Dragonflight profession preview: A new world for sure

Blizzard just gave as a slightly deeper look at Dragonflight professions, so let’s take a look.

Crafting orders

The crafting orders portion of the preview did not really include any new information. You can set the optional reagents, as well as the recipe, and then set a commission. It is uncertain to what degree you can decide the quality of the finished item by specifying the correct combination of reagents. If you can’t do that, then I expect targeted orders to known top crafters will be huge.

Profession specializations

Once again we don’t really get any new information. Specialization will be unlocked through a “variety of activities” and the main currency you spend is your time. It is clear throughout the preview that specializations will have a significant impact early on, on which top quality recipes you can craft, so picking the right one will be important.

Quality

Blizzard clarified that they want the difference in quality to be relatively small, with an example of a 10 ilvl gap from the best to the worst quality for a gear piece. The quality of your reagents, any finishing reagents you use as well as your stats and specialization will combine to define the quality of the finished item, with some amount of variation from craft to craft. Economically you will want to remove the impact of variation completely for crafting orders, and the meta will revolve around finding ways to craft a given quality 100% of the time.

Determining quality

The quality is determined by comparing your skill with the recipe difficulty. The UI will show the expected quality, so you can always know this by checking the UI, at least the minimum quantity. Crafting stats can impact this.

Crafting stats

There are 4 new crafting stats with effects as below:

  • Inspiration – You have a x% chance to be inspired, crafting this recipe with extra skill.
  • Resourcefulness – You have a x% chance to use fewer tradable reagents such as ore.
  • Multicraft – You have a x% chance to craft additional items. Only works on recipes for stackable items.
  • Crafting Speed – Crafting is x% faster.

Inspiration will either be completely useless or mandatory. For mass crafting BoE gear it can be good, but for fulfilling BoP orders I expect players want to guarantee their item is at the top level. Resourcefulness and multicraft essentially do the same thing, reducing the average cost. Multicraft will be better for time savings, as you craft more items per time spent, as well as saving resources. Mathing out the optimal one will be very straightforward. Crafting speed will be fantastic for intermediate materials, where time spent is what I would want to minimize.

Some potential combinations

I’ll list some potential combinations of preferred stats for various crafters. What the optimal setups will be obviously depends on the actual ratios, but this is what I expect to be the best approach.

Consumables: Resourcefulness/Multicraft

Intermediate materials: Multicraft/Crafting speed

Gear: Resourcefulness/Inspiration

Quality philosophy

Blizzard graced us with a look at their philosophy this time, which I loved. That being said I don’t see how their vision can work out. Max quality gear, which includes up to 5 mythic ilvl crafted pieces will require you to be:

  • Fully specialized in crafting that gear
  • Use all top-quality reagents
  • Use the best profession gear you can find, which requires highly specialized crafters to make
  • Use a valuable finishing reagent or get lucky with inspiration

They want this to be highly lucrative or something a guild works together on, but in the next sentence they want to avoid this gear having costs that “remotely approach” legendary costs. I don’t think it’s possible to have gear that requires a ton of effort to craft and that is cheap. The gold cost represents the effort of getting the materials and the recipe. Crafting orders might help, as the buyer sets the price, but if they succeed with the effort side I don’t see how they can succeed in making these items cheap.

Profession skilling

Profession skill is now something you work on. You get all the recipes halfway through the profession skill, and then you acquire the rest to gradually work towards high quality crafts. This is a cool change from an RP perspective, but for goldmaking it does not really change much from Shadowlands. You need to get to the skill/specialization point where you can craft the desireable items at a high enough quality. Whether that is a specific skill point or something else does not matter.

Powerful crafted equipment

As I mentioned we are getting access to powerful crafted gear. This will be BoP and has to be crafted through the crafting order system. You can get 5 mythic raid ilvl pieces, slowly unlocking over time. You get one optional reagent per “couple of” week to craft these. You will also need a soulbound reagent from the highest tier of content. This system includes weapons, which is huge. If this can be used to deterministically get a heroic/mythic ilvl weapon in the first 1-3 weeks then we can expect everyone to pile in. Blacksmithing with various weapon specializations will be huge, if you are the first crafter on your realm that can make a specific mythic weapon, you can rake it in!

Overall this seems pretty cool, and it’s a great way to design crafted raid level gear in my opinion. I have been asking for something like this for years, so bring it on!

Phials

Lastly flasks are gone in DF. In stead we get phials, which have half the duration, but there’s a much greater diversity of effects. This is very cool, and will add a larger spread to alchemists, so even if you are all on the same realm there will at least be a bunch of different phials to compete on. The effects they shared look cool from a gameplay perspective. That being said with every realm merged for selling alchemy consumables I don’t see these being massively profitable.

They also shared that we will be getting cauldrons for potions this time around, but no cauldrons for phials. This is bad news for alchemists, as potions have very large volumes. The phial changes might make up for it a bit, but overall I do not expect much from alchemy for goldmaking in Dragonflight.

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