Dragonflight: Making It with Professions

Dragonflight introduces a new and updated profession system into World of Warcraft, providing greater depth and engagement while allowing the crafters of Azeroth a way to differentiate themselves and stand out from their peers.

Crafting Orders

Crafting orders are a new way for you to place an order for almost any Dragon Isles crafting recipe using an Auction House-like interface. This new service will be provided as nearly free of charge by representatives of the Artisan’s Consortium, a new trade organization recently founded with its first branch in the Dragon Isles.

When placing an order, there are three options that players can set for who can fulfill it: public, guild, or personal. For public orders, the player requesting the creation of an item will need to provide the tradeable reagents.  Guild and personal orders can be provided by the requestor or the crafter. Certain special reagents may only be provided by one or the other. In particular, Soulbound reagents will often need to be provided by the requestor when placing an order for a Soulbound item.

Players will also be able to customize the order further by including various Optional Reagents depending on the recipe, dictating exactly what you want to be crafted. For example, many equipment recipes will allow secondary stats to be specified.

Once an order is finished being customized, the requestor will decide on an offered commission to the crafter, pay a small posting fee, and send it off.

Crafters can then view these orders, fill in any missing reagents, craft the item, and collect the commission (minus a small cut for the Artisan’s Consortium, of course!). The finished item will then be delivered in the mail.

This is a great new way for crafters to earn gold, increase skill, and, most importantly, help craft for friends and guildmates. 

Profession Specializations

Profession specializations will allow crafters to specialize in their primary crafting and gathering professions once they’ve reached a high enough skill. You will earn specialization knowledge through a variety of activities and get to spend it on improving different areas of your profession permanently.

This will be one of the main ways crafters can differentiate themselves from their peers, as there will be many areas of each profession to specialize in.

Crafting and Gathering with Quality

Crafting with Quality

Quality and its Effects

New to World of Warcraft is the concept of crafting quality, both for crafted items and many gathered reagents. This is not to be confused with rarity, such as Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, and Legendary, which remains unchanged and isn’t directly related to crafting quality.

Crafted equipment will have five levels of possible quality, while many other crafted and gathered items, such as potions and ores, will have three levels of quality.

For crafted equipment, quality primarily modifies item level, with each level of quality increasing it by a small amount. For example, a piece of crafted leveling gear might be item level 306/308/310/313/316 at quality ////. In all cases, the goal is to have quality matter enough for it to be worth your effort to achieve higher qualities without having the gains be so large that the lowest quality versions don’t feel worthwhile.

For crafted items such as consumables that have quality, the effects of quality are a bit more varied. For most, a higher quality will result in a more powerful effect, but in some cases, it might come in other forms of variation, such as longer duration, more charges, etc. Note that there is an expectation that low-quality versions of these items will sell for less, but this will provide a niche for those who don’t want to spend a lot of gold to be able to make use of the full suite of crafted items. It will also be cheaper to craft lower-quality versions of these items for a variety of reasons.

For reagents that have quality, that quality value will serve as a major input into crafting. Crafting with higher-quality basic reagents will directly provide bonus skill when crafting with them (more on that below).

Finishing Reagents are a new type of reagent that can be used to improve aspects of the crafting process— increasing skill or crafting stats, for instance. Higher-quality versions of these will have stronger effects on crafting.

Not all gathered reagents will have quality. The core reagents gathered by the primary gathering professions of mining (ores), skinning (skins, scales, hides), and herbalism (herbs) will have quality, as well as reagents crafted by the primary professions (e.g. cloth bolts, metal alloys, etc.). Other reagents such as meat, cloth, fish, and elements that can be gathered by anyone will not.

Determining Quality - the Crafting Process

When crafting an item, there are two main elements of note.

The Recipe Difficulty will determine how hard it is to craft the recipe at a higher quality. Recipe Difficulty will also change when you include Optional Reagents, which can modify it up or down depending on their effects and quality, sometimes significantly.

Crafting Skill is determined by the base skill the character has in their profession (e.g. Dragon Isles Tailoring), but can be modified by a variety of factors, including the quality of the reagents in use, Finishing Reagents, profession gear with skill bonuses, various bonuses provided by consumables, and most significantly,  profession specialization. 

As you craft your item, there is a small amount of randomness added to your skill roll to represent the natural variation in your crafting execution. In addition, if you have any Inspiration—a new crafting stat—you have a chance to become inspired, gaining a significant amount of bonus skill during the craft. This means you may do better than you expected, but never worse!

In the end, final Crafting Skill will be compared against the Recipe Difficulty. If that skill is higher than the difficulty, you will craft the item at maximum quality; otherwise, the quality will depend on where your skill falls comparatively.

Additional Crafting Stats

In addition to your primary Crafting Skill, there are several secondary crafting stats that can affect the crafting of new Dragon Isles recipes and which gear can be specialized towards. These are as follows:

• Inspiration - You have an x% chance to be inspired, crafting this recipe with extra skill.
  • Inspiration is for those of you who love rolling the dice and getting lucky on some bonus quality. It’s also a way to craft items at a higher quality than your natural skill and a specialization would allow when you get lucky.
• Resourcefulness - You have an x% chance to use fewer tradable reagents such as ore.
  • If you are trying to squeeze every drop of profit out of your crafts, then this is the stat for you.
• Multicraft - You have an x% chance to craft additional items. Only works on recipes for stackable items.
  • We have long loved the feeling of crafting extra items from various abilities, like Potion Master in Burning Crusade. Multicraft cements this as a permanent crafting stat for those of you who love that moment of crafting a bit extra!
• Crafting Speed - Crafting is x% faster.
  • For those of you who mass-produce crafts for the Auction House or just want to save a few seconds now and then, crafting speed is a stat to help you create those items a bit faster.

A Few Dragonflight Specific Crafting Details

Powerful Crafted Equipment

In Dragonflight, there are many recipes for extremely powerful craftable equipment. Every primary crafting profession can craft one or more pieces, all of which work under a shared system with the following attributes:

• Some of these items have more powerful effects and are labeled as Embellished. Others do not but can have optional reagents included that add a powerful effect, making them Embellished. While you can wear as many un-embellished items as you want, only two Embellished items can be equipped at once.
• All of them start at an item level range near to Normal raids, increasing with quality. Through earned Optional Reagents, they can be brought up to Heroic and even Mythic raid item levels, making them competitive with some of the best gear you can find.
• All are Soulbound, so you’ll either need to craft them yourself or have someone craft them for you through a crafting order.
• Each piece of crafted equipment will require several types of Soulbound reagents that you will need to earn to craft it and improve it further with Optional Reagents.
  • The first of these, Primal Chaos, will come from various challenging activities including dungeons, raids, PvP, and adventuring in some dangerous outdoor areas. You will need to earn a fair amount of this reagent to craft a piece of equipment, more for significant pieces. A second reagent, Spark of Ingenuity, will come from a series of quests that award you with enough to craft one piece of equipment. Additional stages of these quests will become available to everyone every few weeks. After five are earned, you will gain the ability to make more Sparks of Ingenuity when you find a rare drop around the Dragon Isles.
  • To upgrade this equipment to Heroic or Mythic raid item level, you will need to acquire 10 Primal Focuses or 10 Concentrated Primal Focuses, respectively, then combine them with some Primal Chaos. These final reagents can only be obtained in Heroic / Mythic Raids, the highest levels of Mythic+, and highly rated PvP.
  • For those who don’t do this content, reaching a high level of Renown with each Major Faction will allow you to acquire a Primal Infusion, the optional reagent that upgrades your equipment to Heroic item level.

Alchemy and Phials in the Dragon Isles

You will find many strange and wondrous concoctions to discover during your Alchemical experimentations on the Dragon Isles. One of these is the standardization of the Phial as an innovative replacement for the Flask. Phials work very similarly to Flasks, lasting through death and counting as both a Battle and Guardian Elixir. The main difference is they tend to require about half the reagents to craft and last half as long, but two can be drunk together to get the duration of a Flask for extra flexibility.

Alchemists who choose to specialize in Phials will discover the secret to making Phials last significantly longer for them.

New Crafting Stations

Upon entering the Dragon Isles, you will find new crafting stations for all primary crafting professions.

Most advanced Dragon Isles crafting recipes will require you to be at these new crafting stations. You will find many of them scattered throughout the regions of the Dragon Isles for your convenience during leveling. Once you reach the main city of Valdrakken, you will find a large profession hub which includes all the crafting stations, as well as vendors and trainers. The Artisan's Consortium also has Crafting Order representatives located in the city and has even convinced some Auction House representatives to set up shop in the area as well.

Alchemists are often called to craft fresh potions and other concoctions on the spot for their allies, but the engineers of the Dragon Isles have invented remote crafting tables for alchemists to use. These portable stations are highly convenient and rarely prone to explosion—save for alchemist error, of course.

Reagent Bags and Updated Stack Sizes

With the introduction of quality to crafting and gathering, additional inventory updates have been made regarding professions. To help crafters out, we’ve introduced a brand-new bag, the reagent bag! Reagent bags can only hold reagents and follow the same rules as the reagent bank. These new bags will also exist in a new dedicated bag slot, allowing for a larger amount of inventory space to devote to your gathered and crafting reagents.

In addition to this new reagent-only bag, the maximum stack size for most crafted and gathered items in Dragonflight has been increased. Gathered reagents stack to 1000 (up from 200), and most crafted consumable items stack up to 200, up from 20 (e.g., potions, Optional Reagents, Finishing Reagents, etc.).

Prospecting and Milling Updates

With the new profession updates, new Milling and Prospecting recipes are now listed in each expansion-specific version of Alchemy and Jewelcrafting that you have learned. These recipes will allow you to select which herb/ore you wish to mill/prospect from that expansion, then select create or create all to consume as many or as few of them as you want with a single click.

You will also find that the basic version of Milling and Prospecting, where you directly target a stack of reagents, is gone, replaced by this more convenient means of Milling and Prospecting.

Profession Equipment

Players will also now be able to gain profession-specific equipment to enhance their gameplay and show off their crafting pride. In the new system, most professions have three slots for equipment— one tool slot and two accessory slots. These slots provide a dedicated place to put your profession equipment. You will no longer need to keep a hammer in your inventory if you are a Blacksmith or switch your weapon with your Fishing rod when you want to fish; these items will already be equipped

New profession equipment in Dragon Isles will often provide profession bonuses, usually in the form of new crafting and gathering stats.

In addition to the bonuses it provides, most pieces of equipment can show on your character, letting you look the part of your profession. When you perform a profession-related action, your character will optionally visually swap into this profession equipment, then switch back again upon entering combat. 

Recrafting and Artisan's Mettle

Recrafting allows you to take Dragon Isles' crafted gear and take another shot at crafting it. It requires the original item, a subset of the original tradeable reagents that went into it, plus in Dragon Isles crafting, a special profession-earned reagent known as Artisan's Mettle:

Recrafting allows you to add, remove, or change out the Optional Reagents in the gear. Any Optional Reagents that are replaced or removed will be destroyed in the process. It also allows you to raise the quality of the gear further if you can craft it at a higher skill than when it was originally made.

As mentioned above, Artisan's Mettle is required for recrafting. This reagent is Soulbound and can only be earned in limited quantities through various crafting and gathering activities. During a crafting order, either the customer or crafter can provide it.

Besides its use in recrafting, Artisan's Mettle also has various other profession-centric uses. Some of these are for crafting high-end profession equipment, Illustrious Insight, a Finishing Reagent that increases skill when used, and some other profession-benefiting consumables. This means that Artisan's Mettle is highly valuable to anyone with professions and that you'll want to be judicious with how you choose to use it.

With more tools at your disposal, we look forward to seeing where you take your new crafting adventures, and we’ll see you in the Dragon Isles!