Tank like a girl

This week’s BA Shared Topic comes up with the question asked by Pixelated Executioner: What do you wish your profession could do?

I happen to be a 375 Blacksmith with a specialization as Armorsmith, with mining on the side. At 375 I find it to be one of the most useless, pointless professions to have. There, I said it. What do I, as maxed out blacksmith do with the profession? I make the occasional enchanting rod, adamantite sharpening stones, and the Felsteel set for leveling plate armor tanks. If you do not have access to epic blacksmithing plans, there is no market for blacksmiths. This is a problem. Now you might say that most professions have this problem, but I always find that I do a lot more with my other professions (maxed out leatherworking and alchemy) than blacksmithing.

The Armorsmithing specialization is equally problematic. In my DPS gear, I am sporting the Bulwark of Ancient Kings. Out of sheer desperation I wore it as and the lower version as tanking chest for a long time, for the use effect and the nutso amount of stamina on it. But it’s clearly a DPS chest. None of the few armorsmith BoPs does anything for tanks. How can this possibly be?

I actually have no idea what plans Blizzard has for the blacksmithing specializations in WotLK, but I would hope that it’s a better implementation than in TBC. In comparison, look at tailors with their specializations. You can pick your specialization on what kind of caster you are (frost/shadow, fire/arcane, healing). I would not have picked armorsmithing and would have gone swordsmithing if I had known about the lack of tanking gear this would provide me with.

Now that I have done my share of griping, the good stuff. Blacksmithing did provide me with decent gear while leveling. The Fel Armor set was amazingly good, same for the Adamantite set, and as I got all Felsteel plans fairly quickly, that set was also great. Sharpening stones are awesome. I want to continue to see great pieces of gear you can make for making leveling easier. I am totally excited about the addition of shields. But I think the biggest step is that we get to add sockets to gear. That is great. This will be something of use even at max-level in the profession. Everyone will eventually upgrade gear and will want extra sockets. Especially one that’s colorless. It provides so much needed utility.

From the other Shared Topic bloggers I have seen the same request, and I am endorsing it as well: let us repair our own gear. That would be a killer feature for tanking blacksmiths. Blacksmiths should be able to repair mail or plate armor, leatherworkers should be able to repair mail and leather, tailors should be able to repair cloth armor. That’s the ideal for me. Come on, I can make fancy armor, but I can’t hammer the bumps out of my plate pieces? You could even do it as a bonus, like half-price repairs. Everyone knows that us folks have huge repair bills, and every little perk would count.

As last request, something with a fun factor would be great. Tailors will get a flying carpet in WotLK, engineers get tons of stuff that just screams fun, it’d be nice to have something like that too. I am fresh out of ideas what could be fun smithing gadget, but surely there could be something.

So as summary: do something to keep blacksmiths busy once they’re at 450, something with utility; make blacksmithing the killer profession for tanks by adding the ability to repair armor; and some fun stuff wouldn’t hurt.