agreement from other guilds, from January to July 2021, The Profession Heaven (PROF) guild was able to hold SE, giving gathering boosts to whoever asked to join. I will not say anything more about it, considering it has little relevance to this post other than how the guild has been the vehicle for the most drastic changes in the gathering leaderboards.

Thankfully this boost was nerfed before release to a measly 180%, which was still enough for @AmbassadorMax to get 141103 XP from one node of Dernic Ore on a dxp weekend, with a ton of other boosts. for reference, highest I ever got from one Dernic Node in 1.19 was about 10k, give or take a few hundred xp. The effect this had on the gathering leaderboards is hard to understate. Before the update @ron111701 's 1 billion fishing overflow xp was extremely impressive, considering average xp per node from levels 128-132 used to be around 2.8k with bombs. Now, There are 3 people with 1 billion fishing overflow, 1 with 1 billion in woodcutting, and one with 1 bil in mining. But the biggest effect that you can see easily from the leaderboard is in ron's current overflow, sitting pretty at 7.8 billion.

The guild boost was later nerfed to just 100% at a later patch, and after PROF stopped holding SE it is currently as I'd imagine the devs intended, where the guild boost cannot be held for dernic profs for more than a couple hours at most. However the effects on the gathering leaderboards are here to stay, and unless the guild gxp boost is removed, it will still be possible for such ludicrous xp gain to take place again. The Current state of the gathering leaderboards make a great example of how it isn't a great plan in the slightest to add a feature under the assumption that it won't be used to it's full effect.

Before I start on the next section of the post I would like to touch on 1.20 gatherings as a whole. I think that the GXP/GSpeed Ingredients were fine by themselves. A Guild boost was not necessary or wanted by the community, and it completely flipped the balance of profs as a whole. Gatherings used to be considered much harder than craftings, however the update changed that entirely by making it the other way around.
This is where the rant about how the amount of xp gained itself has changed from 1.19 to 1.20. The rest of the thread will be much more subjective than the previous portion has been already. I am going to talk more about the Prof Discord/Community, as well as the trade market, so be aware of that.

The Proffer/Hunter Dynamic
The biggest change in the experience of getting xp itself has been on account of the GXP Ingredients. I still think they are a good addition, but I think that something else was lost along the way. I remember when I first started doing profs for real around January of 2020 (Sorry 1.18 Proffers, I am not one of you :( ). There were no GXP boosts of any kind, except for one. Hunted Mode. This was the only way to get more xp while gathering. As a result, a new class of players emerged to make sure proffers didn't get anything for free. Prof Hunters. The way this played out was a metagame of Hunters finding the best way to kill the proffers, while the proffers had two options for survival: Run away, or Fight back. Everyone made sure to only use fully untradeable builds on their prof classes, as to ensure they did not lose equipment when dying in hunted, This created a culture where the hunters were effectively alienated from the Prof Community, in that until May of 2020, Hunters were straight-up banned from the Prof Discord. This stopped when it was decided that they could join, but they had to have a role showing they were a prof hunter. The Prof Community made sure to document who was hunting frequently.

Now as you can imagine, this created a slightly toxic environment. It also created a headache where not everybody fit strictly into the categories of hunter and proffer. However in my opinion if you can overlook the toxicity this dynamic was capable on inciting, it created an interesting dynamic, where you would risk your materials for more xp gain. It was also enjoyable for a number of the players involved. It was nice early on, but then someone discovered that the mythic relik Toxoplasmosis could kill anything in one hit, except a mage. This mages surviving problem was solved easily by putting two fire powder VIs on the toxo, giving it courage which affects poison for some reason. And like that, it became nearly impossible for proffers to fight back. The new meta was to get 150 agility, and run back to lutho and turn off hunted once a hunter shows up. No more fight, just flight. This ruined most of the allure for using hunted for me, considering you could almost never kill a toxo, unless you also had a toxo.

Once 1.20 was released, hunted was no longer the only option. The Prof Discord removed the hunter role, and most proffers stopped using hunted. This lead to Prof Hunters getting bored, and for the most part the Proffer/Hunter dynamic ceased to exist. There is still the occasional fool who uses hunted with their crafted gxp set, which is pretty much the last remnant of proffers using hunted for xp gain. I giggle a bit when I see hunters nowadays, although I do feel a bit bad for them. I don't have much in the way of opinions on this change, but I know that I romanticize the early proffer/hunter dynamic more than I should. I would like to hear anything anyone else has to say on this one as well, considering most of this section is just a very subjective interpretation on prof community history.

TCC and the Material Market
I'm not going touch on The Canyon Colossus itself, only one of it's rewards. TCC gives T3 Level 100 materials (mats for short) as a reward. Seems like a nice filler reward for doing the raid until you consider the effect this has had on the price of high level T3 materials. T3 Sky Mats used to be about 1le per 1 mat, give or take. Now, this has dropped to about 15eb at most. Your opinion on this is going to differ depending on what you stand to gain from cheaper materials. Personally since I sell materials on trade market as a source of revenue, this puts a massive strain on my ability to make money off of it. Although, I sell dernic materials so Ideally I should not be affected too much, right? Wrong. The supply or the cost may not have changed, but the demand has. there are very few recipes that actually require Dernic Materials, considering you only lose 3 durability if you use Sky Mats in place of dernic. As a result the demand for Dernic Mats is much lower, making it much harder to profit off of them. It is still doable, but it's not as good as it used to be. But yet again my opinion is heavily biased towards that of a high level proffer. So I see this a bad thing. You may see it differently and that is fine by me.

TLDR
To sum up that 2000 word rant, gather ingredient good and interesting and good addition to game, guild gxp boost bad objectively and there is no room for debate, hunted mode :crab: and the material market is in shambles, IN MY OPINION.

Conclusion
I don't have much to add here, other than telling you to comment again. But I would actually love to see other people's opinions on what I touched on here. Now if you'll excuse me It is 3 in the morning and I need to sleep, Leave a comment if you feel you have anything to add, I would love to hear it when I'm not sleep deprived.

EDIT: Removed the advertising so salted doesn't kill me ty for bringing that to my attention

EDIT BUT AGAIN: In retrospect I downplayed how toxic the whole hunting environment was. after reading the comments what's written there doesn't reflect my current opinion very well. If I were to rewrite it I would take it more from a much more critical perspective, considering it devolved down to getting one-shot by everything anyways. Despite how much I want to think it was fun, it really wasn't due to a multitude of factors. The most fun PvP involving hunted was more in line with when everyone got bored after prof bombs stopped being thrown and went to pvp outside lutho, or more organized events like InteriorCamping's Golden Battle Royale, where everyone had to make a level 33 hunted class and battle it out. Just thought I should add this here so the thread better represents a more informed opinion.

 

Good thread! <3

 

Thank you garbicbobble, dofor voicing opinions i too have held for months. While I'm still not as open-armed receiving of the ingredients as you, it is true that they are a good feature. However one thing I have to fisagree with; removing the profer hunter dynamic.
This may be real biased, but oh well. I am an afmin on the prof tryhard group, and was incredibly active during the days of hunting. I can not begin to tell you about the amount of drama and backlash I have received, especially regarding a certain banker person. I'm not kidding when i say that my life was worsened drastically by the existence of hunters. Now that the hunters (at least the toxic ones) are gone profing feels a lot less... murderous and toxic.

Ah well anyway good thread 10/10 dentists would recommend.

 

me when 20-30 people hit fishing 132 in one weekend due to gxp boosts

whoa, this reminds me of another endgame activity you can do in wynn, deja vu? (cough cough) 1.20.3 attackers (cough)

 

you cant remove guild gxp boosts because then the gathering leaderboards will be forever stacked against those who come after its removal, but it remaining also causes a disparity between those who have access and those who dont.

this is why we think things through and listen to community feedback :saltroll:

 

me when T3 Starfish Meat sells for 32e :doom:

 

I'm just waiting Level cap to be increased so dernics shine more

The only uses for dernics now are: vim vein flip ring, rainbow tierstack ring, and weapons if you like to sacrifice 10le for 5 more base damage

 

just a heads up. Gonna give my thoughts on what you said later

Ok, here's my thoughts. I'm saying this as someone who has done both gathering and crafting until level 80 basically without XP and speed bombs, has done most of the gathering afer that without XP and speed bombs, and hasn't used gathering XP gear before like level 95 gatherings (this is because it was before 1.20), I've also been doing professions since 1.18, which I've done very slowly as you can see by the fact that I still wasn't level 100 gathering in 1.20.
I've also never used hunted mode or guild xp for profs out of principle. I'm saying all of this as someone with pretty much max useful profs, but who is in no real way a prof tryhard.

Gather XP/Speed Ingredients
I also think both gather XP and Speed are a great addition to profs, but they do have a major problem. Much like any other identification, the better XP ingredients are high level. Thus incentivising people even further to level their combat first and do professions later. As someone who has tried to level their professions along with their combat (more on that 'tried' later), I know that this makes people miss out on most of the good stuff you can do with professions. I'd like more noticeable incentives to be gathering and crafting at levels below 100. And feel like no good low level gathering XP is a missed oppurtunity.

Guild Gathering XP Boosts
I fully agree with you

The Proffer/Hunter Dynamic
imho, the Proffer/Hunter Dynamic is the worst thing to ever happen to wynn.
It was (and is) an xp bonus with a random chance to die every now and than. You use big words like 'metagame' and 'dynamic'. But there was never anything dynamic. Just sometimes an assassin using vanish + multihit or a toxo shaman on a proffer and the main meta was shaming people out of hunting proffers. This was a catalyst for the most toxic behavior I've ever seen on wynn. And it was not just proffers being toxic. Like I said before, I've never used hunted mode and I've had several times where a person would try to multihit me out of vanish or hit me another way, which did nothing, after which I got ridiculed for doing profs without hunted mode.

(about gxp/speed)
it completely flipped the balance of profs as a whole. Gatherings used to be considered much harder than craftings, however the update changed that entirely by making it the other way around.
I'd like to add to this, because it's almost never mentioned, that until the levels 60s I had a very hard time getting my crafting professions up to the same level as my gathering professions. Until the level 60-65s, my gathering professions were a solid 10 levels above my gathering professions at all times. This might be a side effect of most people using speed bombs to level crafting which halves the amount of materials needed, though. In higher professions I also found this to be the case, though.

TCC and the material trade market
As you can imagine, since I don't gather with bombs, I got alot more materials than most people and from lvl 80 and up, where the gathering really was taking longer than the gathering, I started selling my excess on the trade market. So selling high level T3 materials was also a big part of my income. (Although my main income would be selling slightly overpriced T1 materials, which have barely been effected.) I don't feel strong emotions about their prices dropping and I do like that it both incentivises people to look into the cool things you can do with crafting and doesn't make me feel as bad for using good materials on something suboptimal. I don't really think it's a bad thing but can easily see why it would be seen as such.

The champion rank
I really miss this one from your list of changes. Since the launch of 1.20 Aside from the DXP weekend, I've only ever been able to get into one server with prof bombs. I was actively trying to get into these servers until around the middle of April using both the bomb discord and the prof discord. That's three months of actively trying to get into a prof server to no avail. Crafting is 'balanced' around having both prof speed and XP on at the same time. Due to champion rank this has become way more difficult for f2p players to level. Adding champion has been a bigger change to me than any of the other changes. I can see how you might overlook this as you have the rank yourself and there isn't non-stop champion backlash like there used to be anymore. But the problems that came with champion are still here and I feel like they should be spoken about.

 

While I for one definitely cannot speak for proffers and the general grind, I think that it does become an issue when a non-proffer can semi-reliably farm high-level mats by doing a raid (with 3 other people also capable of getting the same mats as you) that does not directly have anything to do with profs. A guild member who beats a low defense tower does not collaterally destroy a high defense tower, and a guy who clears Corrupted Decrepit Sewers does not instantly get a Corrupted Undergrowth Ruins clear as well, but a guy like me who has never touched a prof beyond mining 59 yet can get lvl 100 t3 mining materials by clearing TCC, kind of unfair if you ask me

 

I mean, while you are not wrong, the screenshot is from the Game Rules section and not the Forum Rules. There might be differences (altough not in this case).

But for the thread:
I have casually started doing profs (lvl 110 woodcutting) and must say it is very enjoyable with a GXP-set. It doesnt take too long, but is still a time investment. I am sad to have missed out on the guild GXP in SE. Also, one reason I began with profs were to sell mats... Guess that won't work as well now with TCC.

 

I'd have to agree with you there. The peak of Prof Hunting was almost a year ago, and it's really easy for me to forget that it created a toxic environment. I should have gone over that more. And I'm just now finding that especially strange since both of us had to deal with the hunters and the discord. I did like the early hunter dynamic alot, but that was also when it was the most toxic. I really should have put more emphasis on that.

________________________________

yeah

 

*adds t3 dernic mats to new raid*
*ruins market further*

first of ty for actually reading the forums rules so salted doesn't end me

ok now the actual content

I do have to agree with you on the ingredients, as someone who never really considered low level profs after I finished levelling there is definitely a missed opportunity there that I never noticed.

looking at the comments I definitely romanticized the old days. I never really felt the majority of the toxicity, so I glossed over it far more than I should have. Sorry for misrepresenting it so badly.

When I said the balance of profs was flipped, I completely forgot about like anything below 110. At higher levels most people I knew had craftings way higher than their gatherings, and when 1.20 dropped it flipped over. I was being pretty overdramatic when I said that.

Yeah my opinions on the changes in mat prices are heavily biased, but that's a good point and I'm glad theres an opposing opinion represented here as well.

I'd have to agree in retrospect I should have at least said something about champion. So I guess as a consolation, I'll put something here. Champion rank is stupid. Bomb bell was bad enough on it's own, and then to make it worse champion slots are awful as well. I literally never have to try to get into a world anymore, and whenever I decide to join one it screws over someone else. I remember Salted talking about a champion slot rework which made me happy, but he also said it wasn't a priority. I only bought champion because I got fed up with not getting into worlds. I don't see how pet levels and tasks as a whole being champion locked isn't pay to win. I can just throw stuff in my bank or sell it or scrap it at any time, and you can't.

anyways good reply thank you very much

________________________________

It'll still work, it just used to work better before TCC. I was a bit dramatic in like half of the thread. Also I'm gonna play it safe and delete the link because I was told that by other people as well. You can message me on discord: GraphicNovel#9349 for the link if anyone still wants it.

 

Honestly, you made it pretty clear that you were giving your view on things. I don't think you really misrepresented anything. I'd even go so far as to say that putting a little disclaimer on top of your post of your own little biases is great for threads like these. Don't be too sorry!

 

very cool .

 

Well I guess its time to offer my perspective. I am gonna start with story time, because I don't some people think realize that there are players that play the game cause of profs (I have met at least 4 that I didn't know IRL).

My friends and I are bored one night and we are playing online games. We are looking for a game where we can all be farmers and do a monotonous task. One of them had played Wynn a while ago, and suggested this. So we join. I decided to just do as many of the gatherings and craftings as I can. Six months latter my total level is 1559 on that same class with only 69 quest completions. Most of which I had to unlock content. I also leveled most of my profs in 1.19 with combat. I stopped around 80-90ish to rush combat/hunted then used hunted till I got to dernic.
​

GUILDS:
disclaimer: I have been involved with PROF the guild since January 2021 as perm member.

The single worst thing to bring to the profs was guilds. The two should have never intersected. If anyone in the prof community had been asked before the guild gathering boost was added they would have said "Heck No". Early on many of us dreamed about getting it removed from the game completely. But now Ron is right when he says

CHAMPION:

Well we saw this one coming. Its almost necessary to get into profs worlds now. I have it I think its unfair. Its why any proffer who doesn't have champion or further still who doesn't have a rank and made it to dernic or leaderboards I tip my hat to you.

Anyway if you aren't champion and see me online (ign: MntRunner) in a prof world at 40/45 msg me in game and ill rejoin if i see it. Also if you need prof bombs alerts feel free to msg me in game as well and ask I keep a list of poeple Ill /msg. If I'm able I let people know when they drop. Doesn't always work cause if I fighting a boss I can't or afk, but hey I try.

SOLUTION (KINDA):

Communication is key. So last I heard there is 1200 members in the Prof Tryhard Group discord. As an active member I myself can count exactly two people who are active in the community from the wynn team. They are one active mod who does QA and Altakar who is CT . Altakar does all the new ingredients. Its no surprise that in general all the new ingredients no one is really complaining about. So we know communication between CT and proffers does produce favorable results, now how do we get it?

 

Great response tyvm, just two things to add:

There are 2.4k people in prof discord, making it even stranger that there are only two staff members around.

Same goes for me as well. The more people who do this the easier it is for everyone who doesn't have like 170 dollars lying around to play the game.

 

phenomenal

 

Im that occasional fool

 

GXP/Speed are cool, no doubt. I would love to see them slightly more accessible than rare mob drops and gathering speed to not suck, but they're still a nice addition.

I can't really say anything about guild boosts or hunters since I have never used them/never cared, but from an outside perspective it does seem like a good thing that proffers made their own group and even controlled SE for a long time for the benefit of lots of people? And it seems a little weird that they decided to hold SE and not a different gathering area, since once you get to 110 there's not really a point leveling further.

Raids giving T3 materials is something I think is absolutely great though, since it can replace the 1% chance of gathering T3 materials for hours on end with a more interactive and meaningful thing. T3 materials are necessary to create the high-baseline crafteds people want, so having another method of obtaining them compared to gathering on end is great in my eyes. I hope they make it easier to create useful crafteds early-game and buff crafting XP and how it's obtained in general.