Profession Overhaul Explained - Everything You Need To Know About Crafting in Dragonflight

Hey folks! This is Kalani, professions are changing a lot going into dragonflight and it’s not just a new user interface, this is a complete overhaul. I don't think professions have ever been given this much attention and it definitely shows.

We have multiple overlapping new systems within professions that allow you to pick and choose how you want to use your professions and what kind of items you might want to make and which items you want to be really good at making we have specializations, profession knowledge, empowered Gathering nodes, profession gear and even special profession stats.

Profession materials and crafts now have quality tied to them and the higher quality you can make the better everything is going to be and there ‘seven something called re-crafting which is probably the best thing added to professions in a long time, there is a lot to break down here and every part is pretty important so this video should hopefully serve as a One-Stop shop for learning how all these parts work together so you know exactly what to expect when you dive into professions when the dragonflight expansion goes live, this is the professions overhaul explained and everything you need to know about this new type of end game progression.

The first major update for professions in dragonflight is the ability to choose a specialization, this is goings affect your entire profession progression path and it's where you get into the nitty-gritty of special bonuses and really honing your craft whatever that may be, for example blacksmiths have four specialization options, armor smithing boosts your abilities while crafting armor as you work through the branches your skills become more specialized and your bonuses will work for less and less crafts but the bonuses become more impactful, weaponsmithing is the same thing but focused on Crafting weapons specialty, smithing is a small tree focused on making tools and Alloys which give General bonuses to most crafting options tools will be very important for later but you can also craft better Adventure in gear like grappling hooks improve your stonework for things like enhancements and then smelting focuses on the various Alloys you’ll need to craft the best blacksmithing gear and then the last option is Hammer control, this also gives General bonuses to your overall blacksmithing potential so depending on where you progress and what you unlock first your blacksmithing Journey can be very different from other blacksmiths and you'll craft different things at different quality levels.

Every profession has multiple specializations that allow you to focus on different Pathways so you're never going to be a One-Stop shop default profession in dragonflight everyone will have different skills and even if you pick the same specialization you might put your points into different places, not everyone can do everything at the tippy topper professions especially early on so if you want the best of the best crafting result you're gonna have to find a crafter who was focused specifically into the areas that you want to take advantage of that means.

Professions will take a lot more time and effort to max out and they’re actually kind of levels of maxing out but that will allow professions to be a viable endgame alternative, it also means that time invested into professions will actually be quite valuable so if you love professions and crafting and that’s all you want to do dragonflight could beat lot of fun.

You can choose to unlock a specialization after earning 25 skill points in your profession so the first unlock will be at skill 25 the second at 53rd at 75 and if you have a fourth one, not all of them do there will be 100this will be very important for your overall progression we'll touch on this more when we talk about the general progression.

You can expect to see with professions later on the next most important thing is going to be profession knowledge, this is basically your skill points or Talent points or whatever you want to call it for your specialization itself, so we have completely different progression paths here Skilling up your profession as we always have done is simply that increasing your skill to learn new recipes and improve your craft but the specialization talent trees require profession knowledge, you can earn this knowledge in a variety of ways and it’s also going to depend on what profession you are using the most basic way of earning knowledge is to craft items but only the very first time you craft a recipe will give you knowledge, this means you will want to craft every single recipe you'll learn at least once which is really interesting to me because professions were always a game of finding the most cost efficient item to craft to level up and while that’s still somewhat relevant you will definitely want to craft every recipe at least once.

Knowledge is what drives your profession this time so every point is going to be very valuable thankfully first crafts are also very easy to track one filter option we have up at the top is the first craft bonus, if you tick that only recipes that you haven’t gained to the first craft bonus 4 will appear so filter by first craft and make sure you have all of those recipes made at least once to get your sweet sweet Profession knowledge.

For gatherers who don’t really have many recipes to creator craft you can instead find knowledge while Gathering so literally anytime you mine at all there's a chance to get some knowledge every time you pick a herb, there’s a chance to get some knowledge they don't seem to be super super rare and I've seen items that give one knowledge and items that give two knowledge so maybe the higher skill you get the faster you can gain this knowledge, it's definitely more straightforward when compared to crafting profession knowledge but it is also quite random.

Another source of knowledge is going to be daily quests in valdraken, each profession seems to have quick daily Quest related to their craft provide materials craft items you know how this goes the reward is a setoff notes that increases your knowledge by a few points, there will most likely be other quests related to professions and knowledge too so we should have plenty of options when the system is all fleshed out.

An interesting byproduct of earning knowledge is that you will also get a special crafting item called Artisans metal, there are also a few different ways you can get your hands on this and it's going to be incredibly important for higher tier crafting especially but every time you earn some Profession Knowledge you also gain a small amount of Artisans metal so that makes knowledge even more important.

Now the most important factor for specializations is that no matter what spec you decide to focus on first you should see a benefit to your overall profession skill level typically each point spent in a specialization node will increase your overall skill as well as provide specific bonuses depending on the spec you decide to put points into, this is going to be incredibly important due to the next big change quality in dragonflight.

Every single profession items going to have a quality tied to it, raw materials like bars and herbs have three quality levels whereas crafted items and finished products have up to five quality levels, quality is a very simple feature, the higher the quality the better the product when it comes to crafted items and gear that translates directly into item level so the better quality your wears the higher item level they are going to be so the better they are in every way which means you should be able to sell them for higher profit margins, it's kind of like the crafter’s dream right if you have the best stuff you can charge the highest price people will literally seek you out to have their gear made because they know you’re the best for that specific type of item.

The same goes for consumables too, potions and vials especially the higher in the quality of whatever you make in your profession the better it is goings be so it's not just for crafting gear it’s almost anything made by any profession in dragonflight the higher quality you can get to the better that item is going to be now quality.

For raw materials is a bit different but honestly it's also very straightforward higher quality rare materials increase the quality of an item made with them so you’re going to get a better result if you use tier 3 quality ores in your blacksmithing recipes, the same goes for any optional crafting reagents with quality the higher the quality the better the result will be obviously the higher quality raw materials are goings be rarer and thus more expensive and quite costly to introduce into your crafting which means the results need tube worthwhile you can get higher tier raw materials by increasing your Gathering skill so max level miners, herbals and skinners will see more higher quality materials more often when Gathering but then some specializations also Focus strictly on that high quality stuff even to the point of refining your materials so you can turn tier one mats into tier two mats and then turn those into tier three mats eventually so depending on how you decide to specialize you might have easier access to higher quality materials but you’ll be sacrificing in other areas so it is an important choice the quality of an item usually comes down to skill difficulty.

We were just talking about Gathering so let's see how that looks, first when you open your Mining Journal for example, and you can look at all the different types of nodes available in dragon flight each one will have a skill difficulty tied to it and I think that number means that's the skill level you need to reliably get the highest quality raw materials from that node.

Now 260 skill might seem quite high but remember that you have up to 100 from your profession by itself plus one skill point per knowledge spent in specializations plus extra skill points for different things depending on your chosen specialization and then we also have things like profession gear, it’s all going to add up eventually and that’s kind of the big goal of profession progression in dragon flight.

For crafting we have recipe difficulty which is arguably more interesting it’s basically the same thing the skill requirement for crafting that item at I think the highest available quality, you also get a bar to track your current skill progress what quality you can expect from the current setup of materials and if you hover over the next quality mark it actually tells you what skill level you would need to get to to guarantee that higher quality as you progress further and further learning more specializations and leveling up your profession you'll be able to craft tier 2 then 3 then 4 and eventually that coveted tier 5 quality which yields the very best results.

But here's the cool thing and where things start to get a bit more complicated, you can do a lot of different things to increase your skill make recipes easier or even make recipes harder for a different result for example using higher quality raw materials increases the overall quality expected for the resulting craft you can use special materials to infuse your craft with power, this is how you can bump up gear to even Mythic raid item levels but using those items increases the difficulty of a recipe so you’ll have to pull out all the stops to increase your skill to reach the higher tiers of quality which means the highest item levels available.

You can customize secondary stats similar to what we saw in shadowlands but that also increases the difficulty of a craft, you can add powers to your gear through embellishments to customize them further but once again that's going to increase recipe difficulty and then there are special finishing reagents you can use too these provide a large bonus to your skill level to help you reach those High break points for higher quality results.

Another way to increase your crafting efficacy is through special profession only stats, you can get inspiration resourcefulness crafting speed and multicraft, the inspiration stat is basically just like crit you have a chance to be inspired for your craft which crafts the item with extra bonus skill that bonus skill is usually enough to craft an item at the next highest quality you have available to you seven if you don't have enough skill to get there naturally you can stack the inspiration stat to get those lucky crafting procs.

Resourcefulness is also quite useful, it gives you a chance to craft an item while using less tradable reagents, this is going to be very useful if you have expensive materials to source and using stacking resourcefulness could save you a lot of gold in the long run.

Crafting speed is pretty self-explanatory, you craft faster, potentially useful for some of the large batch crafting professions like dual crafting or Alchemy and then multicraft is a bit odd mainly because it only seems to work on recipes that can yield more than one item as a result so things like sharpening stones or other enhancements but Alchemy is where this stack will really shine because almost all Alchemy recipes can make use of multicraft, it basically just gives you a chance to craft additional items using the same materials so a combo of multi-craft and resourcefulness could be amazing for Alchemy.

Specifically Gathering professions so Mining, herbalism and skinning have different stats to work with you can get finesse, deafness and perception, finesse allows you to gather more of the standard material from any source so if you ‘re mining teravite you get more teravite.

Deafness just speeds up your Gathering speed and then perception gives you a higher chance for finding rare materials.

the main way you're going to get these new profession specific stats is through profession gear, up at the top right of the user interface you have three slots one profession tool slot and two professional accessory slots, you'll find that you have very specific things to fill these slots so blacksmiths have a hammer a tool kit and an apron, that follows for pretty much every profession so you'll have to figure out what your three pieces of gear are where they come from and how you can get some upgrades.

I think every piece of gear can be created by professions but you can't create all of your own gear, blacksmith for example can create their own Hammers and their own toolkit when they need to find a leather worker to create the aprons, that is also very typical at least one of your pieces of gear will be crafted by a different profession but sometimes all of your pieces of gear are crafted by others which means you either need to seek out someone who can craft your other pieces or you can maybe just have an ALT with the appropriate profession.

I guess each piece of equipment will give you some stats, you'll start with uncommon gear work your way up to rare gear and then there are even special epic gear pieces which will take a lot more effort to craft but it should be worth it.

Unsurprisingly this gear also has quality levels so the better quality gear you use the more stats you'll have the better your crafts will be so when you look at some specializations that focus on tools and crafting their very best tools available you might have thought that useless compared to crafting better armor or weapons but everyone will want the best tools to craft their own stuff right so there’s definitely value there so upgrading your profession gear is yet another step in this huge progression path.

Now perhaps one of the most important additions in dragonflight is something called re-crafting, up until now you've probably been thinking great higher quality random procs all of this is going to mean I have to craft the same item over now over again to get a better result and while you are kind of correct you don’t have to craft the item itself again thanks to recrafting, re-crafting lets you pop in an item you've already made and just remake It For Less material cost than the actual recipe, these costs also exclude the rare materials which let's be honest are the big problem when it comes to making the same item over and over again so you can recraft an item to try and get a higher quality or you can swap the secondary stats or add special effects with embellishments, you can even recraft an item with a power infusion materials to increase his item level.

This means you don’t have to wait to craft an item you want to use if you really need a shield or a weapon or any piece of gear whatever it is just go ahead and craft it as early as you can then when you’ve built up some material stores progressed through your profession more and earned more skill or learn new specialization boosts or gotten a new item to increase item level you can recraft that item to upgrade it, it's really the icing on the cake for the whole setup.

Then the last huge change for professions in dragonflight is the work order system, there’s one big problem with this system right now, it's not actually in the beta or at least not completely, it also hasn’t really been tested at all which doesn’t bode well because it might be where professions live or die in dragon flight.

The basic idea of the work order system is simple, you can create an order for exactly what you want crafted providing whatever materials you want plus a fee for the crafter, Crafters can then come along to the work order menu pick and choose which items they think are worth their time and materials to craft and fill those orders.

It sounds like you're just removing the trade bartering and barking which you kind of are but there's a more important factor at play here with a work order you can have someone else craft you a bind on pickup item so whenever you go through professions and you see something is Bop it’s not actually necessarily Bop, that just means you would have to go through a work order to obtain it for yourself, whether that's going to be higher item level game high tier profession game yeah special reagents or even battle pets if it can be crafted through the work order system it doesn't matter if it’s bind on pickup you can still get that item without having the profession yourself.

This also extends into Bop materials, some of the rarest crafting materials will be bind on pickup but you can still offer them to a crafter through the work order system, that's why I say this could make or break professions because it has to work for the profession change as a whole to work so hopefully they start testing it sometime soon, just know that through work orders you can craft Bop items for other players or have Bop items crafted for you.

You can also use Bop materials to have something crafted for you or use Bop materials to craft something for someone else so bind on pickup doesn’t really mean what it used to and it's a huge change to how this system usually works, now just in case you were worried about your bag space with all these changes and all the different quality of items and all that jazz.

There is also anew bag slot dedicated to profession items specifically early on in your adventures in the brand Dragon Islands you should be able to pick up a 26-slot profession bag from a quest giver but an end game tailor can create 32 and 34 slot profession bags, so we'll have even more space to carry around our hordes of materials.

That covers the majority of the big picture changes coming with dragonflight professions and as you can see there are a lot of moving Parts, this is why I said professions are going to be completely different this expansion so I hope with all this laid out in front of you actually believe me, this time some folks probably think it's way too much it's too complicated and it's going to take way too long to understand and work through and you might be right but I think it's an interesting change of pace.

Professions haven't mattered in such a long time so I'm excited to see how this pans out how the player base in general takes to it and whether they think it's worth the effort or not either way this expansion will bring the largest profession overhaul that we’ve ever seen in game.

So what is this going to look like when dragonflight launches, what is the typical profession progression path going to be, you’ll start out by earning profession skill points per usual, craft new recipes to earn knowledge as you level, always making sure to craft each recipe at least once that’s going to be your first goal on the way to skill level 25.

When you get to skill level 25 in your profession you can pick your first specialization, this choice is going to be very important because it could spring you forward quite nicely in terms of progression it’s also important because there doesn’t seem to be any way to change your choice or to reset any part of the specialization system once you pick your spec, it's locked in once you spend your knowledge in specific nodes that’s locked in as well so you're probably going to want to sit down go through each spec and what it offers and maybe plan out a little pathway so you know where your first points are going to go from there.

You're going to continue up to skill level 50 remembering to craft each new recipe at least once for the free knowledge and this is kind of where you hit your first roadblock which might seem strange but skill level 50 is when you can create or craft almost any recipe in the game for your profession so you don't actually have to Max your profession out to crack have the best stuff, you can start doing that as early as skill level 50 in a profession.

The main caveat here is that you won't be able to craft anything at a higher quality just yet so you'll pick up your second specialization and start the slow grind up to profession skill level 100, the extra skill between 50 and 100 will boost up your overall skill level which lets you craft better items but also unlock your last specialization options the recipes you'll be crafting between 50 and 100 are going to be quite expensive which is why I think it will take quite a long time for anyone to reach that point.

That also means that for a good chunk of your profession progress you won't have access to every specialization making your spec choices even more important, at this point you’ll want to skill up whenever you can hunt down new recipes to craft for more knowledge, complete any quests or daily quests that reward you with professional knowledge and try to get the best profession tools and gear you can get your hands on.

This is also part of the reason why I think the work order system is going to be so important you can use the work order system to use other players materials for your own skill UP which might help you get from 50 to 100 far cheaper than if you're gonna Source all the materials yourself so this time it’s not necessarily a race to Max skill level there's a lot of different progression paths you'll want to work on which is more interesting in my opinion right.

To round out this video Let’s quickly go over gathering in dragonflight because Gathering is changing in a few ways but the basic premise is the same, miners will be collecting ores in dragonflight we have teravite or draconian kazgarite or from what I've seen teravite ore has its own specific nodes, draconium has its own specific nodes and is going to be the rarer of the two and then kazgarite ore can randomly be found in either Terra like nodes or draconium nodes.

Herbalism follows the same kind of path except there are more herb nodes to look out for, we've got hok and Bloomsaxophrage, bubble Poppy and rythbark, youcan also find empowered Mining and herbing nodes we have Bloody hardened molten Primal and Titan touched versions about Terra by and draconium deposits for Miners and then we have wind swept frigid decayed and Titan touch versions of herbing nodes, each empowered node will contain a specific rousing crafting reagent this is our new moat if you played from way back in the day there’s routing and Earth fire Frost blood Decay and order they each come from different types of Mining and herbing nodes and you can also find them from Elemental Monsters or creatures tied to those elements.

You can combine 10 rousing items to create one awakened item and the same Elemental types both rousing and awakened element are used in recipes so they are going to be very valuable but there is an additional effect with empowered nodes, both Miners and herbalists will get a special overloadability this is tied to one of your specializations when you overload a node you will trigger a different effect depending on the type of empowered node I’ll pop them up on screen for you so you can pause and look at them yourself, this video is already quite long so I don’t want to go through each of them individually as there are quite a lot of effects that you can trigger, It's worth noting that your specialization that deals with overloading nodes can give you even more effects and significantly reduce the cooldown of overloading so you can do it more often.

Now moving on skinning is very much the same as it always has been kill stuff skin it profit but dragonflight introduces a lot of different species, specific materials for you to hunt for so alongside the basic leather and scales we have rare leather and scales as well as things like salamantha scales which only come from salamanders, there's also pristine Vulcan horns that only come from vorkins or even Flawless proto-dragon scales you can probably guess where they come from so it's not quite as easy as finding the largest pack of beasts to skin over and over again.

You're going to have to go hunt down some specific monster packs to get the materials you want for your leather working progress that's going to make skinning way more interesting in general so as you can see professions are changing a lot the really cool part of this though is that even the bind on pickup portions of a profession system can be used to help other players through the work order system that’s going to massively increase your potential gold earning potential if you put a lot of time and effort into your professions folks are going to be looking for the best Crafters to make their stuff for the highest quality available so if that's you could charge a large gold premium for some Professional Services in dragonflight.

I think it's going to be a really interesting landscape to navigate that goes for Gathering professions too tough to make the best products you need the best raw materials and they’re going to come from the gatherers who have more knowledge higher specializations and even different specializations you're not going to be able to Max them all out right away so the path you choose will dictate which materials you can provide at those higher qualities and then the specializations of a crafter will also dictate which kinds of items they can create at higher qualities so you definitely will not be able to cover every aspect early on in this expansion which should provide enough niches for players to spread out and cover different things.

It is worth noting that apparently as the expansion unfold as we get through dragonflight we should be able to unlock everything on each character for each profession but that's going to take a very long time, we've never really had professions in this state they offer a lot of power there's a lot of depth and complexity and it looks like time investment is going to pay off quite nicely.

Now there are still some Kinks here and there that need ironing out but the profession system seems to be in a good spot on the beta right now, the major blanks that we have are related to some items and how we're going to obtain them because every Source obviously isn’t available right now or maybe just not available for testing so there's a bit of uncertainty there but also for the drop rates of some of the rare items we have no idea how long it’s going to take to get some of this stuff.

Some professions could progress quite slowly in general for everyone Definitely wouldn't expect to be pumping out the highest quality crafted gear right away or maybe even within the first month we'll just have to wait and see either way this is a huge update for professions and I'm really glad that it will become an alternative end game progression path with professions being so different and kind of complicated and with so many choices being very important for Progress, I'm actually thinking about doing individual profession guides to help navigate the best ways to level up each profession and what specializations could be worth taking early on, that could be an interesting little series let me know if that would be of interest to you in the comments section but that's the new dragonflight profession overhaul explained in everything you need to know about it is there anything in here that is still unclear do you have any specific questions that you feel I didn’t address or answer and what do you think about the profession system for what you've seen so far leave all your thoughts in the comment section below!