Back in March I wrote about how after the initial levelling frenzy that followed Midnight's release, I ended up turning my attention towards professions. This is an interest that hasn't dropped off since then. Sure, I also do other content such as delves, but the first thing I do after each Wednesday's reset is log into my (currently) seven profession alts and do their weekly profession quests. I didn't think too much about that at first, but after a few months of doing it, it does seem like I'm rather in the minority in enjoying the profession system this much.
Flying across Eversong in search of copper, like I do every week
I hesitate to put too much stock into the WoW subreddit because it's hardly representative of the player base as a whole, but it does tend to give at least vague insights into what a lot of players are happy or unhappy about at any given time. The profession system seems to be fairly solidly in the latter category, with threads decrying its terribleness receiving thousands of upvotes, while one I found that said it was great was sitting at a rating of zero, with over a hundred disagreeing comments.
After a bit of reflecting, I think the reasons I've come to like the current iteration of the profession system so much and why so many people on reddit seem to hate it are probably the same: it's honestly more reminiscent of the way a lot of things worked in Classic than modern retail's general design philosophy.
I suppose you could argue that the way the acquisition of knowledge points is time-gated is very un-Classic-like and you wouldn't be wrong about that, but I'm less talking about the nitty gritty details and more about the overall vibe of the system.
One part is that you are forced to make choices about what to prioritise that you can't take back. Sure, eventually you'll be able to fill out all the profession skill trees if you grind long enough, but if you pick one tree early on and then wish you'd chosen another one instead - tough luck, no resets. (Though I seem to remember that they are going to implement a once-per-expansion reset opportunity or something.)
On my tailor, I made a similar mistake as the guy who wrote the second post I linked above, specialising into profession equipment at first, only to find out that the epic pieces I wanted to craft all required me to have dozens and dozens of bolts of a special rare cloth that I couldn't even loot until I'd gone halfway down a completely different skill tree - that sucked, and is one of the reasons my tailoring is one of the professions on which I'm still more behind than some others.
However, I don't feel like I'm in a race and my error is something that will be rectified over time, which brings me to another big "Classic-like" positive about professions from my point of view: that the work you invest into them isn't tied to the whole seasonal cycle that constantly obsoletes your gear every major patch. (Let me knock on wood and hope that Blizzard has no plans to change this.) It's very grindy and you have to keep coming back to it week after week, but the benefits remain and accumulate over time.
Thanks to the spark system, crafted gear is relevant each new season without you necessarily needing to learn a lot of new recipes, so if you put the time into learning how to craft gear for every armour slot under the sun - that will still be useful as the expansion progresses! Same with gathering professions, where the benefits of grinding out those knowledge points are very noticeable - when I started on my blacksmithing in Midnight, I was constantly short on copper (another callback to Classic if I've ever seen one) and the output of each mining node felt absolutely anaemic, with many of them only yielding one piece at a time when I needed dozens to create a single alloy bar. But as I've filled out those skill trees and the yield of each type of node has increased, I could feel the pain easing, and now it actually feels like I'm already in a pretty good place in terms of raw materials, helped by the way the weekly knowledge point unlocks encourage me to keep gathering and not just stop the moment I have enough for my current project.
It's basically slow and grindy but rewards you in a way that is consistently useful throughout the expansion and to some degree even past it, now that housing exists and some decor items can only be crafted. A few months ago I levelled Cataclysm blacksmithing and now I can make pitchforks - not the most popular thing ever, and also only tangentially related to the new crafting system in particular, but it's something, and it's a big contrast to the way any gear you earn will be worse than a random world quest item by the time the point one patch hits.
I wonder if this old-school feel of the post-Dragonflight profession system was an intentional decision to bring a bit of classic flavour back to retail and appeal to different player types, or whether the devs will eventually decide that it was an accident that needs to be rectified and streamlined, considering how much pushback there has been against the way things work from more entrenched retail players.
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