Dragonflight is Making Me Want to Level Alts for their Professions

 We're now only a few days into Dragonflight, but I'm noticing something remarkable: the thing I'm most excited about in the expansion right now is professions.

When my Junior year roommate in college first introduced me to WoW in 2006, he was playing his Orc Warlock, running around Durotar. He showed me that the linen cloth he was collecting off of enemies could be turned into bolts of linen, and then those could be turned into cloth armor he could wear. It kind of blew my mind - believe it or not, but there was a time when crafting systems were not ubiquitous in video games. It's honestly part of why I picked the game up.

Now, over time, professions got pretty boring - not really because they lost anything, but because they didn't really keep up.

One perennial problem with them is that part of their appeal is that they can be used to craft powerful and useful gear, but old design philosophies have tended to want to limit that, because it creates a scenario where having a bunch of gold equals player power, and people could get amazing gear without ever facing challenging content.

Soulbound items make that a little better - if you need a special component out of a raid in order to make raid-worthy loot and you can't just sell that loot to someone who hasn't done the raid, then you don't have that issue. But this then creates other limits - do I need to be a Blacksmith if I'm a plate-wearing class?

The crafting order system in Dragonflight fixes that to a large extent - you can put in an order with another player using your own components (including, importantly, the Titan Training Matrix items that set item levels and are soulbound) but their profession skill. For example, I ran Heroic Legacy of Tyr on my Paladin the other day and was sad that I didn't get any loot - just a Titan Training Matrix. Then I realized: I had gotten a piece of loot. I went to the crafting orders NPCs, put in an order to make some boots, and came away with a pair of 363 boots with my best stats (thanks to a missive,) which is actually higher item level than the stuff out of heroic dungeons anyway.

The thing is, we've had a lot of systems in previous expansions to get fancy loot: Benthic Gear in Nazjatar, Sandworn Relics in Zereth Mortis, those crystals in Argus. It seems like in Dragonflight, Blizzard has said "hold on, we have a complicated system for acquiring gear already!" and just took professions and made them that new system.