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In this preview, the World of Warcraft development team shares more on the new profession updates and shows off some of the new crafting stations and equipment becoming available in Dragonflight.
Crafting Stations in Dragonflight
Upon entering the Dragon Isles, you will find new crafting stations for crafting professions that don't currently have them, which includes all crafting professions with the exception of Cooking and Blacksmithing. The goal for these stations is to help increase the immersion and fantasy of your chosen professions and enhance the social experience.
Engineering Station
Enchanting Station
Jewelcrafting Station
With those goals in mind, much like for Blacksmithing, most new 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. You should find this profession hub to be vibrant with the commerce of buying, selling, and crafting!
Finally, recognizing that many alchemists may wish to craft fresh potions and other concoctions on the spot for their allies, the engineers of the Dragon Isles have invented remote crafting tables for alchemists to use— don't worry, they very rarely explode.
Portable Alchemy Station
Reagent Bags and Updated Stack Sizes
With the introduction of quality to crafting and gathering, there will be some additional pressure on bag space due to items of different crafting qualities not stacking. To offset this increase in bag space, we are making several inventory updates regarding professions.
First, we are excited to introduce a brand-new type of bag, the reagent bag! Reagent bags can only hold reagents, following the same rules for what can go in the reagent bank. What is particularly special about these bags is that they will have their own new, dedicated bag slot. In other words, once you get your hands on a reagent bag during your adventures in the Dragon Isles, you will have a large amount of additional inventory space to devote to your gathered and crafted reagents.
In addition to this new reagent-only bag, we are also increasing the maximum stack size for most crafted and gathered items in Dragonflight. Our current plan is for gathered reagents to stack to 1000 (up from 200), and most crafted consumable items will stack up to 200, up from 20 (e.g., potions, Optional Reagents, Finishing Reagents, etc.). We think these two changes will offset the added inventory space that items with quality will introduce.
Prospecting and Milling Updates
As part of the professions revamp, we are streamlining how Prospecting and Milling work. With this update, you will soon find new Milling and Prospecting recipes in each expansion-specific version of Inscription and Jewelcrafting that you know. For example, you would find a recipe for "Shadowlands Prospecting" if you were to look at Shadowlands Jewelcrafting recipes.
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
As part of our update to professions, we are expanding the concept of profession equipment beyond Fishing rods and inventory items like Blacksmithing hammers. 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 visually swap into this profession equipment, then switch back again upon entering combat.
For the time being, transmog will not be supported with profession equipment, keeping the visuals displayed directly connected with what you have equipped. We recognize that as more types of equipment are discovered over time, there will almost certainly be a desire for transmog support with this equipment as well.
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. This is always a risk-free operation, as you can never make the item worse when recrafting, even if you craft it with lower skill. That isn't to say the quality cannot go down since changing out Optional Reagents can result in a higher recipe difficulty, but if you were to remove the more difficult Optional Reagent, the quality would always maintain at least the quality it was at before.
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, 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.
We hope you've enjoyed learning more about professions and crafting in the Dragon Isles. We look forward to hearing your thoughts. Please note, as with anything in development, this is all still a work in progress, and some aspects may change as development progresses. Thank you, and we'll see you in Azeroth!