Allowing more professions??Follow

There are no plans to ever change this; you'll have 2 main professions and 3 secondary professions on a single character, and that's all.

You can swap professions as much as you like, but each time you lose everything you had learned in the profession you remove and you have to learn the new profession from the start.

If you swap back to a previously unlearned profession you may find some issues with quest reward plans, for example if you were an Engineer, dropped it and re-learn it you will find that you can't learn the mote collector again as it's a one-time quest award.

I think it more has to do with how OP some toons could become with the buffs provided by those professions. JC that could put their gems into a BS extra slot with inscription shoulder enchants and chanters ring enchants? You also have very nice lw wrist items, tailoring only buffs, and all that. It would make it so that there would be three professions or more you had to have if you tanked, healed or dps'ed endgame content.

No, it will never happen.

As mundaneboy said, it would be too great a boost to gearing up at lvl 80 if you had 3 professions.

Professions are fine the way they are now. Working as intended.

Are you sure that your name isn't dimwit? You'll want to learn every specialization, too, I suppose!
(mutter, mutter) not just a fool, but a damned fool!

I've often wished I could have more than two professions on a toon, but I realize it will probably never happen. Instead, I level several toons and keep their professions complementary. I think the root of the limit on professions is a leveling mechanism. There's also a role playing aspect dating back to games like D&D, but I don't think that's as big of a reason for keeping the limitation in the game.

Having the ability to learn all professions would greatly benefit two types of players: hardcores and goldsellers. I'm not lumping the two together, just saying they'd be the most likely to benefit.

Hardcore players would max all professions for obvious reasons. This would have the effect of widening the gap between the haves and the have nots. More casual players would have a much harder time keeping up with the time and gold requirements of multiple professions.

The benefit to goldsellers is more limited than in the past, given the changes to the game that make gold so easy to acquire. But, as far as I know, they're still out there, so someone's still buying gold. Unlimited professions would undoubtedly help the goldsellers by giving them a super-farmer that could do everything.

I said that they should only allow 2 active primary professions at a time. Basically what I'm saying is that you should be allowed to swap professions without losing all the skill ranks you've learned. Maybe I should have just said that and then it may have been easier to understand. I'm not saying that you should be allowed to have every profession active at once. I understand that people would be OP'd if Blizz allowed that. I just meant that people should be allowed to swap primary professions without penalties.

And again, like I was trying to say in my original post, skills for you inactive professions will be inactive as well. If Inscription is one of your inactive professions then your shoulder inscriptions will be inactive too. Or if Enchanting is inactive then your ring enchants will be inactive too. Stuff like BS sockets and jewler's gems already have skill requirements that must be kept in order for those things to be active. Blizz should add skill requirements to more items like the shoulder inscriptions, ring enchants, and maybe even crafted BoP weapons and armor in order to make something like this work without everyone becoming overpowered.

I understand the complexity of doing something like this. I never suggested that Blizz should just allow everyone to learn every profession and have every profession active at the same time. I just really don't like the current penalty of losing all of your skills on one profession when you drop it for another. If you decide that you don't like one profession, drop it for another and then decide you were wrong and go back to your original profession then you've wasted a lot of gold that you can't get back.

I guess maybe an alternate idea would be if you drop a profession then you're refunded all of the money that you spent on skills from trainers plus some sort of predetermined extra amount to make up for the gold that you spent on recipes, and crafting items. There's no way you'll get the full amount of what you spent on that profession back, but if you could get some of what you spent back then that would be better than the current format where you not only lose all of your skills if you drop a profession but you never get any of the gold back that you spent on it.

That was my reasoning for my original idea. I never wanted people to be overpowered. I just hate that if you dropped a profession then you've lost everything that you invested in it and if you ever decide to go back to that profession then you have to start from scratch. I hope this post explains what I was trying to say better than my original post.

Edited, Feb 10th 2009 9:28am by Nimrook

Edited, Feb 10th 2009 9:33am by Nimrook

The reason they won't allow players to have more than 2 primary professions at a time is the same reason they only allow one DK/realm. They don't want it to be easy for everyone to have access to every profession at the grand master skill level, especially now that almost all crafted epics with WotLK are BoE.

If you want access to all of the primary professions, you have to level alts and train them. That's what I did. Took a while, but it's been worth it.