i like the corpse purification optional reagent just to add a little long term passive benefit. if i am building the costly 262 boe item for my alt anyway, why not add a little extra gain to offset the costs? shrug, just my 2 copperedit, adding a link to the item because most people i tell about this item dont even know it exists. good luck!
I feel like gathering getting a mini-game or something to be more "engaging" is going to be more frustrating than anything. What holds gathering back for me is mostly the fact you can't fly at the start. I happen to love going around herbing in flight form, but they keep clipping our wings at the start.
Most of the people who claim they don't have time for group content typically spend more hours in game than your average raider so that sob story is more a refusal to do group content in a game that has always been about group content. So yes, at a minimum you should have to do mythic dungeons for crafting.
1) There's a comment my partner makes often about professions, and that's this one specifically about Engineering:An engineer can make bombs but that doesn't preclude another person from being able to use them. An engineer might be able to be better at their use, i.e. can have a higher success rate when he or she throws one or have extra success rate in the yield. What my partner always explains for this is that the bomb might have a power effectiveness of 100, and if the engineer throws it at an enemy it can get a power effectiveness of 110 or 120. But then he says that "other people" can also use the bomb, and they'd have just the power effectiveness of 100, however because they're not an engineer they could also sometimes get a failed attempt. Just because the engineer can make the bomb doesn't mean another person cannot learn to use it...In fact, my partner cites the Warcraft movie, even if the scene isn't entirely in keeping with the game's mechanics, for this reason, saying that the scene with the dwarf teaching the human to use a gun is proof that the theory of "other people can learn" is correct. According to the "lore" of the movie, up to that moment, humans had never used guns but a scenes later we see many of them running around and shooting with them.2) My opinion is that if you're making the "profession work order" system to make it that no more soulbound items exist, then after a short quest line offered by the profession trainer (in this example that would be the engineering trainer) any person can learn weapons, items, and tools they'd usually don't have knowledge of. So you do the quest line, and you know as someone who isn't an engineer HOW to throw bombs. You still cannot make them, but you can ask for a few to be made via the new system.3) Additionally, there should be a bonus reward system for people who are purely want to earn from gathering. The whole botting and people STILL flaunting the rules with multi-boxing bothers me. There should be a baked in system of some sort that stops people from dumping materials onto the AH from such accounts as bots or multi-box characters. Because five characters in a row being able to feed the AH in this way in essence makes four of the five sales a "dupe" (in the old sense). I'll take an example of my miner yesterday. My character and another player killed a few mobs for us to mine. We WORKED to get the ore. A person coming in with five bots going boink, boink, boink, boink, boink and doing it with no effort makes our effort less valued. The SAME account shouldn't be able to mine what another character on it just mined or collected as a herb. No one, not even me logging onto a second account, should get the same ore as the character already logged in. If ACCOUNT1 is logged in, and collected a node, then has logged onto ACCOUNT2 of the same battle.net account, then it ONLY gets the stone... or junk from this node NOT ANY ore. That's how you'll beat the bots collecting ore so fast and so often. Make the SINGULAR player collecting ore, or them alongside a friend who is also traveling with them to collect the ore, the beneficiaries of there being ore to collect. The moment they come from the same IP or same battle.net the additional ore (or herb or skin or treasure or other thing that has a shared resource) becomes a "dupe" and cannot get collected from the second, third, fourth or fifth bot or multi-boxer. THIS SHOULD ALSO APPLY TO GOLD! (Yes, this might be a highly contentious and unpopular suggestion BUT when I travel around the world and STILL see bots and STILL see multi-boxers this might be needed).In terms of gold, a bot or multi-boxer picking up as "PERSONAL LOOT" the gold from a mob they have just killed once between five characters controlled by one person is NOT the same as multi-boxing of the past where each mob could only be looted once per character because of tagging.Conclusion: there are ways to earn money pretty fast and efficiently that don't require rule breaking. On a low level alt, with these methods, I can easily get 500-1000 gold in a day with little effort and only a need for good time management and moving fast around the map (flying, taxi, just getting on with quests instead of being idle in a city). If ore or herbs were marked as "do it as solo content and you get 20% higher yield per gather" ALL the people botting in groups or multi-boxing would suddenly stop doing that. You wanted a way to offer better rewards to "solo players" ... well, then do something like this where the random player I had met collecting ore and me, who fought mobs to get to the ore, don't just get 1-3 ore per node, but for every five ore collected get an extra one because we're doing it SOLO and without being in any type of group.So make solo collection of resources more rewarding over being in a group doing the same. A solo player collecting ore or herbs or gold gets MORE than the people who "cheat and bot" or multi-box for it...