If you are frequenter of the CraftSim Discord or have opened the information panes you may have seen the mysterious abbreviation HSV before. It is an incredibly impactful aspect of Dragonflight crafting so let’s dive in.
The information that was skipped
HSV is short for “hidden skill value” and is the in-game random variation of crafting skill. It was mentioned in the first crafting rework preview, but we mostly glossed over that part to focus on the big changes. Eventually goblins started realizing that they were hitting max quality more often than inspiration would indicate if they were close to the threshold for the next quality. Hidden skill value is simply a chance to add extra skill to a craft, up to 5% of the recipe difficulty. This means it’s possible to reach very high max quality numbers for high difficulty recipes or to do the same with cheaper materials, both of which can have huge impacts.
Case study: Fauna runes
I’ve been doing this with the weapon runes from inscription. With my current stats I can reach 296 skill with q2 materials, well within the 15 skill threshold for getting max quality non-inspiration procs. Since quality 2 chilled runes are half the price of q3 chilled runes this is actually a huge deal. Just running multicraft resourcefulness and max skill with q2 materials is more profitable than going for guaranteed q3 with q3 materials.
The math
According to the testing I’ve seen the hidden skill value is a random amount between 0 and 5% of the recipe difficulty, with each extra skill having equal chance (or a uniform distribution if you prefer the math terms). I’ve not done my own testing to see exactly how it discretizes, but this post by the CraftSim developer indicates that it is continuous with a fairly detailed resolution. As such we can use the the analytical formula to generate the chance that you get to the next quality level for a specific level of skill.
The results
To give those of you with less interest in the math a better understanding I have made some graphs. These show the percentage chance of getting a max quality proc from HSV on the Y axis, with the X axis representing the missing skill. I picked a couple of recipe difficulty levels we see in the wild, if you want to calculate it for another difficulty you can simply get the formula above and implement it yourself.
Inspiration?
Inspiration will also of course affect your rate of getting max quality crafts. Inspiration does not matter for the crafts that hit max quality through HSV variation. So to add your inspiration crafts you take the percentage chance of not reaching quality 3 with HSV and multiply that with your inspiration. The graph below is for just difficulty 400 recipes and shows the total max quality chance for inspiration rates of 15, 25 and 35 % at various required skill levels. Obviously this means inspiration matters more the lower your skill is, as it will gradually impact a smaller and smaller portion of your crafts as you get closer to the recipe difficulty.
Selling craft orders
If you are selling craft orders for stuff like Illimited diamonds you will definitely want to advertise your HSV included inspiration rate. I made a simple calculator you can play around with to check what your max quality rate is for various crafts. In all cases we assume that an inspiration proc will get you to q3 (which will always happen if you are in range of getting HSV anyway). Use it to get some clients by advertising your correct q3 rate!