My take on professions (and a possible solution)

Hey everyone, I’ll get to the point.

Professions are an element of wynncraft that everyone with some playtime has come across once, whether it was via a quest or just to try it, we all love or hate them. Profession have been in the game for quite some time now, since the 1.18 update in January 19th to be exact. And they haven’t had much major changes since then. The only real thing that was massively altered was the removal of refineries and the addition of durability on tools and drop chance for higher tiers.

In this thread I will state my impression of professions from some of my own experience, up to I have done them up to level 40 on a craftsman profile. And also with some stuff gotten from the HICH and HIC series done by Réne, go check out his channel if you haven’t already. If you disagree with any of my statements or want to add something, please do. I am happy to listen to any feedback and improve this thread by everything you guys suggest. Now lets get to the point.

Professions are divided into two distinct categories: gathering and crafting. I will focus on gathering first, because it is the support for crafting and makes it easier for me to refer to later.

There are currently four gathering skills in wynncraft: woodcutting, mining, farming and fishing. All providing us with two different materials, for a total of eight. These materials come in sets of 10 levels, so level 1, level 10, level 20, etc. up to level 110. These materials can also drop in 3 different tiers, with a drop chance of 79% for tier 1, 10% for tier 2 and 1% for tier 3 (keep this in mind, as it is important for later.) There is also tools for every gathering skill, from tier 1 to tier 12, each with a different speed and durability. There is currently no other way of getting materials besides the gathering skills, which used to be different, as they were able to drop from certain raids in tier 3 form (also keep this in mind.)

Now, why is this bad? I am going to look at it in 2 ways, a normal player, and a craftsman player, as those are the only real different ways you can look at it. As a normal player, gathering is boring. The only thing it gives is money, as tier 3 materials can sell for quite a bit of Le, but besides that, there is nothing that makes it better than doing a raid or lootrun. The problem with this is that getting tier 3 ingredients is really hard, at a 1% drop chance you would need to mine 100 nodes before you get one, if you are not unlucky. And at mal level for speed, 118, and with the max tool, you would require four hits to take down a dernic node. Every hit is 1 second, assuming no bombs are involved, which would leave you with around 400 seconds, or more than six and a half minutes per tier 3 dernic, now I don’t know about you, but those rates are not really that tempting to me.

As a craftsman player, this gets even worse. As a craftsman, you are only allowed to use crafted items, and some niche quest items as well. This means that you are forced to spend that 6 and a half minutes to get one of those tier 3 materials. And when we get to crafting, this will get even worse, you’ll see why later. It is just not fun to grind 6 and a half minutes, just to get a single tier 3, if you are not unlucky, because remember, this is still down to luck with no pity involved or anything, so you can go 200 nodes without hitting any tier 3 materials. In the early level of a craftsman, about 1-40/50, this is not a super big deal, as you can just use tier 2s in your recipes, and you’ll be fine with it. But when you get to level 50, you will need to get tier 3 materials in order to maintain the quality of your items. This used to be doable, because raids dropped tier 3 materials, and you could get them that way if you needed to. This has been removed in the rekindled update, and made it even worse to get mid/engame tier 3 materials.

However, the main issue with this becomes apparent when we get to the crafting professions, in short, you need a set of two different materials, and you have 6 slots for ingredients to give your item special stats, from main attack damage to loot bonus. The first issue with this happens in the ratio at which you need materials. Take helmets for example, for a helmet crafted with level 1 items, copper ingots and oak paper, you need 1 ingot and 2 paper. This get multiplied with levels as you progress higher into professions, going to 6 dernic ingots and 12 dernic paper. The problem lies in material tiers. The higher tier of materials you use, the better the durability on armor gets, which matters because an item with 50 durability is not useful in lategame content, because you have to repair it all the time, which is quite pricey. And because higher tier ingredients cost more durability on your items, you are going to need those tier 3s if you want to stay on top of your game. Now for normal players this isn’t that big of an issue, because most normal items already outscale crafteds by a lot. Because mythics exist and ingredients don’t have perfect stats, but some builds do use crafteds, because they can be made very specific if needed. However, if you are playing a craftsman, the lack of versatility in ingredients can be a bit of a hussle and sometimes it just doesn’t work out.

Now rekindled made some changes to the old professions, mainly in the accessibility of ingredients and materials. Ingredients are now easier to get than ever with world events and raids dropping rare ones everywhere, yet materials are left behind in the dust.

Maybe you could already tell, but this post is mainly about how craftsmen are affected by the bad design of professions, even though the concept is amazing and the ingredient system is quite unique, because it makes crafted weapons feel the same as looted weapons found while exploring.

In conclusion:

We have identified a few problems with crafting and gathering, those being:

1. Gathering is to boring for the low reward it gives, taking up way to much time without any real fun.

2. Crafting at low levels feel underwhelming and boring compared to the exploration wynncraft provides, even though it is a great concept, it lacks proper execution

3. Crafting doesn’t feel like it belongs in the game, it is a completely separate thing which almost never intertwines with dungeons and raids.


Now before I get to solutions, please remember these thing before thinking about your own:

1. The idea needs to be balanced. The economy of wynncraft and the stat distribution with items need to be kept in mind before you think of any bold ideas that might work for a very specific scenario.

2. It also needs to fit in the current game theme: you need to think about the balance between crafted and normal. Both in items and in gamemodes. If you make crafting to overpowered, the normal part will feel underwhelming and we will create the same problem again.

3. Ease to make: a lot of ideas are really well thought out and provide good solutions to problems, but they are just not viable because they require an overly complex level of programming to work. Please think about the time the Devs have and the recources to make this happen. Try to keep your ideas within the range of what has already been done.

4. You have four problems, not one. Remember that all of these aspects are relevant to make a proper solution that will truly fix the problem, and not just make it a bit more convenient.


With that, here is my solution:

The first problem we have found is that gathering is to boring for the low level reward it gives. Now the first thing that jumps to mind is a form of minigame incorporated in every skill. For example, with fishing, you would have a little slider over a bar, and when it hits the green, you have to click in order to catch a fish. Now this is a solution to the boring problem, but it adds the fact that you will need to spend even more time gathering those tier 3 ingredients. Plus it might be affected by internet connecting, making it harder to truly enjoy for high ping players (correct me if this is false information.) So that wouldn’t work, how about we shift the balance, right now when grinding out a craftsman profile, you will spend more time gathering then crafting good gear. What if we shifted that around? What if we made it so that crafting takes up the majority of the time spent. The first thing we would need to do is remove tiers of materials in the sense op dropping them from ores, just like the old refining system. You will now get unrefined versions of everything and need to make them into materials. We add a new station, the processing station, requiring a new tool, this station will take your unrefined ores, with the new tool, and turn them into different material tiers, with some new ingredients to increase your chances of getting a higher tier or even double ores from this process. Now we have to balance this out. How could we make it fair that you can get tier 3s easier. We make it so that getting unrefineds gets harder. The gathering speed of everything will go down. But we will also fix the third problem. You can now craft upgraded tools. Using ingredients dropped from dungeons and raids only, you can now get speed upgrades on your tools with these new items, in a similar fashion like powders. This will make your dungeons feel more rewarding as you are constantly upgrading the speed at which you can gather ores, regardless of tool upgrades. And there may even be some major ID’s to add special effect to your tools. The last problem we have to tackle is the weird ingredient balance currently present in wynncrafts crafting. And the easy fix would be to say that there just needs to be more ingredients added to the game. However, I think a better fix would be to make these ingredients come from a different source. What content in wynncraft is currently the least useful for players that need to do crafting? Dungeons, so what do we do, we give the dungeons without a use a use, think about infested pit. As a craftsman, the only real thing to get from it is level 3 tools. But why not add some ingredients to the mix to make it better, because the tools can also be bought from the decrepit sewers. So if you remove every dungeon that has a tool that is already present in a lower dungeon, and turn those into ingredients for stuff like positive durability and spell cost reduction in order to make those stats easier to get.


This is just my take on the problem, feel free to react with your own ideas, questions or hate mails because I am stupid. I’ll try to read all of them and react as much as I can. Hope you have a wonderful day.

 

I don't think this has happened.

forced? tier two materials for gear is already sufficient for most situations
there is no NEED to get t3s if you properly utilize health IDs or meta-ingredients

there are two parts of repair cost: base and additional. repair the items when they go below 50% dura and you won't waste money.

yeah, if your whole point was about prof being grind then DONT ADD MORE TIME CONSUMING STUFF

dungeons are specifically meant to primarily give you XP and gear (from tokens). There are also already Raid-Exclusive ingredients from crafter bags.

you think the CT waves a magic wand and creates items buddy

ok so your proposal to a crafting system revamp TLDR:

1. implement extra ingredients to dungeons, which are SPECIFICALLY NOT oriented towards professions players save for the tools

2. Delete the modern system of profession nodes, add a NEW, MODULAR TOOL with UPGRADABLE SPEED (which is only upgradable with dungeon ingredients, which are practically divorced from the main idea of dungeons, a focus on powerful items and a dose of XP)

3.

how does that even work. You haven't mentioned any way of getting the tools in the first place, and now you want to add unique major IDs to them that are obtainable through… what?

so basically what you want is for the game to divert its entire professions system to make a niche mode (craftsman) more enjoyable. a special game mode is special for a reason, because it is meant to be challenging.

your systems basically make craftsman overpowered AND grindy at the same time, by introducing new, powerful ingredients from a nigh-unrelated source and a better chance of getting what is meant to be rare while heavily increasing the average time (tool upgrade, prof tick time, refining) you need to get materials.

Some things are just in the game for a reason.

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BTW. Late-game ingredients have a variety of IDs that normal items simply do not have that are extremely powerful, such as Loot Quality.

 

This has happened actually, raids used to give tier 3 materials, they have been replaced with the crafter bags, which give ingredients

I get your point on this, maybe i was a bit hasty in making a conclusion about using tier 3 materials. I think you mean that tier 3 materials should not be used as main materials but instead as an upgrade if you really need to or if you already have them as well, not a main goal. I actually think you are right about this, but then we have to ask why they are such a low increase in stats if they are so hard to get, this then becomes a balancing issue.

You are absolutely right, it was not my intention to make it seem like you are wasting money, but repairing gear does take emeralds and especially if you need to repair all of your tools, armor and rings it can come up to some EB fairly easily. But you are completely correct that it is not that big of an issue, which is why i did not mention it in the conclusion.

Sorry if i made it sound like that, was not my intention, i was just stating a possible solution, and then i said why it would not work out.

yes, the raid bags are a perfect way to make raids feel more meaningful on craftsman profiles. But raids are content locked behind level 50/60 at least. Why lock such an amazing idea behind such a high level. And yes, dungeons are meant for XP and gear now, but that does not mean that you should not consider changing that if it makes crafting content feel more valuable and smoother with the other things in wynncraft, this will make it similar to boss altars, which also drop both gear and ingredients.

I just want to make my tool point clear, imagine you have a tier 3 pickaxe, this pickaxe has 3 "sockets" in which you can put these crystals. Crystals will be something that drops from somewhere, I will leave that open for suggestions. Instead of progressing through tools in a very flat fashion, getting tier 2 tools, getting level 15 and buying and using tier 3 tools, i want to make it so that you have to think about the purpose of your tool, do you want to give it more gathering XP, or do you want it to do something else. This will make your tools feel more dynamic and more like something to look into, rather than an upgrade you get once and never look back to again.

No, I don't, Sorry for not stating it there. I realise that the Dev team can not do such things, and I don't want them to feel pressure to do this, because this game is already amazing. I am just stating my opinion about a part of this game that not many people enjoy, even though it has lots of potential

Yes, I am saying we change that. That we make professions and dungeons more related to one another like with boss altars.

Nodes can stay, i am just stating that maybe its an idea to make the tools feel more distinct. Because of the way that professions are designed, not just in wynncraft, it is really hard to make exciting gameplay for it. You can't really make mining a block fun. Even minecraft at it's core is just clicking. But if we cant change the nodes in the gameplay, why not the tools instead?

Sorry for not making it clear. Tools can stay in dungeons, fine by me. But for some dungeons, there is just no point in ever running them on a craftsman profile. Infested pit gives tier 3 tools, but so does decripit sewers. Why not remove tools from infested, and make it so that tools instead get some upgrades via that dungeon. And for the Major ID's it would have been better to compare to something like powder specials, which would lower your succes rate for something but higher the refine rate. Or maybe something even more specific, like giving you a chance to catch ingredients for fishing while fishing (although this would make it longer to grind.) Just remeber that not every idea I have is a good idea, and that not everything is well thought out, they are just examples, whether good or bad.

And I think that professions should not be diverted specifically for craftsman profiles, but for all profiles. Why is it that my friend played wynncraft a while back, and then when I found out he did, I asked him why he quit. His response was that he grinded out a bunch of professions to make an armor set, but then he got the adventurer set, which was way better. I dont want to make professions overpowered by any mean, but I want them to be equal in power to the exploration, so that there is a choice for players to make. Craftsman is not really challenging at all. It is just boring right now. There is nothing special about it, except for the fact that you lock yourself into hours upon hours of grinding wood because your spear is not good enough for the next dungeon and you want to get the next set of tools to catch more fish.
This also does not mean that crafting should become the main thing everywhere. Normal gear should still be able to put up a fair fight againt crafted gear, but as of right now, nobody crafts anymore, because it is just not rewarding enough for the time you have to sink into it.
I am not thinking that craftsman should be overpowered, it should be grindy, because that is what it is, and yes, I am saying that the time to get materials should be higher, but my point is that the time doing nothing but clicking a block for 4 hours just to get enough materials to get your crafting professions to level 90, which takes around 200 crafts just for 1 of them without bombs, should be lower. I would personally prefer doing 1 hour of a dungeon over doing 1 hour of mindlessly staring at a block. But if you think professions should take long times of doing mindless stuff, then that is fine, because your opinion is just as important, but problably even more important, then mine.

PS: loot quality is good yes, but would you like to spend 100 hours leveling it up just to find out you can do lootrun camps for your loot as well. Plus normal items also have quality's crafteds dont have, like spell cost reduction.

 

Profs are stupid and boring and I enjoy them and you cannot take that away from me

 

Completely agree, if you like professions and enjoy the mindless grind behind them, go for it. I am not trying to turn them into something that needs to be more complicated. It looks like it, because when you post a long solution it is indeed complicated. But if you enjoy the mindless clicking nodes for hours upon hours at a time, I am not going to stop you in any way. And maybe these changes should only be as important to professions as professions are to wynncraft: completely optional to take. I am unsure on how this could be achieved, but if you have any more ideas on how to make them important but still taken as an option, let me know please. The example that comes to mind is making these "sockets" something that can be skipped, a way to make this work would be that a tool can be transformed into a socket one, but the "unsocketed" tool would still be good enough to gather, keeping it an option to make your tools something else. For the people that do enjoy professions as they are right now.

 

What this post misses is that you can’t really change professions to make them more accessible without alienating the people who currently enjoy them. Because what alienates most people from professions, the grindiness, is what profers love. Hence tacking on a minigame or allowing for tools to be upgraded upgraded doesn’t really address this fundamental problem with them. Especially since any mini game would get old anyway after repeating it hundreds, if not thousands of times.

Also:

Idk how this could be construed as a problem. Crafting imo is the wort part about professions because you spend way, WAY too much time crafting items you don’t need or want. At least gathering xp bonus has multiple ways to access in-game, but for crafting xp bonus, bombs are still the only way to get it. Making crafting more pay-to-win.

It’s especially ironic given how the base game’s crafting system is leagues better than Wynncraft’s system because it’s not grindy and doesn’t restrict what you can craft beyond the materials you have.

But ultimately none of this really matters because you can completely ignore profs anyway, so all significantly changing profs would do is annoy and frustrate profers.

 

Exactly, this difficulty in changing such a complex part of a game is whether you really want to. The famous phrase: Professions: you love them, or you hate them, is present because the community is divided about this specific topic, which is why it is problably not going to get changed. And indeed, crafting is painfully long and boring because it takes so much time to level up, which i think is also a really good reason to fix that part of the game instead of gathering. I have just never come across a solution that still fits the theme of crafting in wynncraft specifically, so you would have to change up the entire core of the system to make a proper change to it. I don't understand what you mean by the base game, but i assume you mean most other RPG's, where you are also correct. Wynncrafts crafting system is unique because the game is built in a different way compared to most other MMO's. The wide variety of stats provided in every single piece of gear means crafting has to be the same, which brings the issue of making a system that doesn't feel to limiting, but also is not to broken to use. And yes, the profession community right now only consists of people that enjoy the mindless grind behind it, but that is also because professions have been around for 5 years now, and everyone who tried them and did not like them just quit. All in all there probably won't be any changes made to this, simply because most people have accepted it and moved on.

 

it's this thing called minecraft, though considering that, you've probably never heard of it

 

ah, get it now. That makes more sense.

 

Prof? There is hardly a middle ground: You either enjoy it or don't. But those who do enjoy it enjoy it a lot. You're on the side of not enjoying it, so you see the problems that profers don't really face.

Gathering is only boring if you think it's boring. It's subjective and there are those that likes gathering, same with crafting.
Crafting at low level feels underwhelming because you are comparing low level stats to level 103 stats. For reference, 6 strong flesh into 6 viking stones can carry you until level 80 if you want. Crafteds are OP.
Finally, crafting being a part of the game or not depends on if you want it to be a part of the game or not. Before annie you barely see anyone use consumables, but that's every MMORPG, people will no consu if they can.
Material imbalance is fine, because all the excess papers you have left from armouring can be used to level up scribing. When you do the calculations, most materials you gathered will have get used for another profession and it's a good system.
Your raid and dungeon ingredients suggestion is not ideal at all. As it stands right now, grinding ingredients are not it. You save time buying from confectionary merchant and spend the time that you were meant to do raids and dungeons with and grind from more materials

Me personally have achieved 110 gathering and 103 crafting in 1 profile and i'm on my way to completing a hic. I hate having minigames, as that will become more annoying than fun after a while, that applies to both crafting and gathering.

As a proffer myself, the most problematic things with prof are

1. Gathering profs are not created equal: You can go through an entire hic run without fishing as mage if you so choose, and that would definitely be the meta if you don't have to grind mini-quests as well. As a normal profile however, you will never level up mining as you only need consus.
2. Profession is bomb-reliant. Yes grinding combat is as well, but combat have 1 bomb and prof have 2, plus you can't drop one without the other or you will hinder the value of the bomb you dropped
3. Woodcutting. Just woodcutting.
4. The queue of which you spend 80% of your time profing on.