Cobalt: This one weird ore that can make you lose your mind in just a few minutes

| Thursday, July 10, 2014
Why it was okay that fel iron and cobalt were annoying to find

Once upon a time when leveling took a while, it was not unreasonable to need a lot of a crafting material to level the profession. You'd be out in the world so much that you were bound to get what you needed. Ores such as cobalt were widely-dispersed and tricky to gather without flying mounts. Yet you got them.

Upon hitting the cap, you likely needed the other ores more. So there were more of them. Saronite could come out the wazoo. Adamantium could also come out the wazoo. Meanwhile, fel iron would remain persistent even in higher level zones because it was still needed for high level items.

These are all fine and dandy when you're in a leveling-capping situation. These days, it becomes a problem. You may level out of the cobalt zones before you've naturally farmed enough. Then you're in the saronite-flooded zones for plenty long, a situation made especially noticeable thanks to the level 80 start on Cata, rather than the 58-60 or 68-70 that could fudge the starts and ends of continents a bit. So you have saronite out the wazoo, but there aren't capped crafters setting ten dozen stacks of saronite ore on fire to make a single "Boots of the Pretty Good That Can Get you Started on Raiding".

There are two ways to fix this. One way is to slow down leveling. The other is to replace some saronite with cobalt. My money is on the Third Way: ignore the problem.

4 comments:

Kring said...

Saronite is the ore that should make you loose your mind, not cobalt. But that's an intersting point, maybe there is an, as of yet unnoticed, old god in Outland responsible for all that. Yogg-Cobal.

Thanks for the post. :)

Talarian said...

4th, extend the MoP gathering profession model to lower forms of ore. You can level from 0 to max on Pandaria alone today.

Talarian said...

And to continue the 4th, also allow crafting professions to capitalize on that mechanic by allowing the substitution of higher level ores for lower.

Klepsacovic said...

@Kring: Hm...

@Talarian: What's the benefit of that? They're all flying-farmed ores. If anything, this just makes new players worse off as the materials they find while leveling are that much less valuable.

In terms of feel, it removes the sense of progression in professions. You aren't working your way up through progressively stranger ores. Instead it's just straight to the latest mystical stuff.

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