Profession overhaul.

Professions are broken. Hella broken.

Professions add an interesting mechanic to the game. Making things for yourself add others adds variety, and helps make the game interesting and fun.

In my humble opinion there is only one profession in the game that currently works and that is Fishing.

Leveling up your fishing skills used to involve traversing the world and catching all kinds of useless fish. Certain ponds in the game were more difficult to fish at than others, and you had to move up these ponds to level up your fishing to the point where it was useful. This mechanic was so frustrating and ess that Blizzard completely revamped it. Now you fish anywhere you want and your skill level now affects your chance to fish up something usefull. This is a wonderful change, and it opens fishing up to every player in the game. You may not get your fisjing daily done in a few minutes with less than 100 skill but it is possible now.

All professions should be changed to be like this. You should level up blacksmithing by either making lower level stuff or having a chance at making the higher stuff successfully. You should be able to mine or herb all nodes at level 1, but only have a chance to harvest something.

What do you think? Are Professions broken? If so how can they be fixed? Is the fishing change good or bad? Would it work for other gathering/crafting professions?

I think the gathering professions are fine as are. It's nice that they added some bonus features; HoT(herbalism), +stam (mining), +crit (skinning). The only thing that needs changing on them is how many/where the nodes are and how quickly you level them. With all that blizzard has done you now often out level your gathering profession and end up having to go back to a grey area just to run around and level it.

As far as the crafting professions, they are good from lv 70-80, but irrelevant to all the other levels. Until you start crafting Northrend gear/enchants you are basically just making items to level the profession, not so that you can use them. I am leveling Engineering on my alt and so far the only useful items have been the first two goggles (by the time you can make the higher lv pair you are getting better loot drops) and target dummies. The bombs,explosive sheep, etc. I found the same thing to be true for Tailoring/BS/LW, the items you could make were always lagging behind your level progression.

On the other hand, once you got to Northrend crafted items, they are great for any toon that doesn't have lv 70 end game gear. And the enchants that a crafter can do to themselves are awesome. Bliz just need to retrofit some of those implementations.

You should be crafting items to use them, not just to up your crafting skill.