Game Mechanics Professions are grindy, let's fix that.

As suggested by the title, professions are grindy and boring. Not only does it take a lot of time to level up, the only method to level up is to click in the same area over and over with GXP sets (which are expensive as heck) and two prof bombs and a dxp weekend. This makes it so that there are no incentives for players to do profs without bombs, making it somewhat of a content island.

I believe that something other than miniquests could be done to make prof less grindy, without changing the whole gameplay. For instance:

1. Make some recurring missions in which some NPC would need some of your materials in return of some prof XP, emeralds or ingredients (some of them could be exclusive). Higher tier (i.e. number of stars) yields more rewards.

2. Make it so that daily missions that require crafting or gathering rewards prof-related items and XP according to what you crafted or gathered. If that is not possible, maybe make some objectives such as "gather 40 Lv.70+ crops" just like the existing "kill Lv. 100+ mobs" then reward the according prof XP and items.

3. Make more variety of gathering nodes and have more gathering spots of them. I love the idea of Larbonic geode, bamboo and whatever that crop is in the void. This way proffers aren't only gathering tons of t1 materials, but also ingredients while gaining a decent amount of xp.

Feel free to talk about this in the comments ;)

 

The problem with professions is that they're designed in the same way as killing mobs to get XP; yeah, you can just farm mobs to level up all day but the more you do the more irritating it gets. However, killing mobs is specifically designed that way because there are countless other ways to get XP other than killing mobs. But for professions, there is a grand total of one way to level up, and that's by simply doing the profession's basic role. Sure, there's the occasional gathering mini-quest but absolutely nothing else. So when I'm at level 50-60 woodcutting and every single Jungle tree I cut only gives less than 2% progress to the next level with bombs with mobs constantly hounding me down every single second of the way then it makes me wonder why I should even consider trying to level up to 100.

There is one of two things they can do to fix professions: One, they rebalance the amount of XP you get post-30 to not be agonizing. Or two, remove profession speed bombs and make the double speed the new default, give us a new form of massive expansive storage specifically for professions, remove the countless different tiers of gathering tools that completely invalidate the ones you already have, and introduce new content exclusively for professions that offer brand-new and dynamic ways to level up in such a way that having normal gathering only give you less than 1% progress to the next level per gather in a game where mobs are constantly swarming you makes any sort of sense.

Now, if it were me I would choose that second option in a heartbeat but frankly I'm getting worried that making professions better isn't much of a priority at all so the first one is the more likely choice, assuming we get either of them to begin with.