Breakfast Topic: Resource gathering professions are awful

While I’m on the record as thinking the Garrison Mine and Herb Gardens ended up separating players from the world, the more I think about it the more I realize that I hate Mining, Skinning, and Herbalism. They annoy me on a lot of levels, primarily because they mean people either need multiple alts to cheese the profession system or they need to effectively abandon a potential profession in order to gather materials. And they lead the the scourge that is the double gathering alt, that person with two of these professions who is therefore always gathering.

You’re thinking ‘so what if someone is always gathering?’ because you haven’t recently grouped with that person. That person is the one who is always running off to mine or gather herbs or loudly demanding that you loot everything so they can skin it. That’s fine, if they’re doing that for one resource.; But now imagine the person who loudly demands you cram your bags full of junk so they can skin every bear also constantly running off to gather herbs or mine that last node, and you begin to understand my pain.

I think the Garrison actually had it right, but in the wrong place. Instead of making your garrison full of nodes anyone can tap and loot, all nodes should be tappable and lootable. If you kill something and it’s skinnable, mineable, or herbable than you should just be able to do that, there shouldn’t be a profession involved. And yes, I made up like three words in that paragraph. But the point is the same — just make resource gathering something you do, or at worst, tie it to your professions, so blacksmiths and engineers are automatically miners, and alchemists can automatically gather herbs, just how enchanters can automatically disenchant things.

Maybe some of you love the system and want it to stay exactly as it is. That’s what the comments are for, so go nuts, tell me who crazy wrong bad I am. But I stand firm — resource gathering shouldn’t take up a profession slot.