Dragonflight Goldmaking – Good or Bad? – Wowhead Economy Weekly Wrap-Up 313

Often players, myself included, want to point the finger at one reason why something sucks. I think, while there were many positives in DF, the negatives outweighed them. My take…

Crafting Profession Stats – GOOD (mostly) +1

Resourcefulness and multicraft add spice to a crafters system. If you craft 1 or 2, you might get lucky, you might even get some free mats from crafting for others, but craft enough and it becomes the law of averages and simple mats again. Inspiration though, was a complete MESS!

Spec Trees – Neutral +0

These were a great thought, badly implimented. They were fantastic in the first few weeks. Those who knew, and took time to learn, profited. Those that didnt….well didnt. They were too finly balanced for them to ever consider changing or updating them later in the expansion. Then consider eventually players could max all nodes, they are aguably not a “specialization” anymore. Some type of respec was much needed.

Knowledge Points – BAD -1

Catagorised seperate from spec trees as this is more about the acquisition. It sucked. 100-130 one time knowledge, plus first time crafts. Then many hundreds drip fed at 12-15 per week via mob grinds/ dirt farm/ basic quests. I am still not 800/800 blacksmithing.

Crafting Orders – GOOD +1

A way to custom order an item, exactly how you need/want it is great. Much room for refinment next expansion.

Making everything BOP – BAD -1

Forcing use of new system by making everything BOP was not needed, and was an engagement play. Much like islands being optimal for neck grinding or lego dust being in chorghast. This caused everyone to HAVE to place orders even when not needed. Remind me again why cut diamonds are BoP?

Tradechat spam – BAD -1

ZERO additional effort added to help both players looking to buy something, and players selling items was poor. With the amount of crafted options, a chat channel should not have even been a consideration. Think if amazon was just a chat channel! CHAOS!

Updated Gathering Professions – GOOD +1

Gathering had been exactly the same FOREVER! It needed something new, and the addition of spec trees, and other node variations made gameplay more enjoyable. I still think gathering should be baseline, and even adding a cloth/fabric gathering profession would help with balance of mat prices.

No replacement for basic gathering – BAD -1

The improvements to gathering, while good, pushed it more into a long term project, much like crafting professions. This left a great hole for some basic farming option. And probably a record low amount of herb/miners. 2×4 awakened farms are really the only alternative, but that would still be considered group play so not very “basic”.

No floor price for materials – BAD -1

If you look at most basic materials, there is nowhere for them to go. Even the basic crafts all need awakened additionaly to the basic material. This causes basic mats to stack up and up, and get cheaper and cheaper. Vendor Shuffles are not the best solution, but it was better than none.

Buffed expansion for bots – BAD -1

Materials and the price is now mostly dictated by bots. They can farm in peace on low pop shards, but gain all the advantages for selling that come with the region wide AH. Their efficency might have been nerfed due to dragon flying/new node types, but they got over that quick enough.

Region Wide AH – GOOD (for most) and BAD (for crafters) -+0

Normalised price for materials and consumables was needed overall. Not really fair that little Jimmy on low pop was often paying double or more for basic potions/enchants. RWAH also meant fantasic selling speed for crafters. Shame overall prices nuked into the floor due to above reasons.

Region Wide Flipping – Good +1

This provides an elite method for goldmaking. Cross realm arbitrage at its finest. Requires 2 accounts to do properly, but most semi-serious goblins have this already. This I feel might only be short lived as I suspect Blizzards end goal is region wide EVERYTHING AH, but take full advantage while you can.

Removing Callings – BAD -1

While not my favorite gameplay loop, it was a basic and effective option if you quickly needed 3-5k for your evenings potions. Dragon races kinda replaced this, but with a very repetitive activity.

Removing Mission Table – BAD -1

Was always going to be removed, because it was over cheesed by addons, but regardless was a nice front-loaded effort method to make some gold.

There is probably more… but it is Monday Morning, and I have still not finished my coffee.

Final score = -4

If you are interested in a more detailed overview, I have spoke more on this topic here :

In addition to these categories I have a couple things I want to comment on too:

No Artisan’s Mettle dump for non-crafters – Bad -1

I this this is a pretty big problem in terms of setting a floor price for guaranteed crafts or giving gatherers in a particular a way of using their Artisan’s mettle. A sinple solution to this would be something like a Mettle Trader similar to the Blood of Sargeras or Spirit of Harmony trader that sells current expansion mats in exchange for mettle, or an in demand, non-BOP item that can be WO’d for Mettle (something like a good combat potion that only requires mettle to craft), or simply making Mettle BOA.

Racial Bonuses providing an unfair advantage for crafting – VERY BAD -2

I think this is still one of the biggest problems with the current system in Dragonflight and I would really like to see them adress it for the next expansion. I like to be able to get everything running at maximum efficiency when I craft so it’s extremely discouraging that I can’t do that even after collecting everything recipe and getting all of my knowledge maxxed out being permanently behind someone who happened to pick the correct race early. It especially sucks when it’s impossible to even race change to the one with your profession bonus because of class restrictions, eg. my Demon Hunter who has 0 option to go Dranei, so if I wanted to fully optimise my JC I’d have no option but to start over from 0.

I’m fine with racials giving a head start with crafting professions but the permanent advantage we have now is the forst tine something like this has happened. I’d prever a racial that gives a bonus +50 Knowledge or something over gaining any skill points in the current system.

So for me my scores are:
Good: +7.5
Bad: -4.5
Net: +3

Overall I’m more positive about this expansion than you are are and I like the direction they’re going in, but I agree with some of your criticisms too and think there’s room for improvement.

It’s ruined FARMING for sure. Which was the goldmaking I enjoyed most in previous expansions.

I could pay for tokens easily just running a basilisk skinning route in Legion, or Herbing outside Boralus in BFA, or Skinning and Mining Sinvry ore in Shadowlands. I enjoyed ending an evening just doing circuits like that while talking to friends on discord or watching a show.

Now there’s just no point. Farmable mats are worth practically nothing. You can make more money doing raw gold farms. It’s pretty disappointing.

I tried to do several professions and just don’t enjoy the work order system how it is. I also don’t like selling crafted gear on the AH because I’m not going to cancel scan and even if I did, margins are so tight that you need a spreadsheet to calculate if somethings actually profitable or not

I just liked farming. Knowing that every herb/skin/ore I gathered was going to increase the amount of gold I had felt good.

Now for the first time in my WoW career I just buy tokens. I like raiding, but not much else in the game ATM, so for my money it’s the best Gold Per Hour I’ve found.

I hate the region wide auction house and the work order system.

Work order system – I can’t stand spamming trade chat to get crumbs. I want to be able to just craft the gear, risking the gold put into making it, and then post it on the auction house. The competition quickly became too much and there were way too many messages going through trade chat so you were rarely seen. And when you saw someone advertise they were looking for a specific item and you quickly message them – chances are five other crafters whispered them as well so good luck. I didn’t like having to explain over and over again how the craft system worked because Blizz didn’t do a good job – I’m still having to explain to players today why they need to resend their request with higher quality mats because even with an insight I can’t get their gem to rank 3. I hate inspiration. Nothing feels worse, especially at the beginning of an expac, to craft something for a player and it isn’t max quality.

Region wide – prices are much lower much faster than ever. I love that people kept saying not to worry, and that prices would just be similar to high pop realms. Yeah, no. I’ve been on a high pop realm since BFA. I made my gold for the brutosaur mount by selling consumables. Yeah, the profit wasn’t great even back that – but it’s way worse now. Also the glyph market was kind of destroyed. I don’t know why they made that cross realm – the demand is so low on them regardless, so now the competition is high and the prices are rock bottom. Many that used to consistently sell for 1k gold, even on my high pop realm, are now 20 gold. And that’s not worth cancel scanning over. I don’t recall herbs and ore ever getting as cheap as they are except maybe at the very end of an expansion. I used to farm them in my downtime in previous expansions and make decent gold, now it’s just not worth it except at an expansion release.

Also the lack of new recipes or new herbs/ore. It feels like not a lot of new stuff was introduced, and many of the things that were (like embellishments) are not in demand at all, and not worth it. Inspiration in general is a terrible thing. And quality/ranks. Way too many mats filling up bag space. Way too many rank 2 consumables that don’t sell as well or for as much.