Community Blog Topic: Should professions be account-wide?

This week’s Community Blog Topic is very near and dear to my heart. I love professions. It’s a little of the chicken or the egg theory as to: Did I create the alt to level the profession or am I leveling the profession because of the alt? Both!

The Engineering ‘section’ in the Shrine of Two Moons, Pandaria.

However, Mr. Ghost crab (Greg Street) seems to think it’s bad policy to level a character solely based on opening up the profession. Since it’s a tweet, I can be sure if he meant the player should not have to do that to get to the profession. I don’t seem to mind, because I am an altoholic. I do see the merits in having all professions available and I have mentioned similar things before in comments on various articles.  Even to the point of suggesting it to Blizzard using the in-game feature.

How it could be handled? I see a couple of different ways. 1. As a guild perk. There would be a an NPC to interact with, you open up a window, select the profession, put your mats in. The recipe would have to be unlocked by someone who has that profession in the guild.

2. As GH mentioned in his tweet, they could be account bound. Either using the NPC method, like with example 1. or you would simply be able to cycle through professions from a drop down menu on your profession UI.

There are a few things to sort out though. Does that mean anyone who has unlocked the profession can add a new recipe/pattern/design/schematic? That would be kind of cool. Does that mean there would be no more profession bonuses? Or would they just stick with the original character who had the initial profession? I also like the idea of at least maxing out the profession on 1 character first.

Why is this needed? It’s convenience really. Not having to log in an out repeatedly. If you have people on your friends list/battletag/Real ID or in your guild who are alt intensive, you know how much of a pain this can be (unless you have the announcement feature disabled- but that’s no fun!).

It could also mean that you no longer have to level every profession on every server you choose to play on. This would be a huge boon for those of us who have alliance and horde characters on the same server. This is probably the most exciting prospect. I’m not sure how big of an impact this would have on the servers economies, but I am guessing it would slow some stuff down on the AH a bit.

I am more or less happy with the way things are right now, with one major caveat: Having to get exalted with each faction to open up crafting patterns on every toon is a major pain. If they made reputation account bound, that would take care of that issue. We will see what they do with the next expansion. It’s nice to know they are thinking outside the box a little when it comes to professions.