Need to rant about JC dailiesFollow

Disclaimer #1: This is me complaining. Not necessarily coherent or correct.
Disclaimer #2: I understand why the system was set-up this way, and I do appreciate those reasons.
Disclaimer #2: I know other professions are claiming they have it worse. I can't say that really changes my argument.



Many of you probably know that cooking has daily quests that build up tokens to purchase recipes. Jewelcrafting is under the same system. It's almost identical to the cooking, except people actually care about the jewelcrafting recipes. Tiffany Cartier is the badge vendor, and her wares fall into four categories:

1) General gem cuts (nearly all blue-quality recipes and many metas) - 3 apiece
2) Self-only cuts that are slightly better than blue-quality gems - 2 apiece
3) Jewelry items like rings and necklaces that are fairly awesome - 6 apiece
4) MATERIALS TO MAKE ANYTHING OUT OF CATEGORIES 2 AND 3 - 1 apiece, and the jewelry usually takes 4 of them

If you look at Tiffany's list, and the fact that you can only really get 1 badge-token-thingy each day, you can probably guess why I'm complaining. If I counted correctly, it takes no fewer than 110 badges to complete category 1 alone. And if I'm being serviceable to my guild, I'm going to probably be picking up a good two-thirds of those recipes. Sure, I can do without some worthless combinations, but generally I want to complete what portion of my spellbook I reasonably can. This will take somewhere upwards of 75 days.

I can work on the other categories first, at the expense of the first one, but they're fairly healthy investments apiece. If I want to make a single Titanium Impact Choker, I'm going to need to spend 10 days not working on my gem cuts to do it, and then another 4 days if anyone else wants one. I'm sure the cost on those things will be ridiculous, considering that, but I'm not in JC to make money. I'm in it to be useful.

So let's say I get two of those epic recipes to make two of each. That's 28 days down the pipe. Another month.

And the real perk of the profession -- what I'm supposed to call my own little place to hang my hat that makes it worth being the JC'er myself -- is the self-only gems, which are a minor improvement over normal gems, and for that I need to cost myself another day per gem (and two for the recipe.)


So we're talking probably over 4 months to get reasonably situated...IF I LOG IN EVERY DAY TO DO THE DAILY. I don't play WoW every last day of my life. There are some days I'm too busy with work or life or whatever. There are some days I don't want to log in just to do a daily chore. If I wanted to take extra daily chores upon myself, I'd empty the dishwasher and take care of my laundry on a more routine basis. I personally hate daily quests. I understand why they exist, but I don't want to do them...and I definitely don't want to be obligated to do them.

I've heard alchemists complain that they have a weekly timer on their learning...well, ok, but you've got less to learn, and you only have to log in to push a button once each week. That's easy enough to do on an alt. I have to actually run a minor quest...fairly basic, but I have to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY. And if I don't, I fall even farther behind in usefulness.


This system is slated toward people who play regularly, and yet slated against people who play in a hardcore fashion. I'm not sure who a system like this favors except people who log in for 15 minutes each day. Frankly, if that's the kind of time I have, I just don't log in.

Oh yeah, except that I have to at least do my daily for my GD token.

Because Jewelcrafters are going to be breakfasting with her every day if they ever want to make their gems?

Because of this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiffany_%26_Co.

Because Druids can be bears.

The first and last names are cracking me up.

What a noob.

Check the auction house, some people actually sell their dragon's eyes, crazy as it may seem. Of course, we're talking upwards of 300 gold each and probably closer to 600. At the moment i've managed to get the recipe for a Titanium impact choker (6 days of dailies), the Bold Dragon's eye design (2 days) and a single dragon's eye. I got my "A simple request" achievement doing this, which probably tells you exactly what i think of regular dailies.

It's certainly a good time to plan out your gear accordingly. I have an epic belt from a heroic, which has a blue slot for example. Blue slots are terribad for melee dps, but i *could* stick a dragon's eye in there. Or i could save myself an extra Dalaran JC token and wait til i get an upgrade from raiding. Stupid, stupid system imo. The fact all the good stuff requires at least 4 days worth of mats only available to JC themselves hacks down any little profit margin the profession had.

I counted it all. If I want to get all the recipes plus just two (2) of the self-only recipes and then get the mats for the neck, ring and 3 dragonseyes (which is the max you can equip), it will take me 192 days (or over 6 months) of doing one of the same five quests every single day without skipping any, at all. That is absolutely messed up. So messed up that I posted on the O-Boards about it. It is one of the biggest time sinks ever and it is ridiculously tedious.
By the time I get all those, epic recipes will be out (or the next expansion), making this sh*t obsolete.

I can understand the "I chose my upgrade route" thing and that it's more controlled than just doing a stupid discovery (alchemy and inscription) and just getting whatever. So generally, the system of buying recipes with tokens isn't too bad. I would welcome it as an alternative, so you can get the recipes that just never dropped.

The stupid thing is, however much time/gold you invest, you can only get one token a day and tokens are the ONLY source for the majority of recipes. There is no way of farming them at all.

On the other hand, some recipes are mob drops with 100% dropchance for JC. There are no BoE recipes, so no buying for stupid prices on the AH. How does that fit in?

There is one other source of JC Tokens, which is a quest that starts with a random world drop. Aka not farmable. The item is BoE if you don't start the quest. On my server there were two on the AH (1/3 of a meta recipe) for 750-1000g. So for one recipe I pay 2000-6000g, if I want to speed it up. Nice!

But even with 3 JC in the guild and perfect coordination, it will take you 2 months to get all the cuts. And much longer if the JC have to farm up the Dragonseyes to get other people their necks/rings. It's a slap in the face to make those items BoE (oh, sell them for gold), and then require items that the JC takes 4 days to obtain and the buyer can't even provide himself. WTF?
"Oh, you want that ring crafted? I need to get some mats. Come back in 4 days." Yeah right...


Poldaran, you can only make that gold if you do not skill up at all and don't get any gems for yourself either because you sell every single token as a Dragonseye. You can do that with enchanting too. Just disenchant everything and sell the mats without getting any enchants for yourself or skilling up at all. You can easily get 300g a day like that.
And what did you skill up for? You can't get any more recipes in the next few days anyway :D

Edited, Dec 3rd 2008 10:06am by Turicus

While I feel your pain, it will be probably two years until the next xpac comes out, so it's not like you have plenty of time to run these dailies and collect all this stuff.

I wonder why everything feels so rushed when an xpac comes out, why we have to feel we have to get it all done now? I suffer the same problem--I see all these reps I have to grind dailies for and start to feel overwhelmed, then I realize I've got about 23 months in which to do it.

1. At least you don't have to wait 7 days to learn a recipe, which will probably be grey when you do learn it anyways.

2. At least you can buy patterns at almost every rep vendor. Alchemy has, wait for it, wait...wait....NONE.


But I'm not bitter.

Azuarc, I agree with you and I've had the same complaint about the cooking recipes. I don't think it's a well-designed system.



I'm not really sure who this system favors or is geared towards. It becomes a stupid chore, more than anything. You have to remember to do the daily every day or you get set back. I don't think it favors really casual people at all (the "15 minutes each day" person). I seriously doubt someone with limited time wants to spend a chunk of every time they log in doing a daily jus to get the token. I'm sure they'd much rather be out questing, instancing, whatever. You said it yourself:



The obligation part is the real kicker when it comes down to it.

Personally, I'd much rather have it the old way, where recipes were spread out among factions and you had to get the required rep to purchase the recipe. It seemed like a favorable system for either hardcore, or casual.

Yes, JC is crazy-profitable. With a decent fund to invest in it you can churn out pretty much however much money you want with it.

I too have my gripes with the token system. On the other hand, there are lots of BoP blue cuts that you can get from instances to start building up a profession. One thing that I've noticed is that I've reverted back to my JC roots. I can no longer cut every single important cut for huge profits from raw gems that I prospect or get for cheap. Way back when I started JCing, my primary role in the market was prospecting cheap ore and providing raw gems. Since every JCer is bound to have a different collection of cuts, I find myself becoming a major supplier of raw gems again. On the other hand, my shear Saronite buying power is starting to push out the smaller suppliers that had been keeping the market alive.

In general, I've noticed the token system has flooded the market with raw gems (which somehow STILL maintain a value of 75g for some despite being available in abundence) while driving the price of cut gems through the roof. Solid Sky Sapphires and Bold Scarlet Rubies have held a steady price of around 100g on my server without flinching. If it's a Monarch Topaz cut, some people are buying them at 150g. Sure, it's not the 800g of nearly pure profit I'd make off of selling a Solid Empyrean Sapphire before Tier III gems became the norm, but with the demand for gems so high right now pure sale volume almost brings it to the same.

I'm always ALWAYS scanning the AH for Damaged Necklaces.

Can I just say "I hate dailies" and add it to your rant?

Nadeshock (jewelcrafter on strike)

I believe an improvement on the system would be to have the daily reward 1/2/3 tokens on a 67%/22%/11% probability.

That way you could still have a decent grind and a necessity for prioritizing, while having a chance at speeding it up a little. With random numbers, the system would still be generally fair.

It remains to see if Blizzard has any intention of changing this or if they consider it's "working as intended".

Why? I took my mage to 80 who's a herbalist, saved most of the herbs I gathered, sent them to my 70 druid alchemist. Leveling to 425 was very easy, then it became sort of rough, I spammed green potions for 5 levels (took about 35 pots to hit 430), then made 5 diamonds. Once I got to the flask stage it was cake since I picked up like 25 frost lotus from 70-80, they were seling terribly, so I just decided to keep them.

So 450 in like a day, and I have almost everything people want. Yeah theres some discovered recipes, but like Azurac said, I can just logon once a week and do those.

My problem with alchemy is price of vials and AH listing fee, but other then that it's a nice profession for an alt.