Dragonflight’s changes to how crafting and gathering work in World of Warcraft are an interesting chnage in how the game views professions. For years, hell around a decade or more, professions have, largely, been afterthoughts. Fishing, the developers themselves joked, was a thing you did so you could watch Netflix. Outside of consumable trades like Alchemy and Jewelcrafting, or professions that worked with the constant gear upgrades you’d receive, like Enchanting and Jewelcrafting (again!), there just kind of wasn’t that much value in tradeskills in WoW. Gatherables were often priced down just days or weeks into an expansion, rarely, if ever, to rebound. Herbs remain valuable, enchanting materials remain valuable, but the cost of ore, leather, and cloth constantly drops.

Over the years, Blizzard has tried various things to mitigate this loss of interest in professions. Shadowlands saw the biggest revamp to date, where legendary items required a base crafted piece to imbue with power, where item level upgrades and secondary stat allocation through optional reagents became possible, and where some pieces of gear even saw small added effects to boost their power. It wasn’t enough, though – the legendary crafting process involved a tedious leveling scheme that required crafting dozens of low item level base crafts per slot, where leveling all slots was generally useless given that certain slots tended to be meta-gamed as the slots, and then of course, that meta changed patch to patch and would leave the lack of effort you put into leveling, say, bracers, as a stain on your record as now that was the money slot.

Dragonflight wanted WoW to catch some of the genre’s general fascination with crafting, wanted WoW to get a piece of that pie. So they made a few changes targeted at just that – professions now have gear slots they equip for easier crafting and gathering, profession stats exist to give those power boosts, there is a ranked quality system that puts items on either a 3 or 5-star max quality rating which increases the value of the end-result items, and a new talent-lite system exists to offer new recipes and further skillups to the trade. It has, overall, been both a hit and a miss in some ways. I last wrote about tradeskills in WoW in the early days of Dragonflight, when we understood the new systems less, and now today, with a couple patches of new content and a general flow to the leveling and skillups, I wanted to discuss the good and bad that has come with these changes.

The Good!

Crafting Viability: In the past, armor and weapon crafting trades were just generally not worth it past maybe the launch window. In BfA, Blizzard made a confusing choice to lock a lot of epic crafted armor and weapons as BoP, making it so that these trades had very little outside value. You could make your own gear! – and that was about it. The result is that, much like throughout WoW’s overall history, professions that made equippable gear just didn’t have the money-making potential or value that something like Enchanting or Alchemy had. In Dragonflight, this has been far from the case, however, as the ability to craft armor that matches up to even Mythic raid levels has been a boon to crafting and made it such that even those high-end players, in fact especially them, have needed to engage with crafting. Through both item level and the use of the Embellishment system, crafted armor and weapons are almost always a part of a spec’s best-in-slot loadout. This creates a system that can help keep crafting valuable, because it incentivizes having that crafting leveled to the highest possible skill and it makes that leveling grind have an indirect monetary value. That is a good thing, in my eyes. Even as embellishments have shifted in value tier to tier, crafted gear has always been high importance for BiS and balancing the game around the rate of crafted gear acquisition has made that value translate to sales for crafters, while also keeping supply costs relatively more stable than in the past (they’ve crashed a bit as time has worn on, because people don’t craft infinitely, of course, but the value of the epic recipe mats has stayed relatively decent). In general, the new system has been a boost to crafting gameplay and has made it much more rewarding in both a power and monetary sense.

Account-Level Support: In the past, having every tradeskill leveled to max on your account was more of a general nice-to-have, because it rarely translated into much value outside of being able to self-enchant, cut gems, and send consumables around. It was good to have, sure, but for most players it wasn’t really the most useful thing. Crafting orders and the Dragonflight changes make that far less true – there’s now a ton of value to be had from having all your tradeskills maxed out and ready to rock. You can catch-up an alt at any time with easy catchup gear to craft, you can self-craft the powerful embellished gear by submitting your own work order to an alt, and because you can now do work orders without supplying all the materials, you no longer have to shuffle the non-BoP items to an alt to submit that work order – if the crafter alt has them, good enough. The new system makes it so that every tradeskill you max on your account has a force multiplier to it, to the point that it is possible to have a nice little factory going where you can make all the stuff all your characters need without stepping outside of your own production line, and that is pretty neat. It has a certain clinical factory-style to it – the ruthless efficiency that good goblins crave!

The Low End Market: While there’s obvious high value to be had from top-end gear, enchants, and max-quality crafts, the market for enchants and alchemy consumables in particular is a whole new ballgame with lower-quality items. While a lot of WoW players are cash-flush, a fair number more aren’t, and so having access to lower-tier versions of the same enchants, gems, and consumables is pretty nice. If you know you’re going to replace a given piece of gear soon-ish, then instead of buying the 3-star enchant or slotting up the 3-star gem, you can buy the lesser version, get a majority of the benefit of having a gem or enchant on, and not waste the extra cash on something you’ll replace. Sure, the market tends to be weird about this sometimes (in a fair few cases on the NA region AH, it’s common to see the 1-star version of a crafted item be listed for more than the 2-star and sometimes even more than the 3!), but the difference often works out in your favor – do you take 70 of a secondary stat on a ring for 5 gold or 82 of that same stat for 100 gold? Min-maximally, there’s one correct answer, of course (82 stats please!), but if you know that ring is going away in a week or less, then save 95% the cost in exchange for a loss of like, 10% of the stats. It’s an obvious win. The same is also very true for alchemy items like potions and phials, where the difference between 2 and 3 star is often around 10% more stat value in exchange for 2-3x the gold per item – the math ain’t mathing, but that’s also how the market kind of works (high-end players are always going to overpay for that last little bit of performance). For crafted gear, this is less often the case, but sometimes it is better to get a 3-4 star crafted armor piece and then recraft it later than to wait and wear a much lower value piece in the interim. It means there’s room in the market for crafters at all skill levels to play, which is actually kind of nice.

Done With Trainers Sooner: You learn all the trainable Dragon Isles recipes by 50 skill for pretty much every crafting profession, so there’s less need to camp the trainer or sit by them in Valdrakken aggressively crafting items to skill-up. Get to 50, buy the remaining recipes, move on.

Repeatable Crafting Gameplay Content – Sort Of!: Every week you have a knowledge quest you can do per tradeskill. Every month you can do the Darkmoon Faire quests for your trades. Fulfilling work orders has a weekly quest and is also just something you can do really easily if you’ve only got like 10 minutes to log in and check some things (easily is perhaps an oversimplification given that work orders have to be available, which, you know, isn’t always the case, but hey). Sure, a lot of the content in these quests has nothing to directly do with the profession (go kill things and get us the items we need), but it is extra gameplay that is opened up by virtue of tradeskills, which isn’t something the game has done a lot of before.

Heavy Involvement in Endgame Content: Outside of the gear-crafting and content I mentioned above, another major piece of the tradeskill pie in Dragonflight is that multiple professions get heavy involvement in the two legendary questlines to date this expansion. In the Evoker quest, crafters can even do world content with the Evoker they’re helping to speed-up the process, which adds another wrinkle to the game that’s only available in that way. This has some downsides to it as well – mostly for those trying to acquire the legendaries – but it is something that rewards those who level crafting and creates a way for guilds to align together for completion of things like this.

The Bad!

Catchup on Spec Points Sucks Ass: If you played Dragonflight from the beginning, you had a fighting chance at keeping up with and maxing out your profession trees, provided you were doing your quests fully, looting the world treasures, and getting all your first craft bonuses. With every week past the start of the expansion, chances of keeping up and maxing out have grown slimmer. It’s still quite possible to max them out now, provided you put in the legwork, but the game hasn’t really offered a substantive way to manage to catchup from a deficit or even to change skill and start over. You just have to kind of…do the thing. In 10.1, we got a little help at a high-ish Renown breakpoint with the Loamm Niffen, and in 10.2 so far we’ve had new world treasures for skillups in the Emerald Dream, and both of those things have helped, as has extending the Artisan’s Consortium reputation skill tomes to account-wide progress, but it is still needlessly hard to grind a tradeskill up to maxed out. You might then say, well, why does it matter if you max out, and that’s a fair point…

The Specialization System Is Kind of Incomplete: Spec matters for trades, but there’s no way to correct for mistakes you make in spending points, and it is possible, based on your goals, to mis-spend points quite quickly. In the three talent-tree systems added in Dragonflight, one is spec talents and you can redo those on a whim, Dragonriding is a small tree with no real bad choices that can’t be corrected in an hour or two of gameplay (and you’re intended to get everything as-is), but profession talents offer neither the flexibility or the ease of collection. If you make a choice that is out of alignment with your goals, you are basically saying goodbye to those misappropriated points until your tradeskill leveling winds back in that direction. Now, to be fair, in a lot of the trade spec points, you get a bonus that is still broadly useful, so it’s not like a complete waste, mind you – but it can feel really, really bad, especially when the meta of what is good to make with a given skill changes patch to patch. If you didn’t spec into necklaces as a Jewelcrafter in 10.0 and now in 10.2, your business was trash (it could also be trash for a really bad reason besides that we’ll discuss momentarily). For how important spec is and how long it takes to fill the entire set of trees per trade, it would have been incredibly useful to get a respec option, like the ability to spend 100 Artisan’s Mettle to reset a tree or something along those lines. Hell, it could even have been free – why not? Not having it reflects some lack of thought from the designers, because just that one ability would make the system vastly better.

Recipes From Rare Drop Sources Are A Bad Decision!: One of the best embellished items is the Elemental Lariat, a jewelcrafting necklace that has a proc for a bunch of secondary stats based on your gem loadout. In Season One, it was pretty optimal for almost everyone, and while it fell off hard in Season Two, it was still somewhat useful, before it had a resurgence in Season 3 that sees it being pretty useful to a decent handful of specs. There’s one pretty huge problem with this item though – the recipe has a very small chance to drop off of named rares in the Elemental Storm events, which happen on a fixed timer that is the same across a region. You can sell or trade the recipe since it doesn’t bind, thank god, but because the events are timed, not up all the time, and often see rares quickly die in a rush to them, it’s also not easy to farm – you can’t switch characters and repeat kill the rares with anything approaching ease, you get at most 3 shots per day at it assuming you’re willing to put in some insane hours to be up for every Elemental Storm, and there’s no apparent bad luck protection or path to earn enough currency from a storm to just buy it – at best, you might get someone who lists the recipe for an absolute fortune on the AH once in a blue moon, and even then, it’s likely to sell fairly quickly. The low drop rate extends to a lot of recipes – raid dropped recipes like the Elemental Potion of Ultimate Power, the engineering gun Ol’ Smoky, and more are all gated behind time-limited or once-per-week targets, which kinda sucks real bad! Finishing a tradeskill involves a lot of extra work and farming, but mostly luck, and that feels absolutely terrible. If you don’t raid at all, you can basically never fully finish your recipe book unless someone lists a non-BoP recipe on the AH, and even if you do raid, chances are slim, alongside outliers like the aforementioned Lariat. It is far, far too many layers of bullshit to just earn the recipes, and if there was some very clear form of bad luck protection or an alternate track you could use to earn those recipes after a sufficient amount of effort, it would be fine – but that’s not what we have!

Recrafting Is Ill-Explained: I love recrafting as an idea, genuinely. It’s cool to be able to make a thing for a skill-up, make it kind of bad, and then fix it later to be better. That’s cool! What is less cool is how recrafting is both very poorly explained and needlessly limited as a system. For example, did you know that the materials used for a recraft always replace the lowest-quality items in the original craft? So if you make a piece of armor with 6 Ingots and you use half 3-star and half 1-star, then recraft it for 3 more ingots and use 3 additional 3-star ingots, those replace the original craft’s 1-star ingots and thus push the quality increase. Where this gets confusing and confounding is that items that aren’t asked for in the recraft are also upgraded with recrafts, provided you use higher-quality materials in the recraft, so you can eventually push an item up with enough recrafts – 3, to be precise. Blizzard’s warning about quality going down doesn’t provide a lot of info as to why it can or how to remedy that – because there are a lot of variables in the recraft. That part, while confusing, is fine enough – the idea of needing more skill and better materials to push an item higher or add Embellishments and higher item level enhancements to it makes sense on a basic level, at least. What I find truly irritating is that I cannot recraft through a public order at all – I have to launch a personal or guild order. I get on some level that Blizzard doesn’t want tradeskills to be a thing you can do without ever speaking to someone, but honestly, it’s easier at a certain point of progression to just craft the item you want at max power in the first shot, and this season, I did exactly that – waiting to make certain items until I had the max item level Aspects Crest ready and the full Embellishment and Missive loadout I wanted. If the meta around embellishments shifts again next season (likely, IMO), then I can just do the same thing again. When a guild has the recipes and expertise in house, it’s fine – but if you can’t get lucky on certain recipes or just don’t have invested crafters, well – it feels pretty bad and limiting.

Gathering Feels Sort Of Left Out: Gathering…uh, has skill trees, it has stats and gear, and it has the consumables and other niceties afforded crafting professions. However, I think that the crafting specs are largely meh, with far fewer points, less interesting abilities to invest in, and a general lack of purpose. The biggest option you will notice for Mining and Herbalism is the spec node that unlocks mounted gathering, so now everyone can be Druids – and that’s great, but some of the features unlocked through gathering spec points are baffling. Skinning making…bait? Sure, it kind of makes sense…but it also doesn’t really fit the skinning fantasy to me, you know? Mining and Herbalism are less oddball here, but also less interesting – everything is just skillups that make you better, which is cool, but the theme isn’t strong and it also gets undermined by some of the spec points teaching you to be able to just smush herbs and ore together to make less, but higher quality, of the same item. Gathering also takes fucking forever to skillup compared to past expansions, since baseline nodes stop giving skill very early on, leaving you to find only the enhanced nodes for like the last 30-50 skill points – it’s more noticeably tedious than leveling gathering has previously felt. The major thing you get for gathering from the revamp is…a lot of random chances to get more or better herbs, but it doesn’t have gameplay aspects like choosing to use Illustrious Insight for crafters or anything close to the finishing reagent system, so the best you get for non-skinning is to overload an elemental node every…couple of hours. Oh delightful. A gameplay system to add guaranteed Finesse procs or just give you more mats on any node would be nice, as would an ability to guarantee a gather would proc max quality – but you can’t do any of that. It feels half-baked compared to the effort that went into crafting.

Stats in General Are Kind of Poor: Stats for crafting and gathering are cool in theory, it’s a skill like anything else in the game and you can practice and perfect the techniques involved. Great! The problem with how Blizzard has added stats to trades is that they don’t feel that meaningful. Inspiration for crafting feels like a really, universally bad idea – I don’t want to need a crit craft to make something higher quality, and at a certain point of skill tree prog, it literally stops mattering. Crafting speed is neat, but it also has limited applicability in WoW’s system of tradeskills – great if you’re cooking a couple thousand bits of raid food or phials, less interesting if you’re making a piece of armor, not to mention that choosing it means foregoing the benefits of multicraft for reagent or consumable crafting or inspiration if you want that gamble on covering a skill gap. Resourcefulness is the most generally useful, but it also isn’t always useful because it is a multitude of different RNG rolls. Likewise in gathering, you get the same issues in a way – Deftness is just speed which is not that great, Perception is interesting but also RNG and thus hard to rely on, and Finesse can help you get more stuff, but it also relies on RNG and would be better if it translated into a direct skill or choice you could make to push for more mats when it is useful to you. Basically, there’s a pretty clear priority for each profession, but I’d like it more if the stats always had some use – like on gear, where Multicraft doesn’t work, it could instead be a force-multiplier for Resourcefulness, giving you a higher chance to reduce material use in the finished craft. I’d like to see the critical strike style stats go away in favor of something else or even just going away altogether – either for a flat added skill increase or to put more value on the points you can spend in the spec trees. I’m also not a fan of the speed stats and would like to see them either folded into talents or otherwise nudged out in favor of something different and more useful across the board.

No-Material Orders Were A Confusing Addition In Many Ways: In patch 10.1, Blizzard added the option for people to submit any type of work order with missing reagents that would then be supplied by the crafter. In a fair few cases, this is very useful and a decent quality-of-life addition – launching an order to one of my own characters means I can just forego the step of shuffling mats all over my account through the mail, for guildies that need a recraft whom I want to help I can just choose to supply most of the mats, and personal orders where I’ve supplied materials as the crafter in exchange for a larger fee or as an added convenience. You still have to ensure that you have the BoP materials needed to supply, so a crafter can’t just front everything for most recipes, and that’s fine. What is less fine is that the feature launched for public orders and immediately became a scam vector, especially since at launch of the feature, you couldn’t actually tell when looking at the list of public work orders if someone had supplied all the materials with any ease – you had to dig into the order to see, and accepting the order and then refusing it counts against your limit of public orders per day, so hey, that kinda sucks! Worse still, for those trades where you can craft something entirely with BoE or non-binding reagents, well, this becomes a huge abuse vector. Imagine being an alchemist where every public order of Dracothyst is a landmine where someone will supply, if you’re lucky, some silken gemdust and leave you to front 3,000 gold of Zaralek Glowspores, but hey, they gave you a 150 gold tip, so now you’re only in the hole 2,850 gold if you choose to fulfill their ridiculous order! Oh boy! Frustrating still is that I cannot, through the trade and work order interface, block this asshole for doing it – but I can choose to favorite them! What the actual fuck? Thankfully, addon authors and later Blizzard themselves fixed the display of these work orders so you could at least see at a glance that the requestor was trying to fuck you over, but the fact that it launched with such an oversight in the first place is fucking baffling. Incomplete supply work orders have a place – I’m just not sure that place is for strangers to throw an order in like a landmine to screw me for their own enrichment. But this system and its contours point out the biggest problem I have with the new trade setup…

Blizzard’s Paternalistic Streak: I generally try to avoid the term “paternalistic” because I’ve seen it used by people to express that they don’t like the options in a game, rather than representing an actual enforcement of developer wishes. But here, I think Blizzard is absolutely guilty of enforcing a very specific vision of what the tradeskill system should be in WoW, how it should work, and what the acceptable parameters are and are not. Public Orders are subject to a daily limit because you can send one without talking to anyone, recrafts force you to guild or personal orders so you have to talk with the crafter on the other end in some way, and being able to supply public orders sans reagents are a way to make the system require some thought. Skill points are locked choices because it makes the early period of skilling up “interesting” for Blizzard, nevermind the impact it has on players. Blizzard has, historically, had a specific vision of what World of Warcraft “is” for them and how players “should” see it and interact with it, and these ideas exist in tension with what the playerbase actually does and how they actually engage. One of Blizzard’s most oft-repeated ideas is that of the “meaningful choice,” that WoW is at its WoWiest when the game makes players make a tough choice that defines their gameplay in some way, even if they eventually can dull the impact of not making other related choices – Covenants tried this, Artifact weapon pathing was a version of the very same concept now used for tradeskill knowledge, and of course, what Azerite armor you wanted in BfA in a given slot. While with tradeskills there’s not necessarily a “bad” choice, you are bound to that choice unless you pivot or until you get enough points to go in a different direction. This leads to another problem…

Early-Expansion Tradeskill Optimization Is Better With Multiple Characters on the Same Skill: If you want the best possible crafts in your account stable as early as possible, you really want to have multiples of every trade. Alchemy? Two alchemists means you can go Potion Mastery on one and Phial Mastery on the other to get 3-star consumables faster. Blacksmithing? Armor and Weapon specs, and in both cases, it might even be useful to have like, two of each of those too. This is an absolute edge case where you want to be completely self-sufficient, mind you, but with Warbands coming up in The War Within, it does make a fair bit of sense to go that route!

The Future

Early The War Within previews have been light on details, but it seems like the general intent is to keep the system effectively the same into TWW, likely with new currencies to replace the existing Artisan’s Mettle. This is…okay, actually, for me. Here’s the trick to all of this – while this new system has a lot of differnt pitfalls and downsides compared to the past iterations of crafting, WoW crafting was so dire in many ways that this actually is better. That’s not even intended to say this is bad, either – it is an improvement overall that adds gameplay depth and goldmaking capacity to trades that have traditionally done poorly at it by Blizzard’s own design. Sure, the same winning professions still win overall, the spec system is convoluted to little real benefit in terms of choices, and gathering professions still feel sort of left out in the dark on the actual improvements of the system – but as a first pass at what should hopefully be an unfolding effort, this is a good set of changes. It should absolutely not be a destination for what tradeskills look like for the long-term, but as a short and even medium-term solution to make tradeskills more engaging and valuable in gameplay, it is pretty good.

The real test will be to see how much changes in TWW and how player response is the second time around, now that we all understand the system better and can make more informed early choices – and I do expect that will have some impact. Until we know more, though, that is at least Dragonflight in a nutshell on crafting and gathering.