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Today’s article will explore the Crafting Order system in The War Within. With notable improvements from Dragonflight and new additions for The War Within, the Crafting Order system has significantly improved, bringing a new lease of life to Crafting Orders – setting the stage for professions in the new expansion.
Continue reading for an in-depth guide to the Crafting Order system.
Issues in Dragonflight:
When Dragonflight was released, a minority of players were aware of the importance of specialization points, and maxing out specific paths as quickly as possible would give them an advantage over their competitors. Having many alts able to specialize in different aspects within a particular profession meant you could cover anything a player would require from Crafting Orders – thus monopolizing the Crafting Order market.
Players were farming Dragon Shard of Knowledge to power-level their professions/specializations. Blizzard quickly realized that the rate at which players successfully earned the Shards wasn’t intended and abruptly hotfixed it. Players who didn’t use these methods (including myself) found themselves inadequately behind those who did.
With the ease of leveling characters via the first craft bonus, Blizzard also scuppered the ability to level a profession, unlearn, and learn a different profession, thus earning a lot of Artisan Mettleand levels through first-time crafts. This method inadvertently puts extra demand on materials, increasing the cost of materials and making it difficult for other crafters to level their professions/character.
Public Crafting Orders also had an original limit of 20 Crafting Orders a crafter could complete. Due to many players complaining of insufficient Public Crafting Orders, Blizzard amended the limit from twenty to four. This alteration proved to be a success and something they’ll continue to use in The War Within.
The Crafting Order system in Dragonflight also had teething problems for specific professions, such as Engineering. Many intermediate reagents/crafts were challenging to acquire, meaning a lack of interest in crafted items. If you were a player in a low-populated realm, you would need help finding Crafting Orders due to the player base size; this had a negative effect when trying to level your profession or earn specialization points.
Thankfully, Blizzard sorted most of these issues, and as you will understand, this will benefit the profession/Crafting Order system going forward!
Improvements to Crafting Orders in The War Within:
As mentioned, Public Crafting Orders have a limit of four; this limitation prevents crafters from monopolizing all the Crafting Orders, giving everyone a chance to craft.
There is a limit to the amount of knowledge points you can earn within a week. This method will ensure players progress slowly, providing players who fall behind with catch-up mechanics. The further you fall behind, the greater the catch-up! Overall, this should mean steady progress in leveling your professions/specializations and offering importance to the Crafting Orders system.
Blizzard has also introduced NPC Crafting Orders, which hope to alleviate many problems surrounding players’ inability to complete Crafting Orders on challenging professions and low-populated realms. The option will also give players a feel for the Crafting Order system before trying out Personal and Public Crafting Orders. Importantly, it will be a catch-up mechanic for players who need to catch up with the cadence and a method for acquiring Artisan Acuity.
If you’d like to offer any feedback following your testing with NPC Crafting Order, leave your feedback here.
What is a Crafting Order?
For those unaware of this feature, Crafting Orders allow players to create an order for an item that they cannot craft themselves; this notably is an item that is Bind on Pickup, which you can’t purchase from the Auction House. Players can create either a Public Order or a Personal Order.
The Crafting Order System:
The Crafting Order system has three sections: Public, NPC, and Personal. While each option is similar and has the same result, they offer benefits based on your needs or the crafter. Below, I’ll cover some of those benefits.
Public Crafting Order:
A Public Crafting Order is an order available to crafters realm-wide. Crafters can scan the Public Order section for crafts they’re interested in; crafters will likely accept a Crafting Order based on the commission fee offered! To create a Public Order, you must supply all the materials!
Be aware that crafters are limited to four Crafting Orders, so ensure your commission is sufficient. As a crafter, select wisely the orders you want to complete to ensure you get the most from your four crafting orders.
Consider checking Trade Chat and creating/completing a Personal Order to ignore the limitation.
NPC Crafting Orders:
New to The War Within is NPC Crafting Orders. It’s unclear how often these will refresh, but Blizzard intends to have these rotate to give players different Crafting Orders with various rewards. NPC Crafting Orders aim to offer players a chance to catch up if they’ve fallen behind and acquire Artisan Acuity.
According to the feedback, there are issues in the beta testing phase, some of which might interest you.
Known Issues (Beta):
- The reward preview does not display all rewards for a given order.
- Customer-specific rewards need to be more consistently displayed and awarded.
- Pocket Lint is not an intended reward.
- The number of orders on Beta is slightly higher than intended, primarily due to knowledge catch-up orders always being active currently.
- Knowledge, Catch-Up Knowledge, and Acuity gains still need to be tuned.
- Non-quality items sometimes request a minimum quality and cannot be fulfilled.
- In rare cases, the NPCs are overly patient and submit orders within 2-3 months.
- Weekly knowledge tracking is only set up for some weekly knowledge sources, resulting in excessive knowledge gain in certain cases.
- These are affecting more than just NPC Crafting Orders.
Personal Crafting Orders:
A Personal Crafting Order has many benefits that outweigh the Public Crafting Order. Here, you can assign a specific crafter, a friend, an alt, or someone advertising in chat. Ultimately, knowing the person who crafts your Crafting Order will guarantee that they craft it to the highest quality.
With Personal Crafting Orders, you don’t need to supply all the materials, but you will need to increase your commission to offset the gold required for the crafter to provide the materials on your behalf.
Players using the Personal Crafting Order option have already contacted the crafter and agreed on a commission, completing your Crafting Order.
How to Place a Crafting Order:
You can find the Crafting Enclave in Dornogal (coordinates unavailable), the capital of Khaz Algar; this is where you’ll find the clerks for placing Crafting Orders. Interact with one of them and choose the category that best fits your needs.
For this example, we’ll use the category Profession Equipment. Ensure you’ve selected Current Expansion Only within the Filter option. This option will only return results for The War Within. Under Blacksmithing, choose Tools and Proficient Blacksmith’s Hammer. In the top right, pick Public or Personal Order. Remember that you must provide all materials if it’s a Public Order!
If you have a crafter in mind who will complete the Crafting Order, select Personal Order and add the player’s name; otherwise, choose Public Order and hope someone opts to complete it.
You’ll see you need 50 Artisan Acuityand 1 Core Alloy (these amounts may change at a later date). If you want the highest quality craft, ensure you supply the highest quality materials. You’ll notice there’s an Optional Reagent; this guarantees a specific stat for your tool. Furthermore, this can increase the craft’s difficulty, which can impact the final quality of your craft.
You must add a commission once you’ve added everything to the Crafting Order. Crafters will only complete your Crafting Order if the commission is worthwhile. If you want this crafted urgently, I recommend inserting a 12-hour time limit.
How to Complete a Crafting Order?
Find your profession hub within Dornogal and interact with the profession table (or open your profession beside your profession table). At the bottom of the profession window, look for Crafting Orders. At the top of the page, you’ll have three options: Public, NPC, and Personal.
For Public Crafting Orders, you must react once you see an order you can complete as you compete with players across your realm. It’s a first come, first served scenario. However, players who have picked a Crafting Order have 30 minutes to complete it before it’s canceled and returned to the Public Crafting Order.
NPC Crafting Orders are easier; these are similar to Personal Orders; these are explicitly for you, and you can complete them within the time given. Upon completion, these offer a variety of rewards. It’s unclear how often the Crafting Orders refresh, but the rewards will be appealing – especially if you can acquire an unlearned recipe, as highlighted below!
Personal Crafting Orders are players specifically choosing you to craft something for them. Here, players can specifically demand a quality for the final craft, which, if your skill isn’t sufficient, may come at the price of Concentrationor additional materials and Artisan Acuity for Recrafting. Ensure you can fulfill their requirements before accepting the Crafting Order!
The Importance of Commission:
The commission is essential to creating and completing a Crafting Order, so I wanted to add a section highlighting its importance and things you should consider. The hardest part is assuming a fair commission.
When adding commission, consider the difficulty of the recipe, the price of the materials you can’t supply, and depending on how quickly you want it crafted. Consider how many crafters can craft your item, such as the Elemental Lariat in Dragonflight. This craft demanded a high commission due to the lack of crafters with the recipe and sufficient skill to craft a maximum-quality Lariat.
There’s also merit in considering if this is a specialist craft; players would only craft an item at the Altar of Decay if the commission were more than 10-20k gold. Crafters needed to clear and defeat the last boss in the Dungeon: Brackenhide Hollow before interacting with the crafting table – Altar of Decay.
The Importance of Artisan Acuity:
Artisan Acuity is similar to the Artisan Mettle we had in Dragonflight. It will be a vital component when crafting in The War Within. When you get Personal Orders, ensure the customer adds all of them to the order. Otherwise, you will have to make up the difference; this includes the prospect of Recrafts to reach a specific quality of craft.
There will become a time when you’re in short supply, restricting what you can and can’t craft. Completing NPC Crafting Orders will replenish our stock of Artisan Acuity, but given the known issues in Beta, it needs to be clarified at what rate.
Expect the rate at which we gain Artisan Acuityto be slower than that on Beta. This means you will want to pick and choose wisely what you want to craft yourself, ensuring you have enough for any potential crafts in the future!
The Importance of Profession Equipment:
Profession Equipment plays a vital role in professions. The equipment comes in two forms: a Tool and an Accessory. Most professions use two accessories! These offer increased stats that significantly impact your skill as a crafter and the potential quality of the item you can craft.
With Crafting Orders, your main goal is crafting gear; the greater the quality, the better! You’ll be looking at stats that increase your skill, thus reducing the margin of difficulty for a specific craft. Also, there’s merit in Ingenuity and Resourcefulness; I’ve added a brief description below.
Ingenuity: Provides a small chance to refund any Concentrationused in the craft.
Resourcefulness: Provides a small chance to refund materials used in the craft.
Explicitly for Crafting Orders, consider having two items that benefit Ingenuity and Resourcefulness. If you’re crafting something with Concentration, use the item with Ingenuity; alternatively, use Resourcefulness if you’re not.
In The War Within Beta, there should be different quality Profession Equipment based on rarity and item level. Due to a bug (or restriction), Blizzard hasn’t added each item level; ideally, you want the highest item level/rarity – whatever you can afford! Otherwise, continue using the Profession Equipment from Dragonflight until it becomes available!
Check out my article regarding Profession Equipment!
The Importance of an Alt Army?
With the introduction of Warbands in The War Within, alts will become prevalent, especially in professions. Dragonflight has already highlighted how you can monopolize professions in the Auction House/Crafting Order system by ensuring you have a diverse number of professions, each with a different specialization path. This method will be the same (if not worse) in The War Within!
For those looking to incorporate this method, I suggest you use a spreadsheet to manage your alts and detail their professions and specialization paths.
If you want more alts, remember that with MoP Remix‘s introduction, the character slot limit for an account has increased to 60! It’s efficient to level characters to level 70 on MoP Remix, and with professions accessible, immediately after you finish the intro segment of The War Within, they can almost start straight off the bat!
Consider checking out my article, MoP Remix, which will guide you through what’s on offer in this special,limited-time event!
Conclusion:
As highlighted in this article, I was slow to the party when leveling my professions/specializations in Dragonflight. More importantly, once I did get involved, it was short-lived. Competing with other players for Public Orders took up a lot of free time I didn’t have. Instead, I concentrated on crafting for myself and alts – which inadvertently increased my professions/specializations at a steady pace.
My primary profession was Cooking (funny enough, it’s a secondary profession). Sadly, this offers no importance to the Crafting Order system. However, it generated a lot of gold on the Auction House due to its ever-increasing demands throughout the different patch cycles. Due to the high demand for crafted food, it’s a tremendous post-and-forget market!
The NPC Crafting Orders look like a great addition to the game, alleviating many of the problems encountered in Dragonflight. However, with many issues with this new feature, it’s too soon to gauge its full potential until Blizzard irons it out! If they do encounter additional issues following the expansion’s release, I hope they rectify them quickly to prevent the gap in the quality of crafters that was seen in Dragonflight.
What are you looking forward to with Crafting Orders in The War Within?
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