Alchemy and Jewelcrafting Herb Requirements Adjusted

by Hotstreak - 9 years ago     show comments

This was covered in the most recent hotfix blog, but we felt that this change deserved some special attention: Blizzard is making some adjustments to both Alchemy and Jewelcrafting to alter the amount of herbs needed for many recipes. These adjustments will increase the herb requirements for Alchemists and consequently decrease them for Jewelcrafters. Which, in short, will bring back more synergy between Alchemy and Herbalism, as well as reducing the amount of non-herb materials needed, like fish and meat. Makes sense right?

This is an interesting step back, given how much interplay between the professions was introduced with the garrisons in Warlords of Draenor: namely, with everyone having access to a mine and an herb garden by 100, it made sense to spread the usefulness of herbs and ore around to other professions, outside of those that typically employed them. Hence Alchemy requiring ore for the daily cooldown and various gems needing herbs in order to get cut.

However, it seems that Blizzard bet too hard on this concept, since they’re pulling back on how much herb is required for crafting gems and compounding the herbs needed to craft flasks, which dramatically strengthens Alchemy’s dependence on the Herb Garden and Herbalists, while also reducing the impact of secondary professions like Fishing and the meat production from the Barn garrison building.

On the one hand, this is aggravating for people who found that fishing up specific fish or harvesting certain meats was promising to be a lucrative business throughout the expansion. Blizzard offered the defense that Alchemy has historically had “greater synergy with Herbalism than Fishing” which is a true statement within the context of the game, but strictly speaking, the real-world theories of alchemy have always been about taking a physical thing and turning it into something else. So while emphasizing herbs for Alchemy makes sense for WoW as a game, it certainly doesn’t deepen the gameplay of the profession itself aside from simply increasing the materials required from what they were previously.

Meanwhile, it does strain credulity a bit that Jewelcrafting would need anything other than ore in order to produce its products, so seeing the herb requirements reduced there consequently makes a lot of sense. But if part of Blizzard’s intent with giving all players access to what are essentially free supplies of herb and ore was that all professions would have at least a degree of use for those raw materials, I’m not sure that’s really being actualized with Jewelcrafting after this change.

What this change certainly heralds is that how Blizzard intended to warp professions around the garrison system has resulted in some kinks, and we’ll likely see more of those shake out as the expansion progresses. One thing is for certain; when we get around to another BlizzCon and another expansion announcement, we’ll likely get an entertaining postmortem on what worked for professions in Warlords and what didn’t. Until then, of course, we can only comment on the changes we see coming down from the developers.

You can check out the official post down below.

We’re giving a heads up on adjustments being made based on player feedback over the amount of herbs used in recipes by Alchemy and Jewelcrafting. The adjustment will increase the amount of herbs an Alchemist needs and decrease the herb costs for Jewelcrafters.

Overview of Changes:

Alchemy

• Combat potion recipes no longer requires Crescent Oil and meat/fish, and will require herbs instead.
• Flask recipes will use more herbs, increasing the number of herbs needed from one type of herb to two.

Jewelcrafting

• Tier 1 gem recipes will require more ore and less herbs.
• Tier 2 gem recipes will no longer require herbs and instead require a tier 1 gem.

In summary, these changes are not active yet. But once the change is active, Alchemists will need more herbs, and Jewelcrafting will need less.

Historically, Alchemy has greater synergy with Herbalism than Fishing and we wanted to restore that with this change. Crescent Oil still has a use for Alchemists and it will still be used for some Draenor Alchemy recipes. We’re removing Crescent Oil as a reagent from primary stat buff potions and mana potions, but keeping it for other potions.