I've been wanting to make this post for a few days but felt I would let the dust settle first.
For a start, I have seen many posters here speculate that this sub has led to the increase in goblins which is ruining the economy. This is a patently false conclusion. This subreddit has 60k subscribers, about 1% of the playerbase, almost no one I speak to has heard of this subreddit, yet everyone is swimming in gold lately. So what caused it? A perfect storm.
- Professions are more accessible than ever before. Legion forced you to max your crafting level to access high level recipes, it also gave each profession a set of questlines that saw you travelling all over the broken isles. Now you can start and max a profession within a few hours at most. Getting rank 3 herbs in Legion tooks months, currently it takes a day.
- More raw gold was injected into the economy last expansion than any other before it by far. Between the instant respawning cloth/BoE farms, World Quests and Follower Missions, It would be fair to assume that more gold was gained by Legion characters than the entire decade preceding it
- Professions are exceptionally unrewarding at present, the crafted ilvl 300 gear cannot be equipped whilst leveling (something that made these crafted gear and legendaries attractive in WoD/Legion respectively), nor can it be upgraded. Crafted gear becomes useless as soon as you get stuck into heroic dungeons. This is why people are furiously undercutting in a race to sell their gear, many are reasonably worried that by next week their ilvl 300 pieces will be worth less than the crafting costs.
- Professions are considerably unbalanced and very poorly designed as they stand. The best example is leatherworking, no matter what you are seeking to farm/craft, you will end up with excess Mistscales, Tempest Hides and Calcified Bones. The rare materials have considerably less demand than the common materials, however they are quite literally JUST AS COMMON. This is fiendish leather all over again, whether you are skinning leather or scales, you end up with excess amounts of the rare material and there is no material sink for them. You can vendor them, delete them or sell them on the AH at 2-50g per stack of 200
Instead of blaming ourselves, lets be completely honest about this. As amazing as BFA is, the team in charge of professions dropped the ball big time, it feels as though one team designed the professions and an entirely different team was in charge of balancing/tuning them.
Blizzard needs to consider the longevity of professions outside of Alchemy, if the grand endgame of our professions is to sell ilvl 300 gear, we're all going to be rolling Herb/Alch within the next month. They could lower to equip requirements to level 111, they could allow you to upgrade with Expolsum and Hydrocores perhaps, they should definitely retune the material costs of almost every single item, they should do a tuning pass on Anchorweed spawns and they should completely rework skinning tables.
But I think we can all agree, most Non Alchemy professions will be mostly dead within the month if something isn't done and it's entirely unconstructive and arrogant for this sub to claim responsibility for the dying economies. Blizz dun goofed and we need to let them know instead of circle jerking ourselves as though we are some highly influential force within the wow community.
