With Shadowlands on the horizon it’s time to start looking ahead. Over the next weeks I will be posting Shadowlands Profession previews two times a week on Mondays and Thursdays.
Overall changes
The biggest change to blacksmithing this time around is the return of Sharpening stones. These are consumables you apply to your weapon for a temporary buff.
In addition to this star ranks for the various items have gone the way of the dodo. Optional reagents have taken over, and will also be used to determine the power level of the gear you craft.
Gear crafting in Shadowlands
Gear crafting has been revamped in Shadowlands. All crafted gear can be modified by adding optional reagents. An item can take up to four optional reagents to increase the item level, decide secondary stats and gain various bonus effects. It will be extremely interesting to see how this shakes out. I expect they will add higher item level reagents as SL progresses.
Blacksmithing crafts
Blacksmiths in Shadowlands can craft base legendary items, armor, weapons and sharpening stones. The gear can all be upgraded to item level 168 with the use of crafter’s mark rank 2 as an optional reagent. The base legendary items comes for every armor slot and they come in four variants of increasing cost and item level.
Base Legendary items
I’ve covered the basics of these previously. To craft these you need Shadowghast Ingots and Enchanted Elethium Bar. The Enchanted bars come from enchanters and are an intermediate material. The Shadowghast Ingots can be melted by Blacksmiths or transmuted by alchemists. Having an enchanter will be very important to be able to generate dust and enchanted bars at a low price, as you will need a lot of these to keep all the base items in stock.
Armor and weapons
In addition to the base legendary items Blacksmiths can craft weapons and armor. This will be using the optional reagents system. Getting access to crafter’s mark 2 will be very important. The Blacksmithing crafter’s mark recipe comes from the Avowed, and you need to be revered to learn it. Grinding as much rep as you can early on will thus be key to making sure you can get value from these items. To get revered you will have to grind the Halls of Atonement and mobs in the area, so be prepared to go ham early.
Sharpening stones
The sharpening stones will likely be the Best in Slot consumables for all melee classes. I expect these to sell well as all raid level consumables do. These will most likely get value as we head into week 2 and 3 when raids open up, but they are very exciting from a goldmaking perspective.
Final thoughts
I think blacksmithing overall looks good. To really get value early you will want to rush Avowed reputation ASAP. The recipe for the enchanted bars for enchanting is also locked behind revered with the Avowed, so until someone gets there you will not be able to even craft a legendary. I expect there will be tons of rep groups farming the inquisitor and you will want to prioritize this farm heavily on your main crafter regardless of profession.
If you can make it to market day one or two with crafter’s mark 2 boosted gear you should get some very nice sales.
How do you see TSM working with the new crafting system with all the optional reagents?
It depends on how they can process the pricing data, at worst you will have to make separate operations per armor type where you add the crafting cost of any optional reagents use.