For a lot of people who already play the economy, and hang out and deal with the auction house as almost like a full time gameplay style, we want that level of depth and more for Professions, so our hope is that we'll see folks who are spending a lot of time hanging out in the Crafting areas applying their trade and picking up Work Orders, making gold and skilling up on the side as they do that.
Glorious Abundant Timesinks
Of all the changes made in Midnight, none is as contentious as the time required to crafting high-end profession equipment, which requires materials earned exclusively through Abundance. Added as one of several new world events in Midnight, it's not unusual for crafting recipies and materials to be earned from these types of activities, but the rate at which they can be acquired creates an inordinate time sink that players struggle to get ahead of.
Each profession has three equipment slots and each piece of epic quality equipment requires 20 Fused Vitality to make.
Each Fused Vitality costs 800 Unalloyed Abundance, earned by completing Abundance events.
Abundance events award up to 900 currency 8 times per week, limited by Shard of Dundun.
So to earn the 16,000 Unalloyed Abundance required to create one piece of epic quality crafting equipment, players will need at least 18 runs over 3 separate weeks. Crafting three pieces requires 54 runs over 7 weeks, and doing that for both professions takes 107 runs over 14 weeks. As of Patch 12.0.5, this can be sped up by purchasing 3 Fused Vitality from Abyssal Anglers and obtaining another 2 from weekly profession quests, but still requires an awful lot of Abundance.
Let's hope you don't also want an epic fishing rod, cooking hat, or rolling pin at the same time!
Most importantly, profession equipment is BoP and made through the work order system, so each crafter must individually grind and provide their own materials, rather than crowd sourcing them from the auction house. Those unable or unwilling to keep up with that grind fall behind, while those who can dedicate the time circumvent the limitation entirely by taking more and more characters through each week, amassing a level of combined crafting power that is wholly out of reach of individual characters.
Concentrated Crafting
So what do players get out of end-end crafting? Certainly, it can be fun and thematic to make quality items for yourself or others, but profit margins and personal investment have been incredibly devalued by an economy dominated by concentration armies, similar to how certain auction house flippers seek to corner and control the market.
Shout out to The Lazy Goldmaker for helping players minimize effort and maximize reward.
By the time individual crafters have caught up, it's almost not worth crafting anything themselves, as they'd be hard pressed to compete with these well established conglomerates. The idea of individual craftmanship doesn't really exist in Midnight either - patterns like the Elemental Lariat of Dragonflight were interesting because they were disproportionately rare and useful, to the point that the player who had one was highly sought after and had the opportunity to make big business from it. Instead, we're caught in a race to see who can flip gems and enchants the most efficiently on the highest number of characters.
Crafting for profit is its own form of PvP, as players compete against each other to maximize profit.
Lack of Seasonal Updates
Despite the quality of life improvements, streamlining, and simplifying that has happened over the last couple expansions, the professions themselves have lacked meaningful progression between seasons. No new gear or avenue to increase crafting stats means players embark on these grinds early and then stagnate the rest of the expansion, while a handful of new recipes are added with each patch... though not all of them are always particularly useful. It's pretty common that the best crafts and embellishments in Season 1 remain the best crafts and embellishments all the way through Season 3, so there isn't a whole lot for crafters to look forward to.
Truly optional reagents hardly exist anymore, certainly nothing like Pure-Air Sail Extensions, Crafter's Marks, or Relics of the Past.
Dragonflight was less guilty of this, due to the initial revamp creating its own hype and the addition of reagents like Dracothyst. The War Within brought further updates, exchanging Inspiration for Concentration/Ingenuity, but the major patches were somehow even more bare and unexciting. Players hoped there would be a new grand plan for Midnight, but aside from removing the randomness of alchemy discoveries, much of the expansion's update has been renaming items and reorganizing profession trees to do almost exactly what they did before.
Of course, this also means that players are doing the exact same thing they did before. Progression is a hallmark of World of Warcraft gameplay - doing activities to become more powerful in order to do new and more challenging activities, to become more powerful - but that progression rarely exists for crafters, resulting in a system that rewards early investment, provides only partial catch up, and doesn't meaningfully evolve over the course of an expansion.
Instead, the progression curve for crafters exists in how many characters they can level, equip, and add to their ever growing daily concentration farm... a community of digital sweatshops, competing to squeeze out increasingly smaller profit margins.
