Crafter's Marks and Missive Might Save Professions

 Professions, in WoW, were actually one of the first things that drew me to the game - the idea that I could craft my own gear was pretty cool. Of course, that was 14 years ago, and while I'll never let go of Engineering on my main (the best profession, obviously) in general, it's a game system that has struggled.

On one hand, they want it to be worthwhile, but on the other, they don't want to make the game a case of "who has enough gold to buy this on the Auction House" - especially given that they are, effectively, selling gold at this point.

Now, I'll confess that I'm not sure that the new systems fix this. But I do think that the actual appeal of crafted gear could be way better in Shadowlands, depending on how much they use Crafter's Marks in future patches.

Most professions (at least Engineering and Inscription, so I'd guess all the production ones) can make various ranks of Crafter's Marks with their own typical professional materials. When used as one of the optional ingredients in a recipe, this will change the item level (and required level).

Scribes can also create Missives, which can be applied to a piece of gear one is crafted as another optional ingredient to guarantee that a particular secondary stat will show up on it.

And as such, Blizzard doesn't actually need to add any new crafted recipes beyond new Crafter's Marks for the rest of the expansion.

Basically, item level and secondary stats are what defines a piece of gear these days (well, and armor type/slot). Item level tells you the amount of primary stats on it and its armor, and how much of its secondary stats you get. So if I can make, for example, some plate engineering goggles with Haste and Mastery, I'd be happy to keep making those at higher item levels because that'd give me all I want out of a helmet.

Rather than having to make tons of new items for every profession with each patch, they can just add a new Crafter's Mark recipe - one that will probably get harder to attain (maybe requiring some raiding) and perhaps some more difficult to acquire materials (perhaps that drop in said raid) to keep the gear locked behind the content. But it will make it much easier to make sure every profession's stuff gets updated.

I also like that it gives Inscription a key niche in the professional landscape - something they've lacked since Glyphs stopped being a major player-power mechanic.

Now, as of right now, the highest Crafter's Mark A: requires that you be at Cordial reputation with Ve'nari and B: only raises an item level to 161, which is only going to be useful if you don't have heroic dungeon gear.

I hope that we'll see this system expanded, as I think it's pretty elegant.