Imagine If Professions Were Accessible...

I can see a few nice things but also things I'd do differently. 'Ere we go :P

1st suggestion:
Honestly don't think it would be necessarily for the most part. There's no reason for a person to craft a high level item with a low level in professions as the -% effectiveness just makes the resulting crafted item to be next to unusable. I don't think having a chance for that -% effectiveness be set to 0 based on RNG would be a great idea either as that wouldn't really promote trying to gain higher levels as people would probably just craft the same item a couple of times and end up getting the same item they would've if they were level 100.

When it come to the +% effectiveness however, I think it's a good idea in some aspects. Having it increase the power of ingredients would be bad as it would inevitably cause them to be nerfed as stated by Crokee and instead just have it affect the durability of the crafted items. If this is a major enough bonus (+1% durability per level above 100?), I think it would still encourage people to grind to higher levels as durability is a pretty large concern when crafting items meant for use. This would also increase the amount of business higher crafting level people would get seeing as the items crafted by them are just flat out better.

Bonus point to simplifying the 1st suggestion like this is that it makes future item changes be easier to implement. This is due to the item team only needing to worry about 1 stat being buffed by the +% effectiveness. Also makes it easier for people doing the actual crafting and recipe creation as they don't have to think about literally every stat being changed based on the crafting level.

2nd suggestion:
I think having profession specialization is a brilliant idea. How I'd implement it would be different though. You can only have specialization on 2 professions at a time. 1 in crafting and 1 in gathering. Switching specialization would cost soil points and/or have a cooldown. Again to simplify the system and causing less confusion about what exactly you'd lose.

Specializing in a profession would have the following effects:

1. Gives you an xp and/or speed bonus of about 50% or less.
2. Would allow you to craft/gather 100+ materials/items.
3. Removing specialization would reset your level back to 100 but re-enabling it gives back the levels.

Reasoning:
When it comes to giving yet another xp and/or speed bonus to professions, it might be a bad idea. Seeing as hunted mode exist now and bombs also being a thing, I think we already have enough xp boosts. If a larger bonus would be given, getting level 100+ on a gathering profession could literally be done in less than a day. For example @ImBaddest already got from 1 to 100 mining in 3(ish?) days of on and off mining and bombs and before hunted being introduced.

Having high level gathering/crafting being locked behind specialization makes it so people would need to specialize in order to be able to acquire high level items. Even in the real world a novice gatherer or crafter cannot handle high quality materials to their full extent meanwhile a specialized expert knows the intricacies of the used materials. Note that the durability increase would also be locked behind specialization as it kicks in after level 100.

Potential problems or changes for these suggestions:
The cut off point of needing to specialize into a profession could be lowered to 90 or even 80.
Xp/speed bonus from specialization could be increased or decreased.
Switching profession could be made more expensive to avoid gaming the system.
Penalty of removing specialization could be changed but to what? That I do not know.

 

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