Why I Like Midnight Professions

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.

Adventures in Old Content

I've often said that I consider the speed and ease with which modern WoW makes new content obsolete one of its biggest flaws. Blizzard have actually gotten a little better with this recently - everything added during Dragonflight for example served at least some purpose throughout the entire expansion, meaning that content didn't become entirely obsolete with every new patch.

Still, as a whole, the world of Azeroth is littered with old expansions that tell stories and contain gameplay that people might still find interesting and enjoyable today, but that newer players in particular are simply unlikely to see unless they specifically seek it out, as everyone just gets pushed into the newest expansion and that's that.

That said, while I'm sure that the majority of players largely ignore old content, it's not completely lacking in appeal even after it stopped offering challenges and gear rewards. Transmog farmers and all kinds of collectors in general tend to find plenty of reasons to go back into old expansions to keep adding to their collections.

I think I mentioned before that I've never been a huge fan of transmog farming myself, however my interest in it increased ever since Blizzard lifted the armour type and class restrictions in the run-up to War Within, meaning that if a priest robe drops for your warrior (for example), you can still add its appearance to your collection now, when previously you wouldn't have been able to.

For the most part, I haven't been super consistent in my efforts on that front, but one thing I've remembered to do almost every week is to clear Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on my warrior. They are old raids that I'm very familiar with after Classic and that make me feel quite nostalgic, plus they contain some absolute bangers in terms of outfits that I wanted to collect. Even after months of running both instances every week, there are a couple of pieces that continue to elude me.

I originally did most of this kind of farming on my priest, but switched to my warrior after the former had one of the Thunderfury bindings drop for her (and these are still soulbound, sadly). It then occurred to me that if I did the farming on my warrior instead, I could actually get myself a Thunderfury in retail. Before that, I honestly hadn't even given it any thought in so far as I'd figured it was probably just one of those things from Vanilla that are no longer available in retail, but that was not the case here.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea - no, this post is not about me actually getting said Thunderfury. I've got the Garr binding, but Baron Geddon has so far refused to cough up his part. (He also still owes me an Arcanist Mantle, supposedly his most common gear drop - not in my experience.) However, while you mindlessly run through MC week after week, one-shotting everything in your path, it's easy to fall down a rabbit hole of related projects.

Because there is of course another legendary that comes from MC: Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros. That one requires a blacksmith to craft a Sulfuron Hammer first, but my warrior is in fact also a blacksmith, so it was time to level some classic professions!

Mining went pretty quickly for the most part due to how much Blizzard increased the number of node spawns in Cataclysm, plus of course the ability to fly in the old world - also, I don't know if it's intentional or a bug, but you can mine from the back of your flying mount in old content as well now, not just in the newest expansion, which has come in very handy.

As you get closer to 300, things start to slow down a bit, but I had no problem doing laps around old Silithus for hours. However, at skill level 295 I suddenly noticed that I was no longer getting any skill-ups even from Rich Thorium Veins, and I already knew from my MC runs that Dark Iron didn't give any either. That's not how that used to work in Classic! When did they change this and why? And how the heck are you supposed to get to 300 then?

A bit of research revealed that the only way to get from 295 to 300 in Classic Mining was by smelting Dark Iron Ore, which you can still only learn by doing a quest in BRD, so I did that. And to think I'd actually stopped tapping the Dark Iron Ore nodes during my MC runs since I thought they were worthless nowadays! The things you find out...

Anyway, with all the Thorium I had gathered I was able to skill up Blacksmithing without any major issues, and after Ragnaros actually dropped an Eye of Sulfuras one day, I decided it was time to get onto crafting that Sulfuron Hammer. This still requires you to be exalted with the Thorium Brotherhood, which is not that hard to achieve in retail, fortunately. At first I thought I'd go and actually do the Cata quests in Searing Gorge, since those are supposed to give pretty good rep, but then I realised that I'd actually accumulated so many of the trade-in items from MC trash that it was easier to just go all the way from neutral to exalted using those.

I bought and learned the recipe and looked at the ingredients. 50 Arcanite Bars? Hmm. I knew that transmuting Arcanite had no cooldown in retail, but it turned out that my Jewelcrafter didn't have quite that many Arcane Crystals saved up in her bank. I started prospecting some Thorium, only to realise after a while that you apparently can't get Arcane Crystals from prospecting. Supposedly this was only possible at one point in early Burning Crusade, which might be where I got the idea from. So I did more mining instead.

Once I'd accumulated enough crystals, I sent them alongside a bunch of Thorium bars to the Worgen druid I'd made back in original MoP, who's a herbalist and alchemist and still had to skill up her professions through all the available expansions at the time. Once I started creating the Arcanite Bars, I was delighted to find that she was actually a transmutation master, something I'd long since forgotten but which meant that I got a lot more bars out of my materials than I'd expected. Good job for making that choice, past me.

With the Arcanite sorted, I got ready to craft the Hammer... just to realise that I was in fact still short something, namely some Blood of the Mountain. I hadn't paid particular attention to that item, just chucking it into the guild bank alongside the other miscellaneous old crafting materials that sometimes dropped from MC trash, so I hadn't realised just how rare it was in comparison to everything else and that I still didn't have ten of them even after months of farming.

I was stunned to find that they were several thousand gold a piece even on the auction house, and while I could've just bought them there, it did strike me as kind of expensive and would've been somewhat unsatisfactory to me. Instead I looked up the exact mob they dropped from and made sure in subsequent MC clears to always kill all the Molten Destroyer trash mobs as well. Again, what a surprise to find that such a random item from Vanilla was actually still rare and valuable!

That whole line of discoveries actually reminded me of a little story from my Cataclysm days as well: At the time, my old guild (which was already in decline) had made me an officer, and at some point a guildie I barely knew asked me whether he could have some old crafting mats from the guild bank, including some Blood of the Mountain. I happily agreed and handed it all out for free, thinking it was just a bunch of worthless junk. Needless to say, the GM was not happy with me when he found out, and I felt like a complete idiot once I realised that at least some of the items I had given away were actually still very valuable. In fact, I was so ashamed that I then spent the next few weeks farming MC on my shaman until I could restock the guild bank with all the Blood of the Mountain I had so carelessly given away.

It feels funny to be back to that now, even if it's happening under completely different circumstances. However, at least to me there's also something comforting in knowing that there are still some things in modern WoW that haven't changed that much since Vanilla.

The Art of the Armorsmith

One of the amazing things about playing Vanilla WoW is being reminded of just how much more involved professions used to be. I mean, as far as I can tell, the system was still primitive compared to any MMO that actually cares about crafting, but compared to modern day WoW, Vanilla WoW's professions are a bloody goldmine of creativity.

Even the secondary professions required a minimum amount of work. I've written about having to trek across continents to buy the books to level my cooking, fishing and first aid past 150, and at 225 a quest awaited for each of them. Who here remembers when Triage was actually a requirement to level first aid? I remember that this was the quest that taught me that you could turn on friendly NPC names in the UI.

However, my biggest profession-related adventure on Kronos has been levelling blacksmithing. I made Isadora a blacksmith because that's what the original Isadora was, however the original Isadora never made it past level 22. I don't think I ever levelled blacksmithing to a high level on any of my alts, but even if I did it must have been very late in the game, by the time they had removed all the barriers as well as everything that made things interesting.

My only memory of encountering the madness that was the original blacksmithing grind is from when my (now ex-)boyfriend rolled a paladin in Burning Crusade and I helped him level his blacksmithing by spending hours upon hours grinding mithril and thorium on one of my miners. (The things you do for love...) But I didn't really know what he needed it for. I'm finally getting an idea.

It started innocently enough: At some point around level 40, I noticed that two dwarves at the great forge in Ironforge were giving me the option to specialise in either armour- or weaponsmithing. I decided to pick the former, which was probably not a good thing from a min-/maxing point of view but I always tend to think defensively when given a choice like this.

Then I immediately felt lost. It might be that I missed something, but I have a suspicion that this is where the Vanilla WoW simulation is imperfect and missing some clues, as I remember that the trainers in original WoW tended to have dynamic dialogue that would change to direct you towards the next trainer once your skill got too high (e.g. "I have noting more to teach you, [name], you should seek out [NPC name] in [zone].") All the armoursmithing guy on Kronos had to say to me after I had picked up his quest was "hello".

I decided to let the internets help me but went about it in a terribly haphazard manner, which would quickly come back to bite me in the butt. The armoursmithing quest wanted me to create some "ornate mithril" thingamabobs. So I googled "ornate mithril" in Kronos' own database and found that a dwarf in Stranglethorn, located just south of the entrance to Zul'Gurub, teaches several of those recipes as part of a quest. I remembered running into him back in the day without really knowing what he was good for.

So off I went... but the jungle dwarf didn't want to talk to me. I did some more research and realised that I had missed a breadcrumb quest from Stormwind. Back up I went to pick up the breadcrumb quest, then back down to STV. Now the dwarf would talk to me... and wanted me to bring him one hundred and twenty metal bars in exchange for three recipes (forty iron and eighty mithril bars). Needless to say... that took a while. I never set out on a single dedicated mining spree, but mostly tried to squeeze some more mining out of my questing experience by doing extra loops around areas where I had seen mining nodes spawn before. You also have to remember that ore nodes were much, much rarer in Vanilla than they became after the Cataclysm, plus they would spawn in wild mix across zones, so you couldn't just go to one place to farm one thing.

Eventually I got there and accumulated enough iron and mithril. At last, three recipes for ornate mithril wotsits were mine! Except... this is where I realised that I had learned how to make the wrong ornate mithril doodads, not the ones for the gear slots actually required for the quest. D'oh!

More research was needed. Apparently, to learn how to make the right items I would have to talk to that night elf guy by the forge in Gadgetzan. I knew him well, because even as a non-blacksmith I couldn't help but notice his popularity back in the day. Nelf guy (also of Troll Temper fame) offered to teach me the three recipes I needed if I brought him some of the orante mithril thingies I could already make (phew, at least that wasn't a complete waste of time) as well as some "heavy mithril" stuff.

Now I had to research where that came from. As it turns out, it comes from a trainer! But not one I had been aware of. I had thought that armoursmithing was intrinsically connected to master blacksmithing, but this was not the case. A goblin in Booty Bay of all people is apparently one of the most accomplished blacksmiths in all of Azeroth and could teach me what I needed to know... if I increased my skill enough. More mining was needed because I needed more mats. (Most items required 10+ bars of anything to make, not to mention additional materials like leather or gems.)

Eventually my regular old blacksmithing was up high enough that I could learn how to make heavy mithril gear. Once I'd made that as well as the ornate mithril thingamajigs, I finally had all the knowledge needed to complete my armoursmithing quest. Only about fifteen levels or so after I'd originally required it.

After I was finally declared an armoursmith... the dwarf had a total of two recipes to teach me. What the hell?

Grasping at any kind of straws in regards to how to proceed, I remembered that I'd heard people talk about using the Imperial Plate armour set to level their blacksmithing at the higher levels (the same set that all the Stormwind guards wear). Once more I had to consult the database for information on how to learn it. First I had to increase my skill by a few more points, which meant more mining.

Then I had to revisit Tanaris, this time to talk to the dark iron dwarf next to nelf boy. Turns out he's willing to sell the recipes for every single piece of Imperial plate gear... for thorium bars, about two hundred of them. This is where I finally had a minor windfall though, because with all the time I had spent hunting for mithril, I had incidentally built up enough of a thorium stockpile that I could buy all his recipes at once.

Now I just need to acquire another couple hundred thorium bars to actually craft the damn things. It's kind of annoying, but also something of an achievement - in Vanilla, professions simply weren't for everyone.