How would you change Specialization?

[MN_14]

Preventing people (those with different Specializations) from crafting high level recipes does not provide competition, it eliminates it, which is in diametric opposition to the stated goal of the Specialist system.

Yes and no. While it is true that the specialist system was intended to eliminate the need to level all classes to 50 and allow single class crafters to actually produce end game crafts/compete better, you have to remember what single class crafters were complaining about. IIRC, these were the prevalent complaints:

1) Having to level all classes to obtain cross class skills (particularly the level 50 ones)

2) Being unable to compete with omnicrafters due to higher production costs. Single class crafters would have to buy intermediate materials whereas an omni-crafter could make all of them and completely out-price them in the market

3) Omni-crafters ruthlessly dominating each and every market leaving no niches for single class crafters

So the developers wanted to design a system that could address these concerns. They introduced specialist abilities to take care of the leveling issue, but these were clearly a flop. While technically useable, they're far more difficult to use, less reliable, and more expensive (delineations). From my limited experience with single class 4* simulations (which admittedly probably only scratches the surface of what the system can do), you can pretty consistently build up around 9.5k quality as long as you have the level 15 cross class skills, meaning you'd want a starting quality of 3500-4000 which is quite a bit.

To address points 2) and 3), they first introduced systems to make things way harder for crafters to omni-craft:

- a massive favor grind intended to either force a crafter to go through a thousand hours of gathering to gear all classes or buy the materials at great expense (very few would be able to buy all of the materials; players that did would be helping the economy via wealth redistribution and then there was also the cost of melds at the time.....)

- alternatively weekly gear lockouts in the form of red scrip gear

These systems were massive failures as well, so mid-expansion they chose to turn things around. Gearing would now be easy while specialist recipe lockouts would take care of points 2) and 3).

The effectiveness of specialist abilities can be fixed, but I don't really see an easy solution for the competition aspect. Even if specializations have abilities that mirror cross class (quick and easy fix that is better than messing around with and balancing 2 different sets of abilities that can be used simultanously), there would still be complaints of omni-crafters dominating every market though more competitve pricing.