Today we will continue our look at professions in 8.3, and the focus today is blacksmithing. Blacksmithing has been one of the strongest goldmaking professions this expansion with access to a wide variety of crafted weapons alongside plate armor and a couple of nice utility items.
A look at the new recipes
As with tailoring the only new recipes we get is for Uncanny Combatant gear. As a Blacksmith you can craft plater armor for the 5 non-azerite armor slots, and you can craft 6 different weapons, with a good split between 1-handers and 2-handers. All the items are item level 400 and represent great entry points for gearing.
The recipes have 3 ranks, with decreasing material cost, where the largest decrease is in the expulsom cost, which also decreases the time required by the largest margin.
Getting the recipes
The rank 1 version of the recipes are all obtained from your profession trainer right in your factions capital city. You need skill level 170, which is fairly reasonable to get. The higher rank recipes are sold by the new profession liason found by the PvP vendors. As with the previous patches the rank 2 recipes will cost you 2 marks of honor and the rank 3 recipes will cost you 4 marks of honor.
This time around the higher rank recipes are significantly more attractive compared to the last patch as the expulsom costs have been increased across the board. For everything except bracers the expulsom cost has been increased by two, which is huge. This is somewhere around 40-50 seconds extra crafting time per piece in terms of expulsom crafting.
Stocking the items
I prefer stocking up to at least 5 of each base item. You get a nice spread of various suffixes. If you have the capital going up to 10 of each base item is quite good. If you have full rank 3s compared to rank 1 you will save 45 minutes of crafting when crafting 10 of each. Never has the rank 3 grind been more attractive in terms of time investment than this time around. Of course you can do some AFK crafting, particularly when crafting all the tidespray bracers, but getting the higher ranks will save a lot of time.
The recipes require Osmenite Ore, Storm Silver Ore, Durable Flux from the vendor and Expulsom. Crafting expulsom is by far the most important point here, as you don require particularly much of any of the two ores. Getting enough and cheap enough expulsom will be the absolute key for this market.
Expulsom
To get the expulsom needed you will have to do your own scrapping. By crafting the Tidespray Linen bracers en masse and scrapping them you will get one expulsom per 6 bracers on average. You get the recipe at level 1 Zandalari crafting so you can use a level 110 character to craft the tailoring bracers if you do not have tailoring. Expulsom is time consuming to craft, but at least you have everything you need on your tailor. You can just craft tidespray linen bracers and scrap them immediately. You will need a LOT of expulsom.
I strongly suggest getting a scrapping addon to speed up the process. I use Scrap Master which was made by BilisOnyxia of Sniper string fame.
Valuing your expulsom
If you have not set a value for your expulsom in TSM you will have to do so for my TSM settings to work as they heavily rely on the crafting source. To do so you head to the crafting reports window by typing /tsm crafting.Go to materials and search for expulsom. I use a custom price called expulsom, but you can just paste the string below straight in. It will use the lowest crafting cost of the tailoring bracers or either of the leatherworking bracers to calculate the cost of one expulsom.
min(10*dbmarket(i:152576)+2g50s,6*dbmarket(i:152541)+
4*dbmarket(i:154164),6*dbmarket(i:153050)+4*dbmarket(i:154164))/0.15
TSM Setup
As usual I rely on the same auctioning operation I have utilized throughout the entire expansion to post crafted gear. It will be invalid if you haven’t set a proper price for expulsom, so make sure you get one in.Due to the random proc nature of the items my group will be missing some of the variants and you will have to add them manually. Just go to the group page of TSM and click the sub groups for item level 340 gear.