World of Warcraft Tradeskills

The design of combat systems in most MMORPGs has converged to an auto-attack system combined with pressing special action keys. To find innovation in MMORPGs, one has to look to crafting systems, which show a much wider range of variation. Tradeskills in World of Warcraft are innovative, but they are both a step forward, and a step back in development. This guide describes the WoW crafting system, what is new and what is old, and why there have to be some restrictions.

The MMORPGs of the last years have shown a remarkable variety of different crafting and tradeskill systems. There have been games where resources come from monster loot drops, other games where you extract resources from nodes, and even one game where you can extract resources with a harvester anywhere, but need prospect the area first for the highest concentration. In some games, your execution of crafting steps (or combines) can end with either success or failure, while in others a mix of random chance, skill and quality of ingredients determines the quality of the crafted item. In most games, you craft by a simple click, but in other games, where you need to make several choices in the process, or even play a mini-game to craft. In several games it is possible to follow a pure crafting career, without having to go adventuring and kill monsters. But in all of these games, mastering a tradeskill took many, many hours of often highly repetitive grind.

What is new in World of Warcraft is that crafting is extraordinarily hassle-free, and does not have any grind. The highest possible skill level is 300, and every attempt to make an item not only succeeds, but also has up to 100% chance to gain you one skill point, depending on the color code of the recipe. Furthermore you can make several items, and gain several skill points, with one single click, provided you have all the materials. It is thus theoretically possible to master a tradeskill with less than 300 clicks. And if you just count the time needed to click on the craft button and wait for the timer, you can master the skill in less than one hour, provided you have all the resources at hand.

Where World of Warcraft takes a step back to a previous era of MMORPGs is that your crafting skill is linked to your adventuring level. You can't even start most tradeskills until you have level five, and every further step of 75 skill points requires you to have an appropriate minimum level. You need a minimum level to master a tradeskill, which is between level 35 and 45, depending on the skill. Besides this direct level requirement, there are indirect ones: resources either drop from monsters, or are guarded by them, and the higher level the resource, the stronger the monster you need to overcome. Training crafting skills, learning new recipes, or buying resources from other players costs money, and that is another indirect link to your adventuring level, as higher level characters are generally richer. So making a "pure" craftsman character in World of Warcraft is impossible.

The reason for this step back is something I already mentioned in the EQ2 tradeskills review: Creation of items by tradeskills competes with looting items from monsters. Thus a crafting system needs to pose challenges, so that crafting an item is as difficult as gaining it in combat. World of Warcraft went for gathering resources as main challenge for the average crafter, with the added difficulty of paying for training and recipes. High-level characters with lots of money can buy all resources from other players and master a tradeskill in a very short time, but there is a limit of two primary tradeskills that a character can learn. And the level limit to skill advancement stops the high-level character from doing the other tradeskills with a secondary low-level alt.

There are twelve tradeskills in World of Warcraft. Three of these are labeled as secondary skills: Cooking, Fishing, and First Aid. Any character can have any number of these secondary tradeskills. Of the other nine tradeskills, the primary ones, you can only choose two. Lets discuss the secondary tradeskills first:

Cooking is the art of turning the meat of slain beasts into food, with the help of vendor bought spices. You need a cooking fire to do so, but if there is none available, you can make a campfire with flint and tinder, and some vendor bought wood. Eating food regenerates your hitpoints a lot faster than normal. In addition to that, some food also gives a temporary buff to your stamina and spirit, thus increasing you maximum hitpoints, and making hitpoint and mana regeneration faster.

First aid is somewhat similar to cooking. Humanoid enemies often drop raw textile materials, like linen, wool, or silk. With the first aid skill you can turn these textiles into bandages, which then can be used to heal yourself or others. Unfortunately this requires some concentration, so using bandages to heal yourself in combat can be interrupted. Bandages regenerate your hitpoints faster than food, but don't give a bonus to stamina or spirit.

Fishing is mainly used to catch fish, which can be used for cooking, for some alchemy recipes, and for feeding some hunter pets. You also have a tiny chance to fish an item out of the water. The more dangerous the place is you fish, the better are the fish and items found. Unfortunately fishing is the most boring of all twelve tradeskills, as it doesn't require you to move. You can stand at one place and repeatedly fish. That led quickly to players using third-party software to macro ("bot") fishing, which then caused Blizzard not only to ban using such sort of software, but also to significantly reduce both the amount of money vendors pay for fish you catch and don't need and the chance to find items. Fishing is not really profitable any more, thus mainly used by hunters with cat pets.

Let us now turn to the primary tradeskills. I'll discuss tradeskills of the same category together, pointing out differences when there are any:

The first category is tradeskills is resource gathering: herbalism, mining and skinning. Herbalism and mining give you a special "find resources" skill, which makes resources of the relevant type appear as a golden dot on your mini-map. You can only have one "find" type of skill active at any time, which includes tracking and the dwarves’ "find treasure" skill. Each golden dot represents a resource node, an herb or a mining spot. You right-click on them, and after a short gathering/mining animation a loot window opens, from which you can take your herb or ore. Skinning works differently. After you have looted a slain beast, you can right-click it again, and get a loot window with leather. There is no find skill for skinning, but you can skin beasts killed by other players. All the gathering tradeskills are pure moneymakers. Resources are valuable to other players, and can easily be sold in the auction house. People that aren't interested in crafting can nevertheless take two gathering skills for added income.

Tailoring, blacksmithing, and leatherworking are the basic crafting skills to produce equipment. All three produce armor. But each of them produces also additional useful items, for example armor kits from leatherworking, bags from tailoring, or keys from blacksmithing. There is an obvious advantage in taking the crafting skill that corresponds to the type of armor your character can wear. As long as you keep your crafting skill up, you can then always supply yourself with useful armor. At higher levels you can even produce "magic" armor with stats boosts. But as I mentioned earlier, crafted items are in competition with looted or quest items, and crafted armor is not always the best available armor for a level.

Alchemy is my personal favorite tradeskill, because potions are always useful, and there is very little competition from potions found as loot or quest rewards. The downside is that alchemy requires the most work and materials, as the effect of potions lasts never more than one hour, so they are consumables. You will use a lot more potions per level than you need to create armor pieces. There are basically two types of potions: One type buffs you for 30 or 60 minutes, increasing your stats, your hitpoints, your armor, or giving you other beneficial effects. You can drink several different buff potions and run around with several quite useful buffs. The second type is immediate effect or short duration potions. They heal your hitpoints, refill your mana, increase your rage, enable you to run very quickly for a short time, or even make you invincible for a few seconds. Unfortunately all of the second type of potion share the same two-minute timer. If you drink one of them, you can't use the same or any other short duration potion for the next two minutes.

Engineering is a special tradeskill that produces a wide range of useful, often funny items. Engineers make guns, scopes to improve guns, and ammunition. They can create bombs to throw at their enemies, or blow them up with explosive sheep. They can distract them with a target dummy, or shrink them with a shrinking ray. There are far too many items to list here, but most of them are quite useful in combat. But most of the things that an engineer can produce need engineering skill to use as well. As only the producers of these items can use them, there is practically no market to sell them to other players. This tradeskill is very much a money sink. There is a certain trend that engineering becomes the tradeskill of choice for high-level characters wishing to participate in PvP, as it certainly gives an added advantage there. The more powerful items have a chance to backfire, but most of the times engineering items can give you the edge in PvP, as they significantly increase the options you have.

The last tradeskill is Enchanting, the odd man out, which works differently than all other tradeskills. As enchanter you have a skill named "disenchant", which destroys a magical item and transforms it into ingredients. These ingredients can then be used by the enchanter to add magical bonuses to other items. There is a market for enchantments, but you can't sell them in the auction house. The enchanter has to shout out his offers in a busy city's trade channel, and meet his customers directly. There is a special place in the trade window where the owner of the item can place it, allowing the enchanter to enchant it without the item being actually traded. Not an easy business to be in, as finding items to disenchant and finding customers are both difficult.

To sum up this review, I would like to briefly discuss combinations of tradeskills. You can only have two primary tradeskills, so they had better work together well. Some combinations are obvious: mining with blacksmithing or engineering, herbalism with alchemy, and skinning with leatherworking. Less obvious is the combination that makes you the most money: skinning with either herbalism or mining. This combination maximizes income with one gathering skill that doesn't use a find ability and one that does. If you want to learn enchanting, a good combination is with tailoring, as the latter does not require a gathering skill. This combo allows you to tailor magical garments, and then disenchant them for enchanting materials.

In summary the tradeskill system of World of Warcraft is very playable. It innovates in eliminating the grind from crafting. But it is balanced by adding several restrictions, in the number of tradeskills you can learn, and in level limits. This necessary balance unfortunately means that you cannot play a pure crafter in WoW, which some players will consider as a step back in development.

This article has been published on Grimwell.com.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:49 AM Permanent Link