Green items made during leveling with random stats? I personally would much rather know exactly what I am crafting when I craft it. Thankfully these items are usually just vendor trash with very little real value. Perhaps some entertainment can be gleaned from the terrabad stats that are sure to surface.
There are some good changes here as players will finally be rewarded with more skill-ups for making hard to craft patterns. At higher levels obtaining skill points gets tougher and tougher. Its always seemed rather unfair to me that after breaking the bank, and tramping around rounding up various materials from every corner of the world you only got one lousy skill point to show for your efforts. This change will make leveling these professions a little less frustrating.
Also, while it may be coming a few years to late, Blizzard has finally realized that profession specializations are old and outdated. Thankfully in Cataclysm they will be going the route of the dinosaur and becoming extinct. This change leaves me with mixed feelings as it sounds like specializations will be replaced by long sessions of dreary grinding to obtain special patterns. If this is the case it may leave many wishing for the specializations of the past.
Tailors are in for a change as well but for good or bad I’m not quite sure. High end Tailoring items will center around a single cloth type that can be crafted through five different recipes, each on a long cooldown. So instead of making several types of cloth each with their own separate materials and cooldowns, Tailors will now be doing basically the same thing but only producing one type of cloth.
I can see the benefits here, since all the items will takeone type of cloth, technically Tailors should be able to obtain the cloth necessary to create items more quickly. Setting it up this way may also prevent cloth prices from skyrocketing, and finding a Tailor willing to give up their cooldown may be easier. Personally I would much rather see one set of components and one cooldown that produced five pieces of cloth, but I tend to rate on the fairly lazy side.
Alchemy
Oh joy another unique material is being introduced to the Alchemy profession that is used by high level recipes and is on a cooldown. It goes without saying that this material will probably be highly overpriced and annoying to get made.
Better news for alchemists comes with the announcement that all potions and elixirs in Cataclysm will use the same vial type, while flasks will use another. Nothing annoys me more than getting all set to make a potion or elixir only to get the message that somewhere along the line I failed to buy the correct type of vial. Usually I find that I managed to buy every single vial except for the one that I need. Never again will this headache happen. Alchemists everywhere rejoice.
Enchanting
Enchanting has always been, in my opinion, one of the more difficult professions to level. The materials are random and sometimes difficult to get, the enchants are costly, and at low levels almost impossible to sell for any real profit. The slacker inside of me jumps for joy at the news that the material component costs have been reduced for more easy leveling, making Enchanting a more appealing profession by far. A host of new weapon enchantments will also be introduced in Cataclysm and most of them look rather promising. Although I can just imagine how expensive they are going to be. Let’s hope that their corresponding graphics look as awesome as they sound.
Engineering is broken. It doesn’t just need fixed it needs thrown in the trash and done over completely. Sadly enough unless other changes present themselves it doesn’t look like this profession is going to get the overhaul it needs. Blizzard intends to keep Engineering as a tradeskill focused on creating fun and useful gadgets instead of actually making the profession actually worthwhile. This was perhaps the biggest disappointment for me. Having leveled an engineer myself I held on to hope that one day the profession would actually let me reap some real benefits. It appears I was mistaken, but Blizzard does seem to see that the Engineering profession is severely lacking in sellable merchandise. As such they will be adding some much needed items that will allow engineers to actually turn a profit. Perhaps the real changes engineers seek will appear next expansion.
Inscription
I almost fell out of my chair when I read the notes for Inscription. Minor glyphs….that people are….excited about?! Can it be? Currently minor glyphs are a joke, most players wouldn’t even notice if they didn‘t have them equipped. It will be most excellent if these were actually beneficial instead of offering mediocre.
Inscriptionists will also now be able to craft relics and let me just say that it’s about time. Waiting on relics to drop from an instance can be frustrating, and if the relic does drop your not even guaranteed to win the roll. Even if the crafted relics aren’t the greatest at least players will be able to fill the slot easily until they luck into the relic they really want.