Game Mechanics Profession Revamp

Let’s get to the point. Professions have a lot of problems. It is complicated, it is expensive, you need to keep working on them or play month long catch ups, there are better contents available, and it is absolutely mind bogglingly grindy. I know that the Wynn team is working hard on making a good revamp for this, but not much luck on their side. I did think of a solution myself, with not too much overhaul but will feel a major difference on the entire system.



The Profession Rework Scope
Before I start talking about the actual rework, I do want to list some of the goals I want the rework to accomplish.

• The profession should be always directly accessible to players regardless of their progressions of the game, meaning a player can find immediate use on professions anytime they want to try it out.
  
  
• While the previous statement holds true, dedicated profession players should be encouraged to try to master a single profession.
  
  
• Profession players base should be encouraged to work together. Ideally having people filling different roles in professions, to compensate for single profession mastery.
  
  
• Low tier profession ingredients and materials should be inflated, to keep the price affordable by players in that level.
  
  
• The professions should be easy to operate, to not discourage new players to try them.
  
  
• The professions can be dropped at any moment without penalties.
  
  
• The profession should be encouraged to be done periodically but consistently, allowing progressions to build up overtime instead of a couple of multi-hour grinds.
  
  
• The professions should be aiming at a large player base, encouraging more players to try out the professions, therefore the cost/investment should be fairly cheap on a lower level.
  

The Revamped Professions
The profession system has three major systems: gathering, crafting, and ingredients. I will explain the rework of each individual system separately. I will write the suggestion as if it is going to be implemented for consistency.


Ingredients
For the pouch, the direct selling of the ingredients would be removed. Instead, the players can sell or buy ingredients from the ingredient merchant, which is scattered in each city. The ingredient merchant acts like a player trade market for ingredients, but players can just dump all of their ingredients to the merchant and get the money quickly and easily, no need to think at all. This is also done with materials as well


The idea is that the ingredient merchant keeps some stocks of each ingredient at their disposal. Whenever a player purchases the ingredient, the merchant loses some stock, and vice versa. As there are less stocks on shelf, the price rises exponentially, until the stock is sold out, by which players could no longer purchase the ingredient, and the sell price would be astronomically high.


The merchant will also actively tell players ingredients that are understocked, which players could sell for more. The formula for the price can be as simple as something like this:




Additionally, we would want to deflate the market ingredient price so it is affordable by players of their levels, though higher level ingredients should be at somewhat luxury prices. The introduction of the ingredient market should raise the supply, but I think much more needs to be done such as increasing the ingredients drop rate should keep the price affordable by players.



Gathering
The gathering levels would be completely reworked. There would no longer be any restrictions to gather materials except the need for a tool. The gathering time of all materials of the same professions would be similar as well (higher level crafting needs slightly more material in compensation). However, the initial gathering speed would be slowed.


Experiences would still be gained when gathering a material, but the levels would work so that each level would give you gathering speed or some bonus skills. The maximum level is suggested to be 20, but here is an example list of abilities that unlocks for a level system with only 10 levels.

1. Initial Level
   
   
2. Increased gathering speed.
   
   
3. Now have a chance to gather tier 2 material.
   
   
4. Increased gathering speed.
   
   
5. Will automatically gather all materials of the same name in a 5 block radius when finish gathering a material (3 minutes cooldown)
   
   
6. Increased gathering speed.
   
   
7. Now have a chance to gather tier 3 material.
   
   
8. Small chance to see indicators on nodes that guarantee Tier 2 or 3 nodes
   
   
9. Increased gathering speed.
   
   
10. AOE gathering radius increased to 15 blocks, cooldown reduced to 1 minute
    

The xp requirements for leveling will be increased exponentially for each level, making them exponentially harder to grind. However, leveling them up would allow you to gather much more efficiently, and eventually, you can just gather an entire deposit of the material in under 5 seconds while on your way to somewhere else. These are the players who can be a significant supplier to the material demand of the hopefully expanded profession market while making a significant income for themselves in the process.



Another change is that since the gathering nodes had been transferred to client side, the respawn timer for the nodes that had been gathered should be increased to 24 hours. The gathering material quantity and gathering xp should be increased in compensation. Here are the reasons for this change are the followings:

• It promotes lower leveled gatherers to do some gathering without making them too overwhelming. They just need 3-5 minutes to gather this batch of materials when passing a section of the map and they could build up experiences overtime. (kind of like making a schedule or milestone for hobby building irl)
  
  
• It encourages higher leveled gatherers and grinders to go around and explore the map to do gathering instead of locking themselves to the most efficient grinding spot.
  

Crafting
Crafting professions would also have a maximum of 20 levels, similar to gathering professions.


The first thing I would like to talk about is the significance of high tier material and high level crafters. Wynncraft needs to keep the power level of crafted items in check to make them optional part of the game play, but it is still important to have significant differences between different tier of materials in order to make leveling gathering important. These would need the lower leveled material to be useless, forcing gatherers to be high leveled in order to be useful, which contradicts with my scope.


However, this does not have to be. Instead of making the material tier responsible for direct powers of the crafted item, we can have it be responsible for other things, such as the durability of the crafted item. There will also be another meter on the crafted item I will call the deform scale. This scale builds up permanently when durability is decreased, and the scale increases the durability lost of the crafted item. Eventually players would find their crafted item in need of repair before the fight is complete, and would need to get a new one. Items crafted with better materials would have much better durability and smaller deform scale build up, and the price would be a bit cheaper when measured by usage time. Players who do not have or choose not to use high tier materials can still benefit from the full effect of the crafted items, making them still competitively viable, but prolonged use of the items require the player to be constantly taking care of the item, and make frequent trips to the blacksmith for repair. The ingredients do not need to get the same treatment because they don’t need professional levels or concentrated grind to have a chance to be gotten.



For the crafting professions, they would also have a maximum of 20 levels, similar to gathering professions. While there would no longer be a level requirement to craft items, crafters’ initial crafting time is significantly increased, about 15-30 minutes at level 1. During the crafting time, crafters can do any other stuff in the game without the crafting being interrupted, with the exception of starting another craft. Some instances of level up would reduce the crafting time, and being max level in crafting could reduce the crafting down to 10 seconds.


Here are some of the level up upgrades there are possible when leveling up:

• Reduce crafting time
  
  
• Increased high tier material effectiveness (durability and deform scale only)
  
  
• Gaining the ability to salvage items to get ingredients back.
  
  
• Gaining the ability to reset deform scale when repair with materials
  

Increased high tier effectiveness is designed to allow high level crafters to be able to get more profit by being the only players to create the best of the best.

Gaining the ability to reset deform does make sense since they are expert crafters, so they get employee (and employee’s friend) discounts by being able to get away with using low tier materials. You most likely would not do the favor to a stranger. Though this is locked away by the high levels as well.



Crafters can craft helpful items that can be used or sold in the trade market, or try out new ingredients for extra crafting experiences. There should also be daily quests where villagers are requesting some items to be specifically made (crafted with specific materials and ingredients), and would give emeralds for successfully crafting the items.

 

These complaints aren't in order, but:
1. This makes grinding worse, much much worse. 'Exponentially'? Seriously?
2. '24 hour cooldown' Jeez, if it wasn't hard to get a lot of a material before, it certainly is now. This suggestion completely forgets about housing (which requires a lot of materials)
3. Complicated ingredient merchant. Why? Why is this necessary? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."
4. Why do Crafteds need to have a durability(?) nerf?
5. Why do you want people to only do one profession. To make the gap between those with a large guild and a smaller guild even bigger?
Let's review your 'scope'

Isn't your deform scale idea meant to make it so that there is some sort of effective durability that is lower, so lower-level players need to spend more money (which is harder to get 'early in the game'). High-level players won't want to level exponentially increasing professions that will take even longer to grind.

So, you want players to grind and grind and grind, only to be able to independently do nothing. Because either they can't craft, or they can't cheaply source their materials.

Like I said before, this widens the unwanted gap between small guilds and large guilds. And makes guildless players unable to make any crafteds whatsoever.

This is the first thing I would agree with, but I can't actually find where you talk about fixing this other than here. I agree, it is absurd that some level one ingredients can sell for so much. Materials? Not so much. Those don't really get that expensive until around like, level 80ish.

(You proposed a much more complicated system for leveling and added a strangely unintuitive merchant to replace simple insta-sell.)

You can already do that. Your suggestion doesn't really do anything here, as this is already the case. You don't get banned from Wynn if you stop proffing daily.

It doesn't take 'hours' to get through 10 levels if you make or buy proffing gear. All your 24-hour timer does is make housing ridiculously difficult, as well as professions.

And while I agree with the statement, it doesn't match with the rest of the post at all for reasons I've already touched on.
Also, limited tiers of materials and making 3-minute cooldowns for fast-proffing abilities just complicates prof leveling for no real reason and does not actually help with the grind

Literally all of your points are contradicted by your post.
There are ways to make professions more fun and interesting, but this is not it.

I apologize if I missed something, or sounded harsh.
I made this post just to say that this won't fix professions and many others might not take it seriously because the main points are conflicting with the changes you want.

 

I mean this is already the case, unless you mean everyone being able to get any type of material with barely any consequences and likely removing the sense of accomplishment.

this is something I do like to have people try in the current version of professions, take it as a hobby besides leveling combat, but being able to choose all of them if you feel dedicated enough.
No change really feels needed except for some encouragement from the community towards professions in general.

Being self-sufficient in professions is the goal of most people who are diving into them at the moment. having bunched up parties where bombs are thrown and people can get together and socialize is what makes it so much fun.

They already are super easy to get into and the only thing discouraging new players is other players, most who haven't even given it a try themselfs