Blizzard continues to share information about what’s new in the Dragonflight update for the MMORPG World of Warcraft. A voluminous material appeared on the game’s website, in which the developers describe the changes that the crafting system will receive. We have translated this material for you. Due to the length of the text, it is divided into two parts. You can read the first part here.

Quality philosophy

Many players will want to create the best of the best and will settle for nothing less. With that in mind, we want to talk a bit about our philosophy of customizing the quality and complexity of recipes.

For many early and lower level recipes such as gear upgrades, starting potions, etc. immediately after learning them, your overall crafting skill can be low enough that you aim to craft them at the lowest possible quality. However, these recipes don’t have to be complicated, and by gaining a higher skill in your profession or specialization, these recipes tend to be easy to make at maximum quality, even with low quality reagents.

On the other hand, many recipes for high-end items, especially equipment with powerful additional reagents and top-tier consumables, will be extremely difficult to craft at the highest quality. In fact, the goal in such situations is that only the best of the best can make them with the highest quality and only using all the tools at your disposal.

In practice, this means that if you want to create the most complex recipes at the highest quality-for example, a chest with an item level equivalent to the level of Mythic raids (yes, this will be possible), you will probably need:

  • Complete specialization in the creation of this type of equipment.
  • All high-quality reagents, both required and optional-all of which will also require extremely skilled assemblers and artisans.
  • The best professional gear you can find. For its manufacture will also require highly specialized craftsmen.

On top of that, you either have to get lucky with inspiration or have to use a valuable finishing reagent that increases the skill to ensure the item is crafted to the highest quality. In other words, it will take many skilled artisans and gatherers, as well as luck or additional resources, to make these top quality items of the highest quality.

The goal here is to make sure that creating the best of the best for you is no small feat to be proud of. We also want to emphasize that you will never have to rely on luck al1. Luck can help you a lot if you want to focus on inspiration, but it’s not necessary.

We also hope this means that crafting the highest quality items will prove to be very profitable. And that large trading and crafting guilds will be able to coordinate their actions on their own. Please note that the goal is not to have the cost of elite gear anywhere close to the cost of the best legendary items in Shadowlands.

In general, we don’t expect base reagents to be expensive, and much of the focus on narrowing it down will be in gameplay rather than wasting gold. Even if for a while only a few players can create the best items of the highest quality, obtaining an item of lower quality will be much easier to achieve. Lower quality items will also only be slightly less powerful than legendary items in Shadowlands.

Professions
Finally, you will be able to get equipment of lower quality, reworked to higher quality later by a more experienced craftsman with minimal reagents. More details on the conversion will come later.

Philosophy of excellence

In Dragonflight, you will gain skills in your professions, just like before. However, there will be one important difference for the main craft professions. Instead of maxing out your skill and learning all the recipes, you will only need to level up your skill to half.

The goal is that you don’t feel the need to rush to maximize your professional skills, but instead can slow down halfway through, content to know that you can learn any recipe that comes your way. This should also mean that as long as you complete orders for others or make useful items for yourself, the guild, or for sale, you will continue to gain skills. Finally, this should mean that far fewer items will be produced just for the sake of upgrading skills.

Most of the other half of your crafting skill will come from crafting high end items that require specially earned Soulbound reagents. Since, as a solo crafter, you cannot earn them yourself to maximize your profession, you will often have to complete orders from others in order to increase your professional skill.

A few crafting details specific to Dragonflight

Powerful homemade gear

In Dragonflight, you will find many recipes for extremely powerful equipment that can be crafted. In fact, each main crafting profession can create one or more items, and they all work in a common system with the following attributes:

  • Up to five crafted items can be equipped at a time, with two-handed weapons counting as two.
  • They all start at an item level close to regular raids, increasing with quality. With additional reagents earned, they can be upgraded to Heroic and even Mythic raid item tiers, making them competitive with the best gear you can find.
  • They are all soul bound so you will need to create them yourself or have someone create them for you through a craft order.
    *Each piece of equipment will require multiple types of Soulbound Reagents that you will need to earn in order to craft it and upgrade it with additional Reagents. One type of Reagent will come from a variety of challenging activities including Dungeons, Raids, PvP, and adventuring in some dangerous outdoor areas. You will need to earn a fair amount of this reagent in order to craft only a fraction of the equipment. You can also use this Reagent to craft an additional Reagent to bring that gear up to around the Heroic level of a raid item. The second type of Reagent will come from a series of quests that will give you enough to craft one piece of equipment. Additional stages of these quests will become available to everyone every few weeks.

*In order to upgrade this gear to near the level of a Mythic raid item, you will need to obtain the Ultimate Reagent, which can only be obtained from the highest content levels-Mythic raids, the highest Mythic+ levels, and high-ranked PvP activities.

Philosophically, the goal of this system is for professions to be a meaningful source of high-quality gear, increasing the importance and value of professions. As an artisan, you’ll have to work hard to gain the skills, specializations, and recipes needed to craft this gear, but it’s worth it!

As a user of this equipment, you will also need to purchase many of the reagents yourself. Soulbound Reagents are designed to provide a means of deterministic, incremental progression to the gear of your choice while performing the actions of your choice. In addition, the aforementioned reagent obtained by completing the quest will limit the rate of acquisition of elite equipment. This will prevent other sources of equipment from being overloaded, as well as giving you the freedom to choose where and how quickly you want to get other reagents.

Alchemy and vials in the Dragon Isles

During your alchemical experiments in the Dragon Isles, you will find many strange and wonderful concoctions. One is the standardization of the vial as an innovative replacement for the flask. Vials work in the same way as flasks, last until death, and count as both a battle elixir and a protective elixir. The main difference is that they usually require about half the reagents to make, and the effects last half as long. But you can drink two bottles at once to get an extended duration.

The point of this flexibility is that a skilled adventurer can discover a large number of flasks, each with its own unique use. Depending on the situation, phials can be switched from battle to battle, creating a lot of variability with a short duration of the battle.

This is just the beginning of what we have planned for professions in Dragonflight. Thanks for reading and we look forward to your impressions and thoughts.

See you in the Dragon Isles!