The Next Expansion: Future Tradeskill Design
Posted by 
Heartbourne on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 65 Comments Tags: Professions, burning crusade, cataclysm, crafting, inscription, jewelcrafting, the next expansion, tradeskills
Heartbourne on Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - 65 Comments Tags: Professions, burning crusade, cataclysm, crafting, inscription, jewelcrafting, the next expansion, tradeskills 
Blizzard has already set the bar for the next expansion. Based on Wrath and The Burning Crusade, players expect to have to level 90. Players expect either new races or a new hero class starting at a high level. Something that not many people talk about but would probably miss is a new tradeskill.Jewelcrafting was very fitting for Burning Crusade; the theme fit in well with the Naaru and the Draeni. Additionally, it added a whole new level of character customization and armor itemization. Inscription worked alright with Wrath; it used herbs as the raw materials, giving Alchemy a run for its money, and also offered some character customization.
In a new expansion, should we expect a tradeskill? What kind of role would it fill?
One of the first things to note is that a gathering profession would be hard to implement. It would require creating nodes all across all of the zones in order to scale with character level. Unless it started at a high level when you learn it, it seems unlikely that Blizzard would simply implement a new gathering profession without a crafting profession.
Supposing they did make a new crafting profession, they have three options for raw materials: ore, leather, or herbs. There are currently three professions which use ore, two that use herbs, and one that uses leather. Enchanting is unique in that it uses equipment as a resource in a sense. The fact that three professions use the products of mining may be indicative of why mining is considered to be the most lucrative gathering profession by a wide number of players.
The obvious design choice would be to choose the resource that is used least by professions to create an overall even consumption of resources. But what profession besides leatherworking could work with leather?
If we look at the Jewelcrafting and Inscription examples, each of them came with a complementary ability to convert raw materials into processed goods for crafting. But what could you do to leather to turn it into something that doesn't fall into the realm of leatherworking? And what would it create? If not leather, how could we use herbs?
A new crafting profession probably would not create armor as its main selling points. For each of the armor classes, there is a profession that creates armor for them. Inscription was reaching with the glyph idea, but its come to be accepted. Weapons are largely in the realm of Blacksmiths, and trinkets are (somewhat) in the realm of Jewelcrafting. Is it even possible with the rate that Blizzard will be coming out with expansions that they can continue to create professions for each one?
It seems that for future crafting professions, it is necessary for them to couple new professions with a new feature. With player housing being one of the most requested features, I wonder how this could be implemented. Perhaps Tauren tents could fall in the realm of player housing. It could fall under a "Tanning" profession. Its kind of hard to differentiate what would fall between these, how this would work for the Alliance, and how to create a profession around just this.
I think the solution is to give each profession the gathering ability that complements it. With more and more crafting professions and less and less gathering professions, the ratio of total players with crafting professions to players who gather more than they craft is decreasing. Having every player be able to gather materials for their craft would simplify it a lot for new players, as well as make it easier to scale professions together. Leveling through the first 350 levels of each profession could be done either by gathering or crafting, making it much easier. Additionally, theoretical new hero classes or players who drop professions for new ones could skill up easier. The profession bonuses, like Lifeblood and Toughness, have been a little inferior and less customizable than their crafting counterparts, and rolling some things together might make it easier to balance. Continuously adding professions and having characters only be able to choose two does add diversity, but it also may result in a lot of content or mechanics not being consumed or experienced by a large player base.
This sort of fits in with my idea of the convergence of crafting and gathering professions that I've expressed in the past. Engineers can now gather from gas clouds, Tailors "gather" more cloth, miners smelt, etc. Most professions can give you money by interacting with the world or by interacting with players and crafting.
Later, I'll talk about some speculation behind Woodworking. Do you expect a new profession in the patch, and what would it be, especially if its Maelstrom based?
Reader Comments (65)
maybe build ships ;D
this is going to be a long coment and i wont worry about spelling okay XD
you could have woodworking/fletching and lumberjacking a a prof where with woodworking you could make like trinkets and furniture for houses(which i will talk about later)and you could have them make staves / wands. and as with fletching you could make bows / crossbows and arrows. and lumberjacking could work by making trees tht are already in the world of warcraft "cutdownable" and have it where u can only cut down a tree like every ten mins and set the tree respawn time to like 30 secs so you still have nice scenery and you dont have a barren elwynn forest haha.
now on to witchdoctor i think it is a good idea and i think you have it explained perfect in the comment above not much to say about it otherwise
and with this other profession that has no name where you gather stuff out of the water it could work but would require a bunch of work from blizz to make it happen. like you get mats from whirlpools in the water liek eternal water and like eternal fire from lava and so on and so on
now to mining. i think you should skill up according to how much you loot from a certain node and what level the node requires you to be in corespondance to what level you are in mining. its like the best of both expansions where you got a level every time you tapped a node and you got to tap it 3 or 4 times and the convinience of have to only tap the node once to get all the ore from it at once.
i am also a big supporter of being able to get a third profession. i often find myself being short on cash seeing as gold burns a hole in my pockets ;) and this not being able to buy mats for my eng and jc so being able to buy a third profession for like 500g would really help me out a LOT.
now i shall talk about the housing issue. it can be possible to do by instancing it where you can only go to your house unless you are in a group or raid in which case you can only go to the raid / group leaders house. and there should be a bonus to having a house in a sense that if you log off in your house and you are off for 12 hrs you get a hour buff that gives you a 10% exp and rep gain that doesnt stack with other buffs you get for capturing pvp objectives ( such as the bases in hfp or the bases in easterrn plaguelands ) and you can get trophies for getting the achievements where you complete a dungeon on reg, a dungeon on heroic, a vanilla and bc raid, a boss in a 10 man raid, a boss in a 25 man raid, a hard mode 10 man boss, a hard mode 25 man boss, a complete 10 or 25 man raid, any pvp boss you have defeated, and any feats of greatness which can be viewed in your house
this is a lot of stuff that can be done to improve the way we go through wow wether we are a casual or hardcore player it will be a major change that some will criticize and praise but in the end its blilzz's call and i think the next expansion will be a great one no matter what happens.
cowjuice, windrunner server
level 72 paladin
"Mount and pet breeding."
Omg, lol, pure win. Go, go, go, Blizz.
No seriously, I like it, haha.
I Think Woodworking and lumberjacking, and in high level u can make like boats so u can travel on/under water. Perfect for the Maelstrom Expansion XD
I think they should deffo make the brewing proffession, like first aid, fishing and cooking. To say for the new main proffession though, ide like something like woodcutting or something like that, i mean there would have to have a total other proffession to go with it, but it would still be cool.
yeh woodworking sounds pretty cool ^^ only bad thing i could think of is that runescape fanbois would be like "omg chopping wood sounds familiar omg blizz try to be creative"
and that mount thing would be awesome, like making funmounts that would just go walking speed. and swimming mounts etc, but there couldnt be that much to craft without mounts being like : white horse, black horse, brown horse etc. what if u add costumes in it :D
Housing would be cool if done like the original Star Wars Galaxies idea where you could even display old sets of gear or store additional items in the house. The only problem with their original system was that player housing began springing up everywhere and it became an eye-sore. Now to use the instanced neighborhoods that LotR uses would be interesting. I could see guilds rushing to purchase whole "neighborhoods" or those lots being bought and sold on the AH like actual property. WoW does need another money sink beside repairs from raids.
Trophy maker would be cool too see which could be a mix of both skinning and Blacksmithing.
Think Warhammer's thropies of some sort.
Skin a player,mob,or uniqe boss and attach its skull,talon,arm or something like that to your armor to make it look more intimidating.
Each fallen enemies limb will ofcourse have uniqe stats similar to Diablo 2 runes or wow Jewelcrafting gems but at the same time be more cosmetic on your character.
Who does not want to have the head of illidan,Kael attached to your armor shoulder or on top of your staff head etc.
it needs to be a grown proffession like breeding stuff for skins or growin herbs for stuff
that what i would like
or a butcher you kill stuff and cut it up
Milking!!
milk cows and sell it ...
New usefull buffs if someone drink milk :D..
they should add sports to WoW..
imagine a football game between gnomes and taurens!!:D
Yay.... Ironforge vs Thunderbluff xD
you know, as i read all of the posts here, i keep seeing that the people that don't like the idea for harvesting wood are afraid of losing scenery in areas. the quests for the goblins in dragonblight had trees that were 'cut down' with a goblin shredder. these trees didn't disappear, they were harvested and stayed there. there can be nodes on the trees without having the scenery be tarnished by the farming of said tree. that being said, up untill WoW, wood was a needed resource because it was us, the players, that made the towns and the villages. with that done for us, i think that the only reason to be able to farm this resource is if we are able to build something that is 'permanant' to the world. be it a home for our toons, a guild hall or our own village. it could be a huge quest line. available at 60 with a woodworking skill of 300 and a guild with a rank of 'X' or a collective acheivment score of 'Y' to be able to be sent on a mission to colonize a said area. make the area instanced to you're guild flag and have so many plots for different things in the guild 'town' if you will. hell, with the new battleground we could be sent up there to colonize the front line. everywhere we have been in the world of warcraft, the villiages have been built already. you could even implement something with each town of village that you pass. drop off x amount of lumber it'll build y building. some of these towns would then become bigger. introducing the oppertunity to have more quests become available at a town. i think the possiblities are endless should blizz decide to go down this path. imagine the screen shots of a villiage you took from it's base start to a metropolis the likes of org or stormwind city.... you're guild town or a village that was already started.... i think that they might be on this train of thought already due to the collection quests they had in the argent collosiem...
anywho... sorry about spelling and typos, thanks for reading :) have a great day
ranshire
80 troll hunter
steamwheedle
I agree with Ranshire's thinking.First there could be a raid on the area to clear the building site and defend it for so long while the builders build the houses. There could be requirements like having X number of 525 (if they continue increasing prof cap by 750) woodworkers and lots of resources that the whole guild would supply (ore, leather, cloth and wood). The guild would also have to pay vast ammounts of gold to pay for labour. After the town is established, you could pay more to 'upgrade it' with defenses, vendors etc. And if you wish, allow other guilds to come into your town to do trade between your towns.
typo on last one. meant to say if they incease crafting cap by 75 not 750 lol