World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is set to bring some major changes to how professions and crafting work in Blizzard’s longrunning MMORPG, and now new details reveal what players can expect come the new expansion’s launch.
As explained in an extensive development blog, professions in Dragonflight will differ in three key ways from previous expansions. Those new additions are the crafting order system, profession specializations, and crafted items having a quality rating completely separate from normal item rarity.
Crafting orders are fairly straightforward. Using an auction house-like interface, players will be able to place orders for specific items, which can then be accepted by crafters, who get paid commission. The player posting the order will be able to set whether anyone can fulfill it or have it be exclusive to guild members or even a specific person. Both the order placer and the order fulfiller can provide reagents if necessary, but Soulbound reagents will need to be provided by the person placing the order. A new faction, the Artisan’s Consortium, will take a small fee off of every transaction.
When it comes to item quality, equippable gear will have five quality levels, while consumables such as potions will have three. Each quality level increases the item’s effectiveness by a small amount, with Blizzard stating that the goal of the system 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 gear, higher quality items will mean a higher item level, while high quality consumables may have longer durations or additional uses.
Crafting recipes will have a difficulty associated with them, and the quality of the end product being crafted is determined by the base profession skill along with the quality of reagents, special finishing reagents, profession gear that may give special skill bonuses, bonuses granted by consumables, and profession specialization. There is also a small amount of randomness associated with crafting that could have the item come out better, or worse, than expected. A new crafting stat, Inspiration, has a chance of granting extra skill bonuses when crafting, and there’s also stats that will allow for crafted items to consume fewer resources, craft additional items, and increase crafting speed.
Blizzard says it will be possible to craft Mythic raid quality gear (aka the best gear in the game) through the crafting system, but that it won’t be easy. To do so, a player would need to specialize in that particular type of gear being made, acquire all the top-of-the-line reagents necessary along with top-quality optional reagents, and use the best profession gear available. In addition, players would need to get a little lucky with an Inspiration proc or use a rare finishing reagent to further boost the item to ensure it is made at the highest possible quality.
There are tons more details in the full blog post, including the fact that players will only need to level up their professions halfway to be able to learn all available crafting recipes for their profession and that a new type of consumable called Phials will be replacing Flasks.
WoW: Dragonflight is set to release later this year, though it does not yet have a specific release date. The expansion will bring a revamp of the game’s talent system alongside the new Dragon Isles region and a new playable dragon race (that is also exclusively the new Invoker class), the Dracthyr.
GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.
The products discussed here were independently chosen by our editors.
GameSpot may get a share of the revenue if you buy anything featured on our site.
