The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
I seem to have a very different idea of how professions are supposed to work than yours. In my ideal scenario you would pick up materials as you quest and by the time you leveled out of an area you wouldn't need the materials from that area anymore.
In this scenario one does not have a second job as a virtual blacksmith/miner. Blacksmithing and mining are just things you do while you're playing that make the game more fun.
Imagine if there were no ore nodes and you had to buy all your ore from a goblin in Ratchet. Now imagine items have encumbrance. Now imagine no mounts, no flight paths. You walk out there to get your ore, hearth back to whichever town has the other materials you need, and limp to the forge hoping for a couple skill points after you make a handful of items. Oh and if you failed not only did you not get a skill point but you probably just lost all your (expensive) materials. Toss in needing rare drop items of some sort and it was utterly ridiculous.
Edit: And if your faction wasn't high enough to buy the items you need? Yea, rep grind from hell that makes WoW's look like a walk in the park.
WoW's version of professions are a joke in comparison.
The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
That's a problem cuz it's stupid and counter-active against the whole leveling system. Choosing a profession shouldn't punish you to stay in a low level zone.
The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
That's a problem cuz it's stupid and counter-active against the whole leveling system. Choosing a profession shouldn't punish you to stay in a low level zone.
Right now leveling professions while leveling your character is pretty smooth. There's hiccups here and there, but mostly it works. It's just it's designed for normal leveling speed and not "max heirlooms and guild perks and rest XP" leveling speed.
Although it'd help alot more if they overhauled the damn things to produce useful shit for you while you level.
It's not punishing you. You can get any profession done and almost all of them are easier to do at max level. It used to be harder than this. I get what your asking for, and it's a great idea, but low on my list of priorities, because I remember how piss poor it was in the beginning.
So if it sucks now, then just wait until max level where a flying 310% mount will make it that much easier. If you want to get xp while you're doing it, well, you still get xp even if the quests are grey, right?
I just don't see why it's such a big deal. Remeber back in the day when you didn't get xp for gathering a node, and you couldn't fly in azeroth, and you could only find one node at a time? That was punishing.
Hah, I forgot about the destroyed material mechanic...
In EQ Planes of Power... I completed the Aid Grimmel quest I have no idea how many times I destroyed thousands of platinum hitting that combine button for the fletching step.
I remember being extremely nervous every time I got a set of mats ready to go...
I will never complain about WoW professions.
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KlatuAussie Aussie AussieOi Oi OiRegistered Userregular
edited May 2011
I started doing profs in EQ.. then realised I didn't hate myself that much, so never ended up getting my awesome earring of solace.
EQ2 when it was released had a horrible crafting system as well and I did my best to level crafting up in that when it came out. Then I came over to WoW. I've never had a problem with WoWs crafting when I compare it back to them.
That being said, tailoring requires insane amounts of cloth to level... INSANE!!
I remember being shocked that "you always make something and don't lose materials" counted as a selling point for WoW. It was like "What kind of fucking masochistic insanity have MMOers been putting up with?".
FFXI laughs at all your MMO's pansy crafting systems.
In soviet Final Fantasy, Professions craft you!
Crafting is the worst fucking thing in FFXI. In my years of coming and going in the game I've never even bothered trying. I can't think of any other MMO that has as asinine and convoluted system as crafting in XI.
I remember being shocked that "you always make something and don't lose materials" counted as a selling point for WoW. It was like "What kind of fucking masochistic insanity have MMOers been putting up with?".
Ok, someones got to explain the Final Fantasy cockpunch-of-a-crafting-system.
Well, no XP with FFXI / XIV, but for EQ ...
Let's take Fletching. You could make bows and arrows, and you needed a "Fletcher's Kit," which was a 4-slot (6-slot?) backpack with a "Craft!" button on it.
In order to make arrows, you would place a [handful of nocks], a [collection of shafts], some [flights], and a [group of arrowheads] in the kit, and press the Craft! button. Then, a skill roll would take place; if you scored high enough, you got 5 arrows. If you scored low, all of your materials were ruined and disappeared. If the recipe was not trivial to you (called "green," I think, based on the color of the text that came up saying, "This recipe is trivial to you and you can learn no further from making it"), there was a chance that you'd get a skill point. The total difficulty to make the arrow was based on the single hardest ingredient - so an arrow with a level 3 nock and level 1 everything else was just as hard to make as one with a level 3 nock and level 2 everything else.
Each item provided various benefits to the finished product. IIRC, nocks provided +Accuracy and +Damage, shafts provided +Range and +Damage, flights provided +Accuracy, and arrowheads provided +Damage. There were some variations, like a particular arrowhead adding a bit of range instead of some damage, but that was the general trend. Better quality (more expensive) pieces gave bigger bonuses. The cheapest arrow did +1 damage, 10 range, for instance, while a more advanced one would have +15 damage, 50 range, +10 accuracy.
What happened was you'd go online and download huge lists of ingredients - the best one was split into two, "Cheapest Arrow Training Path" and "Cheapest Arrow Training Path That's Actually Useable."
The first would tell you to, ferinstance:
Base ingredients to Fletching (15)
Nock 2 to Fletching (20) [everything else was base]
Shaft 2 to Fletching (27)
Flights 2 to Fletching (30)
... etc.
You'd be able to train faster, but your arrows would be functionally useless - only one stat would be better than the baseline 10' range, +0 damage, +0 accuracy. Contra the second list:
Base ingredients to Fletching (15)
Nock 2 to Fletching (20) [everything else was base]
Flights 2, Nock 2 to Fletching (30)
+ Shaft 2 to Fletching (40)
... etc.
These arrows would at least be someone useful - they'd have 30' ranges and do decent damage for their level vs. the first set and could actually hit things.
There was always a period, right when you were transitioning between tiers (e.g., moving to nock 2) where your failure rate would jump up to about 80%, and you'd need to get about 5 skill points before it dropped down to 50/50, but there was only about a 25% chance that a given completion would give you a skill point. So you ended up just pouring gold down the drain in order to not actually make anything because the RNG god frowned at you and you actually didn't get any skill points, either.
It sucked.
It also sucked when, for instance, you reached 20th-level, and could (as a Bard) train Brass instruments. But your Brass skill started at 0, which means that you'd auto-fail anytime you tried to actually play your horn. So you'd find a secluded place in a newbie zone and press your Song of [Whatever] button over and over and over for a couple hours until you got up to about 80ish skill and could somewhat reliably use your Brass skill in battle.
If I remember correctly FF11's economy was screwed by two things: the game sharing servers with Japan so when it was released in America the Americans couldn't do shit-all since prices were set up for people with money already and gold farming tanked the value of gil to the point that basic mats cost hundreds of thousands of gil or something.
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ElldrenIs a woman dammitceterum censeoRegistered Userregular
If I remember correctly FF11's economy was screwed by two things: the game sharing servers with Japan so when it was released in America the Americans couldn't do shit-all since prices were set up for people with money already and gold farming tanked the value of gil to the point that basic mats cost hundreds of thousands of gil or something.
This was great if you were involved in the gathering side, as it meant easy money.
On the other side, if you even managed to figure out what you were doing in the first place, it would cost a small fortune to do anything.
Also the main ingredients/catalysts for all crafting professions, crystals, were a rare drop off of random monsters.
The problem is new players leveling a crafting profession with the appropriate gathering profession level too fast that their gathering doesn't keep up, and they have to stick around grey/completed zones for awhile just to gather.
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
That's a problem cuz it's stupid and counter-active against the whole leveling system. Choosing a profession shouldn't punish you to stay in a low level zone.
Right now leveling professions while leveling your character is pretty smooth. There's hiccups here and there, but mostly it works. It's just it's designed for normal leveling speed and not "max heirlooms and guild perks and rest XP" leveling speed.
Although it'd help alot more if they overhauled the damn things to produce useful shit for you while you level.
I have no heirloom items and I outleveled both first aid and blacksmithing. Mining (and on my shaman, herbalism) are fine when levelling. It's not so much that you outlevel the gathering professions, it's that I collected maybe 1/3-1/2 of the ore I needed when levelling to move on to the next tier of ore.
I've got a bank filled with thorium, fel iron, mageweave, silk, etc. But I need to go back and find about 75ish pieces of mithril and a few dozen wools before I can start using these. And I already know that I don't have enough Thorium to get to fel iron. So I'll have to go back and spend a while doing that stuff. The problem is, for example, mining iron is 125, and mithril is 175. So you only need to find 50 veins. Which is no problem when leveling. But even if each vein gives you 3 ore, that's only 150 ore. Generally for a skill up you're using between 6 and 10 pieces per skill. Which comes out to only about 25 skillups (for the first 10 points you might only have to use one or two pieces, but the last few points it's usually between 10-12). Iron lasts in Blacksmithing from about 150-200. Which means that blacksmithing levels up roughly half as quickly as it's paired gathering skill.
Considering in overhauled Azeroth there are pretty much no blacksmithing recipes that give you anything that's as good as what you'll get from questing, I'd say that at least blacksmithing needs an overhaul.
Compared to inscribing on my shaman, which only required a very minimum amount of extra time looking for herbs, and went by relatively smoothly (until level 55 when I stopped playing him).
Right. The question is, is this something that's actually a problem?
Blacksmithing is kind of a bad example because I actually agree that it needs to be made easier to level (at least 150-300), but in general I don't really buy this idea that a profession is just something that should kind of naturally happen as you level without any extra effort.
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it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Right. The question is, is this something that's actually a problem?
Blacksmithing is kind of a bad example because I actually agree that it needs to be made easier to level (at least 150-300), but in general I don't really buy this idea that a profession is just something that should kind of naturally happen as you level without any extra effort.
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with you. However it's out of whack compared to some of the other professions. And it was originally designed with the idea in mind that you'd spend between 2 and 3 times as long per zone as you do now. But with each expansion the levelling time has been decreased, and considering now there's almost nothing between 1-300 of blacksmithing that's of any use when levelling it seems silly that it takes so long to do.
It's not as though smithing wasn't a pain back then, though. You level faster now, but there are also a lot more nodes (particularly thorium), and you get more out of them.
The main problem as far as I'm concerned is that the first 300 or so levels are basically useless filler. Hey, I made ten sets of level 35 mail legs with extra armor! Who wants them? Answer: fucking nobody, ever. Except possibly enchanters. That's not a criticism exclusively of smithing though.
ed: I also don't think it's a problem that really has a solution; at least, not one I can think of
Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
They could go back and make all orange recipes give multiple skill ups like they've done for the newer stuff. Some of the professions could also stand to have the material costs looked at to make them more consistent although I don't expect them to put that much work into it unless they're doing a complete overhaul.
It's just...not a huge problem. It's super easy level on whatever gear you find while questing. It's generally only the transition from one expansion to the next where it becomes remotely difficult and it might be nice to have some supplemental gear but a few quests in and you're back to plowing through content again. If you really feel the need to fill in some gaps in your gear you can buy it off the AH.
Professions are largely irrelevant to leveling and end game focused as a result.
It also sucked when, for instance, you reached 20th-level, and could (as a Bard) train Brass instruments. But your Brass skill started at 0, which means that you'd auto-fail anytime you tried to actually play your horn. So you'd find a secluded place in a newbie zone and press your Song of [Whatever] button over and over and over for a couple hours until you got up to about 80ish skill and could somewhat reliably use your Brass skill in battle.
I hated skilling up abilities in that game sooooo much. They made you skill up everything(weapons, spells, songs, etc). It really sucked when you got an awesome new spell from the trainer but it was of a school you hadn't used before so your skill at casting spells of that type was 0.
At least WoW didn't make us do that with spells(so glad they finally got rid of weapon skills).
Right. The question is, is this something that's actually a problem?
Blacksmithing is kind of a bad example because I actually agree that it needs to be made easier to level (at least 150-300), but in general I don't really buy this idea that a profession is just something that should kind of naturally happen as you level without any extra effort.
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with you. However it's out of whack compared to some of the other professions. And it was originally designed with the idea in mind that you'd spend between 2 and 3 times as long per zone as you do now. But with each expansion the levelling time has been decreased, and considering now there's almost nothing between 1-300 of blacksmithing that's of any use when levelling it seems silly that it takes so long to do.
Blacksmithing 1-299 was never useful. all those items you see now used to be white, or have basically no stats.
Also the last 20 points were a bitch because you had level 60's running around farming your nodes (if you were a bs/miner, because why wouldn't you be? 100g was alot back then). I had to go around on my level 60 and do the triage quest because I couldn't find enough cloth (back then cloth was used to for the AQ gates, or rep turn ins, or w/e).
The crafting professions were only useful for that weird place of between dungeons and raiding. The mats were insanely expensive--I remember someone in my guild making me the abyssal shard bag as my reward for raiding with the guild for 6 months and I thought: we could have sold the mats for raiding materials--and there were 60s running around without a fast mount (cause the mounts were expensive back then, not the riding).
Everyone has all these fond memories of "back in the day." I know I do, but I was there for them, and professions weren't nearly as useful OR as easy to level as they are now. They also didn't provide any "extra" benefits.
So I was leveling Earthmoother last night and I came to the sad realization.
Cata 1-"60" content actually tops out at 58. Blasted Lands / Silithus is meant to get you from 55-58 and then you dive into Hellfire. It's not meant to get you all the way to 60. Which means my goal of leveling 1-60 without exp boosts was dashed. I was sad, I nearly cried!
But then, with a mighty bellow I said "fuck you Blizzard!" and threw on Heirlooms.
I think I have like 15 quests left in Blasted Lands. I doubt they're going to get me the last 2.5 levels but I'll run some dungeons to hit 60.
Edit: Oh, and as for the professions part. With gathering professions, if you notice on Earthmoother, I'm in the 350s with both Skinning and Herbalism and that's at level 57. You can train up to fucking 450 skill at level 55, which is insane to me. The thing I'll say about this is that around level 20, my Herbalism was sorely lacking in skill. It was way behind skinning. I had to do some catch up once I got my first mount. I wanna say I was at like..70 skill and I should have been around 110. But since then, I've actually been ahead of the various zones. I attribute this to the lack of other players in the zones, meaning all the nodes are for me! But remember, I also leveled from 1-56 without heirlooms. Had I been out pacing the zones, I probably would still be behind on Herbalism and probably about even on Skinning.
Winterspring and Burning Steppes are now level 50-55 zones. So the quests would be green/grey to me. Un'Goro fits into the same category.
And I utterly refuse to step into Silithus without a flying mount. That zone hasn't changed since AQ was released and it's pitifully behind the times.
What's retarded is that Swamp of Sorrows is like...52-55. I know it's a small zone but it has it's own like, leveling bracket. I don't think there's another zone that fits in there.
the upside is that silithus is now great farming for thorium etc since no one's there
Sadly it's been that way since they changed it. It might have been that way back when the zone was rather bland but I don't know as I was going there to farm spiders for the slik for tailoring
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And yeah, professions making BoP best in slot craftables is dumb
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to level a profession you have to put some effort into it. It doesn't just happen by osmosis.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I seem to have a very different idea of how professions are supposed to work than yours. In my ideal scenario you would pick up materials as you quest and by the time you leveled out of an area you wouldn't need the materials from that area anymore.
In this scenario one does not have a second job as a virtual blacksmith/miner. Blacksmithing and mining are just things you do while you're playing that make the game more fun.
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Imagine if there were no ore nodes and you had to buy all your ore from a goblin in Ratchet. Now imagine items have encumbrance. Now imagine no mounts, no flight paths. You walk out there to get your ore, hearth back to whichever town has the other materials you need, and limp to the forge hoping for a couple skill points after you make a handful of items. Oh and if you failed not only did you not get a skill point but you probably just lost all your (expensive) materials. Toss in needing rare drop items of some sort and it was utterly ridiculous.
Edit: And if your faction wasn't high enough to buy the items you need? Yea, rep grind from hell that makes WoW's look like a walk in the park.
WoW's version of professions are a joke in comparison.
That's a problem cuz it's stupid and counter-active against the whole leveling system. Choosing a profession shouldn't punish you to stay in a low level zone.
From your description it sounds to me like EQ's blacksmithing was a joke. But the sort of joke that only a very sadistic troll would play on someone.
0431-6094-6446-7088
Right now leveling professions while leveling your character is pretty smooth. There's hiccups here and there, but mostly it works. It's just it's designed for normal leveling speed and not "max heirlooms and guild perks and rest XP" leveling speed.
Although it'd help alot more if they overhauled the damn things to produce useful shit for you while you level.
It was horrible. The other crafting professions weren't any better either.
But that's why WoW's don't bother me at all.
So if it sucks now, then just wait until max level where a flying 310% mount will make it that much easier. If you want to get xp while you're doing it, well, you still get xp even if the quests are grey, right?
I just don't see why it's such a big deal. Remeber back in the day when you didn't get xp for gathering a node, and you couldn't fly in azeroth, and you could only find one node at a time? That was punishing.
If it fails, your item is destroyed!
In EQ Planes of Power... I completed the Aid Grimmel quest
I remember being extremely nervous every time I got a set of mats ready to go...
I will never complain about WoW professions.
EQ2 when it was released had a horrible crafting system as well and I did my best to level crafting up in that when it came out. Then I came over to WoW. I've never had a problem with WoWs crafting when I compare it back to them.
That being said, tailoring requires insane amounts of cloth to level... INSANE!!
In soviet Final Fantasy, Professions craft you!
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Yeah....FFXIV does this now.
Well, no XP with FFXI / XIV, but for EQ ...
Let's take Fletching. You could make bows and arrows, and you needed a "Fletcher's Kit," which was a 4-slot (6-slot?) backpack with a "Craft!" button on it.
In order to make arrows, you would place a [handful of nocks], a [collection of shafts], some [flights], and a [group of arrowheads] in the kit, and press the Craft! button. Then, a skill roll would take place; if you scored high enough, you got 5 arrows. If you scored low, all of your materials were ruined and disappeared. If the recipe was not trivial to you (called "green," I think, based on the color of the text that came up saying, "This recipe is trivial to you and you can learn no further from making it"), there was a chance that you'd get a skill point. The total difficulty to make the arrow was based on the single hardest ingredient - so an arrow with a level 3 nock and level 1 everything else was just as hard to make as one with a level 3 nock and level 2 everything else.
Each item provided various benefits to the finished product. IIRC, nocks provided +Accuracy and +Damage, shafts provided +Range and +Damage, flights provided +Accuracy, and arrowheads provided +Damage. There were some variations, like a particular arrowhead adding a bit of range instead of some damage, but that was the general trend. Better quality (more expensive) pieces gave bigger bonuses. The cheapest arrow did +1 damage, 10 range, for instance, while a more advanced one would have +15 damage, 50 range, +10 accuracy.
What happened was you'd go online and download huge lists of ingredients - the best one was split into two, "Cheapest Arrow Training Path" and "Cheapest Arrow Training Path That's Actually Useable."
The first would tell you to, ferinstance:
Base ingredients to Fletching (15)
Nock 2 to Fletching (20) [everything else was base]
Shaft 2 to Fletching (27)
Flights 2 to Fletching (30)
... etc.
You'd be able to train faster, but your arrows would be functionally useless - only one stat would be better than the baseline 10' range, +0 damage, +0 accuracy. Contra the second list:
Base ingredients to Fletching (15)
Nock 2 to Fletching (20) [everything else was base]
Flights 2, Nock 2 to Fletching (30)
+ Shaft 2 to Fletching (40)
... etc.
These arrows would at least be someone useful - they'd have 30' ranges and do decent damage for their level vs. the first set and could actually hit things.
There was always a period, right when you were transitioning between tiers (e.g., moving to nock 2) where your failure rate would jump up to about 80%, and you'd need to get about 5 skill points before it dropped down to 50/50, but there was only about a 25% chance that a given completion would give you a skill point. So you ended up just pouring gold down the drain in order to not actually make anything because the RNG god frowned at you and you actually didn't get any skill points, either.
It sucked.
It also sucked when, for instance, you reached 20th-level, and could (as a Bard) train Brass instruments. But your Brass skill started at 0, which means that you'd auto-fail anytime you tried to actually play your horn. So you'd find a secluded place in a newbie zone and press your Song of [Whatever] button over and over and over for a couple hours until you got up to about 80ish skill and could somewhat reliably use your Brass skill in battle.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
The fun part is that FFXI's system is worse.
The FF crafting systems are just arcane
This was great if you were involved in the gathering side, as it meant easy money.
On the other side, if you even managed to figure out what you were doing in the first place, it would cost a small fortune to do anything.
Also the main ingredients/catalysts for all crafting professions, crystals, were a rare drop off of random monsters.
I have no heirloom items and I outleveled both first aid and blacksmithing. Mining (and on my shaman, herbalism) are fine when levelling. It's not so much that you outlevel the gathering professions, it's that I collected maybe 1/3-1/2 of the ore I needed when levelling to move on to the next tier of ore.
I've got a bank filled with thorium, fel iron, mageweave, silk, etc. But I need to go back and find about 75ish pieces of mithril and a few dozen wools before I can start using these. And I already know that I don't have enough Thorium to get to fel iron. So I'll have to go back and spend a while doing that stuff. The problem is, for example, mining iron is 125, and mithril is 175. So you only need to find 50 veins. Which is no problem when leveling. But even if each vein gives you 3 ore, that's only 150 ore. Generally for a skill up you're using between 6 and 10 pieces per skill. Which comes out to only about 25 skillups (for the first 10 points you might only have to use one or two pieces, but the last few points it's usually between 10-12). Iron lasts in Blacksmithing from about 150-200. Which means that blacksmithing levels up roughly half as quickly as it's paired gathering skill.
Considering in overhauled Azeroth there are pretty much no blacksmithing recipes that give you anything that's as good as what you'll get from questing, I'd say that at least blacksmithing needs an overhaul.
Compared to inscribing on my shaman, which only required a very minimum amount of extra time looking for herbs, and went by relatively smoothly (until level 55 when I stopped playing him).
Blacksmithing is kind of a bad example because I actually agree that it needs to be made easier to level (at least 150-300), but in general I don't really buy this idea that a profession is just something that should kind of naturally happen as you level without any extra effort.
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Yeah, I don't necessarily disagree with you. However it's out of whack compared to some of the other professions. And it was originally designed with the idea in mind that you'd spend between 2 and 3 times as long per zone as you do now. But with each expansion the levelling time has been decreased, and considering now there's almost nothing between 1-300 of blacksmithing that's of any use when levelling it seems silly that it takes so long to do.
The main problem as far as I'm concerned is that the first 300 or so levels are basically useless filler. Hey, I made ten sets of level 35 mail legs with extra armor! Who wants them? Answer: fucking nobody, ever. Except possibly enchanters. That's not a criticism exclusively of smithing though.
ed: I also don't think it's a problem that really has a solution; at least, not one I can think of
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
It's just...not a huge problem. It's super easy level on whatever gear you find while questing. It's generally only the transition from one expansion to the next where it becomes remotely difficult and it might be nice to have some supplemental gear but a few quests in and you're back to plowing through content again. If you really feel the need to fill in some gaps in your gear you can buy it off the AH.
Professions are largely irrelevant to leveling and end game focused as a result.
I hated skilling up abilities in that game sooooo much. They made you skill up everything(weapons, spells, songs, etc). It really sucked when you got an awesome new spell from the trainer but it was of a school you hadn't used before so your skill at casting spells of that type was 0.
At least WoW didn't make us do that with spells(so glad they finally got rid of weapon skills).
Blacksmithing 1-299 was never useful. all those items you see now used to be white, or have basically no stats.
Also the last 20 points were a bitch because you had level 60's running around farming your nodes (if you were a bs/miner, because why wouldn't you be? 100g was alot back then). I had to go around on my level 60 and do the triage quest because I couldn't find enough cloth (back then cloth was used to for the AQ gates, or rep turn ins, or w/e).
The crafting professions were only useful for that weird place of between dungeons and raiding. The mats were insanely expensive--I remember someone in my guild making me the abyssal shard bag as my reward for raiding with the guild for 6 months and I thought: we could have sold the mats for raiding materials--and there were 60s running around without a fast mount (cause the mounts were expensive back then, not the riding).
Everyone has all these fond memories of "back in the day." I know I do, but I was there for them, and professions weren't nearly as useful OR as easy to level as they are now. They also didn't provide any "extra" benefits.
Cata 1-"60" content actually tops out at 58. Blasted Lands / Silithus is meant to get you from 55-58 and then you dive into Hellfire. It's not meant to get you all the way to 60. Which means my goal of leveling 1-60 without exp boosts was dashed. I was sad, I nearly cried!
But then, with a mighty bellow I said "fuck you Blizzard!" and threw on Heirlooms.
I think I have like 15 quests left in Blasted Lands. I doubt they're going to get me the last 2.5 levels but I'll run some dungeons to hit 60.
Edit: Oh, and as for the professions part. With gathering professions, if you notice on Earthmoother, I'm in the 350s with both Skinning and Herbalism and that's at level 57. You can train up to fucking 450 skill at level 55, which is insane to me. The thing I'll say about this is that around level 20, my Herbalism was sorely lacking in skill. It was way behind skinning. I had to do some catch up once I got my first mount. I wanna say I was at like..70 skill and I should have been around 110. But since then, I've actually been ahead of the various zones. I attribute this to the lack of other players in the zones, meaning all the nodes are for me! But remember, I also leveled from 1-56 without heirlooms. Had I been out pacing the zones, I probably would still be behind on Herbalism and probably about even on Skinning.
And I utterly refuse to step into Silithus without a flying mount. That zone hasn't changed since AQ was released and it's pitifully behind the times.
What's retarded is that Swamp of Sorrows is like...52-55. I know it's a small zone but it has it's own like, leveling bracket. I don't think there's another zone that fits in there.
Edit: Yeah take a look.
Warchief's Command sorted by level.
Hero's Call sorted the same way.
very much not here
instead of dropping you off at the portal it sends you to the quest hub for your faction
GO LEVEL THERE INSTEAD
the upside is that silithus is now great farming for thorium etc since no one's there