Cry Havoc » Skinning

March 17th, 2011 by Romy

I bought World Of Warcraft on launch day back in November 2004. By accident. That is, I bought it on purpose, but I didn’t realize it had just come out that same day. I was at Fry’s Electronics checking out new DVD releases when I saw it on the shelf. I had read about the game in various magazines, and I was looking forward to trying it out, so it went right into my shopping cart.

Like many players in those very early days of the game, I didn’t have any clue at first what to do regarding professions. The basic concepts were easy enough to understand, but I wasn’t really sure about what factors were most important to consider when selecting which professions a character should have. It’s embarassing to admit now, but at first I was not quite clear on the fact that Cooking & Fishing were considered “secondary” professions that you could learn in addition to your two “primary” professions.

The first toon I creatd in the game was my Warrior, Sunny. When I first took her out of Northshire Abbey into Elwynn Forest, I discovered trainers for Leatherworking and Skinning, followed by Blacksmithing in Goldshire. I later discovered that there were other trainers that were a bit harder to find. For some professions you had to walk up the road into Stormwind City.

My first profession was skinning, which I selected mainly because the trainer was right there in Goldshire and it seemed like half of what I was doing was killing beasts anyway. I figured I might as well get extra loot from them in the process.

I considered mining as a second profession, but there were so many low-level characters running around Elwynn Forest back then, the competition for metal nodes was very steep. As it turned out, I created my second character, Romy, and started playing her before figuring out what to do with Sunny. It wasn’t long before Romy was my main toon.

Once Romy hit Elwynn Forest, I selected Skinning for her profession as I had with Sunny, and pretty much for the same reason. Tailoring seemed like a good option for a cloth-wearing mage, but the information I was seeing made it look like it would take a lot of training before I’d be able to make anything that was even as good as what I was already wearing. Not to mention that it was going to take cloth I hadn’t even seen yet.

The Problem With Crafting Gear

There is a problem with the way gear-crafting professions (Tailoring, Blacksmithing, Leatherworking) work that was there at launch and which remains in the game to this day. The first aspect of this problem is simple and I’m sure we’ve all seen it: All of these professions start out with you making items that are essentially useless to you. For example, in tailoring you have to earn 30 points before you can make anything that a level 10 character might even consider using for anything but decorative purposes.

In general, the problem is that the materials needed to make a useful item are out of reach until your character has leveled well past the point where the item is useful. Let’s look at a specific example: the Lesser Wizard’s Robe can be made by a tailor who has at least 135 skill points. The robe requires a level 21 character and takes a total of six pieces of Silk Cloth, among other things, to create.

The problem is, Silk cloth only drops from mobs that are level 32 or higher. Reasonably, that means the earliest point at which you could gather the cloth would be about level 29 or 30. And by that point, you don’t want the Lesser Wizard’s Robe anymore, and in fact it hasn’t been especially desirable for several levels.

What about buying the silk cloth on the auction house? That’s a possibility, but there are two considerations. First, I’ve always thought Blizzard’s master plan was that you would normally gather the materials for crafting yourself wherever possible. At the very least, it should be possible to do so, shouldn’t it? Second, the cost of buying materials on the AH is often impractical for low-level toons unless there is some higher-level toon feeding them cash as needed.

I can’t imagine that Blizzard only intended this to work for players with higher-level toons who can trickle down cash to their alts.

This problem exists in all of the gear-making professions and pretty much at most skill levels. For the most part, the only time these professions become genuinely useful to yourself is at the highest character/skill levels.

One option is to stick to making items for which gathering the materials is within your reach, and then selling them instead of using them yourself. But that brings up another few problems. First of all, nothing sells at a vendor for more than a fraction of the materials cost of making the item. You might consider this when your primary goal is simply to earn skill points in the profession, but otherwise it’s a losing proposition. Also, most crafted gear simply doesn’t sell that well on the AH. Either people can make the items themselves or they have better gear from quest rewards or dungeon drops. Usually the only crafted gear items that sell reliably for decent prices are the higher-end items which require extreme material gathering.

A big part of the problem here is that when you’re leveling up your profession, you rarely make just one item at a time. It’s more likely you’ll make 10-15 Lesser Wizard’s Robes all at once, until the item becomes green and no longer offers a reliable skill point advance. When you make that many items, you can’t expect to get good prices for them because you’re going to saturate the market all by yourself. And just imagine if another tailor is leveling up on the same item at the same time…

If you look at the list of items craftable by these professions, you’ll see plateaus corresponding to the previous level caps (60/300, 70/375, 80/450). For example, there are a lot of tailoring items you could make at level 60 which would be useful for that character. However, the items on these plateaus all tend to require a variety of exotic materials. Gathering those materials made sense back when you couldn’t advance past level 60 in the process, but now that the level cap is higher, it’s likely you’ll gain a level or two before you can get together all the materials required. Or worse, you might spend an entire level or two gathering the materials, and then after the item is crafted you get a quest reward a level later than replaces it.

Hope For The Future

It’s hard to imagine that Blizzard is unaware of such a fundamental flaw in the way these crafting professions work, and yet here we are nearly six and a half years after launch and it’s one of the few things about the game that hasn’t changed since then. The one saving grace is that this is mostly a problem for leveling up with a brand new toon. Anybody who has higher-level character will almost certainly be helping their low-level alts along the way.

Still… doesn’t it seem like Blizzard should fix it?

Blacksmithing, Jewelcrafting, Leatherworking, Mining, Skinning, Tailoring

The Problem With Crafting Gear

Hope For The Future

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