What I would like to see in Cataclysm. Part 1: Professions

We have all had some time to think about what we would like to see in the new expansion, and I especially have high hopes for this one. Because Cataclysm will remake Azeroth completely, it will basically be WoW 2. This means that Blizzard has many opportunities to do things over and improve the game in a vast number of ways, and I hope they take advantage of those opportunities. I'd like to discuss some specific ways I hope the game is improved, starting with an aspect of the game that I think has become particularly bland since the release of the last expansion: professions.

As I went over in my post on the homogonization of Wrath of the Lich King solo content, professions have become simplified, streamlined, and boring. Perhaps I feel this the most because I am an enchanter, and we get all of our recipes (excluding the odd raid drop) from trainers and the shard vender. That is an incredibly boring way to get recipes, and it quickly grows grindy. As it stands now, almost all professions get the majority of their recipes from some kind of currency vendor or from reputations. Alchemy and Inscription add some variety with their research mechanics, but I want more.

Now granted, I'm not going to attempt to glorify the days of limited quantity recipes in Burning Crusade, where you needed to visit Wowhead, look for all recipes sold by vendors, and fly around to visit all of them, and ditto for recipes that dropped from mobs. I would like a little more transparency in my recipe acquirement, but the current system takes it too far. What I would like is some sort of happy medium. Profession-specific quests are out of the question, for Blizzard has expressed a big aversion to quests that a limited part of the player population can see. But what if we had quests for professions that offered a recipe for whatever crafting profession(s) you have? After your trainer has taught you all they can, they can send you off to some artisan who you help in a way that would vary based on your profession (the only thing that would vary between the quests would be the specific items that would be the goals of the quest, such as a specific potion or enchanting a piece of the artisan's armor, so it wouldn't be that difficult to make different versions of the quests for each profession). The quest text could be very vague to allow for this kind of variation. For example, the artisan could say, "I seek to understand the more benevolent forces of this world. Can you help me with that?" An alchemist could make a spirit potion, a blacksmith could make a blue healadin armor piece, an enchanter could enchant one of the artisan's pieces for spirit, a scribe could make a few glyphs for healing spells, etc. He could also send you out to collect quest items to help him in his research. You would then turn in the quest and get a recipe as a reward. Perhaps an MP5 flask for alchemy, an epic healadin set for blacksmiths, an upgraded mooncloth set for tailors, jumper cables for engineers, etc. This could make acquiring recipes more of a challenge without making it difficult, and it would certainly make being able to craft said item more satisfying.

Another issue I have with professions as they are now is the lack of exclusive benefits for the crafter. I know that balancing these benefits was an issue in Burning Crusade, but as it stands now, every profession with the exception of Engineering and Tailoring gives the exact same stat benefits to the crafter, but it just gives them in different ways. Scroll down to the seventh paragraph in my homogenization post to see an example. While this makes balancing easier, the fact is that it's not enough. Crafter-specific benefits have been simplified to the point of irrelevance, and that makes professions suffer.

But what can be done without throwing the crafting system into imbalance? Many of the simplifications resulted from failed crafter-only benefits, such as potion chugging when combined with an alchemist's stone and BoP crafter armor. While we need simple benefits like the ones in the game right now, we also need benefits that will make the professions more interesting and make choosing a profession a more consequential choice. I'm talking about bringing back that fourth glyph slot for scribes. I'm talking about make the alchemist's stone a worthwhile trinket worth wearing into raids. I'm talking about bringing profession-dependent set bonuses back to crafted BoE starter gear (such as that on the heavy clefthoof set from BC). Yes, these kinds of things are difficult to balance, but when the alternative is homogenization on such a level that it makes professions almost irrelevant to the game, I think it's worth it.

So those are my thoughts on professions. I hope to go over some other aspects of the game I hope to see improved, such as solo-content. Until then, what changes would you like to see to professions in Cataclysm?