WoW Dragonflight Best Crafted Gear/Professions Guide 2023 - How to Upgrade/Recraft Your Crafted Gear in Dragonflight

Professions have gotten a huge overhaul in Dragonflight. Gone are the days when you would replace crafted gear before ever even stepping foot in a raid. Now, crafted items progress with you. In fact, for many classes, certain crafted items can often be your best in slot!

Limitations of Crafted Gear

There are no limits on the number of crafted items you can equip; however, there are some considerations and limitations to the buffs available.

Item Level

Crafted gear is upgradeable and can be increased in item level as you progress; however, there are maximum item levels for each of the three crafting levels:

Base Item - 392

Primal Infusion - 405

Concentrated Primal Infusion - 418

Special Items and Embellishments

You could have up to 5 items equipped at a time with special effects, but only two at a time with “Unique Equipped: Embellished” in the tooltip. Choose any one box from the top row plus any/all boxes from the bottom row (if beneficial).

Yes, technically Elemental Lariat counts as a Special Item as defined here, but we listed it separately since it's BIS for most if not all classes/specs.

Choosing Your Embellishment Slots

So you only get two Embellishment slots. How do you know which items to go for?

Strong for Most Classes

The following items are strong for many classes and are a popular choice almost across the board. Note that they may not be the strongest for your class, so you should still do your research!

Upgrading Your Gear

You can upgrade your gear by putting in a recrafting work order. Recrafting work orders require fewer mats than the original craft. There are a few reasons you might want to recraft:

Item Level Upgrades

Primal Infusion and Concentrated Primal Infusion are the two items you can use to upgrade the base item level of your gear. Both require you to gather 10 of an item and combine them with some Primal Chaos to create the upgrade item. Then you make a work order and place the upgrade item in the work order.

Adding Embellishments

You can add Embellishments to non-embellished gear without having to craft a whole new piece. You can also swap out one Embellishment for another with recrafting. Keep in mind that you are still limited to 2 total items with “Unique Equipped: Embellished”. 

Alchemical Flavor Pockets are added to the Embellishment section in the crafting UI, but they do not add “Unique Equipped: Embellished”.

Fishing for Inspiration Procs

Most of the time, your crafter will not be able to guarantee a 5 star item with Primal Infusion, specific stats, Embellishments, etc. This is where recrafting for procs comes in.

The actual mechanics behind this will be covered in depth in a later section, but just know that you may need to recraft a 4 star piece a few times before your crafter can proc a 5 star. For most crafters with most recipes, you can usually use 2 star materials for this rather than 3 star, which saves a lot of money on multiple recrafts!

Crafting Do's and Don'ts

Do:

-Provide all mats unless worked out ahead of time with your crafter.

-Check with your crafter to see what level mats are needed - you may be able to save wow gold by buying lower quality mats for the same outcome.

-Leave the minimum stars section blank or set it to 4 stars (2 star for Diamond crafts)

Send in recraft orders to fish for inspiration procs (confirm that your crafter can hit the skill requirement on a proc first).

-Ask your crafter what their % chance to proc inspiration is so you have an idea of the average number of recrafts that might be needed.

Don't:

-Expect your crafter to use their mats on you for free.

-Expect your crafter to use their own Artisan's Mettle unless EXPLICITLY agreed on (and DO expect to pay a huge premium if they do).

-Put orders in as required rank 5 (3 for Diamond crafts).

-Give up if you don’t get a rank 5 proc the first time–sometimes it takes a few tries!

-Get upset if your crafter doesn’t hit an inspiration proc by the time they “should” have–the % chance is the average, so sometimes it will take more or fewer tries.

-Miss out on good gear just because the crafting system is complicated!

Crafting Under the Hood

So how does this crafting stuff ACTUALLY work? If you want the numbers behind the crafts, dig in!

Crafting Stats Explained

• Skill - This is the crafting stat that you are used to. Your skill is your actual crafting skill from 1-100 (or 105 with some racials) plus any skill from your profession equipment, any skill from knowledge points, and skill bonuses from material quality (more on this in a later section). Your skill relative to the recipe difficulty determines the star level of your craft.

In this screenshot, we have a base skill of 100 plus an additional 216 from knowledge points, gear, and material quality for a total skill of 316. Your skill might be different when crafting different items, because some knowledge points only give skill for crafting specific items.

In this screenshot, we're crafting a different item for which we don’t have as much additional skill from knowledge. My base skill stays 100 because I have maxed out my profession, but we only get 129 bonus skill now. 

• Inspiration - The inspiration stat encompasses two different numbers: the percent chance you have to proc inspiration, and the number of additional skill points you get when you do proc an inspiration. You can see a breakdown of both if you hover over the inspiration stat in your crafting window. Adding additional points of Inspiration will only increase your percent chance to proc, but there are usually multiple places to spend knowledge points to increase the number of bonus Skill Points you get on a proc.

In this screenshot, we have a 35.8% chance to proc an Inspiration. If we do proc, we will add 79 to my total skill for that craft. So in this case, if we would normally craft with a skill of 316, we would craft with a skill of 395 when we hit an inspiration proc.

• Resourcefulness - This is your percent chance to get materials back when crafting. 

• Multicraft - This is your percent chance to craft “extra” items. Multicraft does not apply when crafting most equipable items, but it can be very useful for crafting consumables.

• Crafting Speed - This increases how quickly the crafting “cast” completes. It has no effect on item quality, number of items, etc.

Recipe Difficulty

Every recipe has a base difficulty, which will display at the top of the Crafting Details pane. The difference between the recipe difficulty and your crafting skill determines the quality of your final product.

If your skill is equal to the recipe difficulty or higher than the recipe difficulty, you will craft the item at maximum quality.

The base difficulty of this recipe is 315. We have not added any additional components, so we would currently be able to craft this recipe at guaranteed 5 stars, because my 316 skill is greater than the 315 recipe difficulty.

Recipe difficulty increases for each additional component you add to the craft. 

In this screenshot, we have added a 3 star Missive, which increases the recipe difficulty by 15. the new recipe difficulty is now 330. Because my skill of 316 is now lower than the recipe difficulty, we can no longer guarantee the craft at 5 stars.

The bar at the bottom is somewhat deceptive. People often think that the closer the bar gets to the 5 star, the higher chance they have to proc 5 star. This is NOT correct, and it will lead to a lot of frustration and wasted wow gold if you don’t understand how this works. Think of this bar like a clock. Just like a clock doesn’t move to the next hour until the minute hand crosses the 12, my guaranteed craft will not move up to 5 star until we reach the Skill Point threshold (in this case, 330). Whether we're at skill 290 or skill 329, we still have the same 36% chance to proc a 5 star (based on my Inspiration stat). 

The following items increase recipe difficulty by the given amount. To find the total recipe difficulty for what you want to craft, add the base difficulty plus the difficulty for each component you want to add.

Many crafting materials come in star levels from 1 to 3. Using higher quality materials adds additional points to your Skill stat. Remember, if Skill is greater than or equal to Recipe Difficulty, you craft at 5 stars, so getting additional Skill points is very helpful!

The exact ratio of Skill points gained per item quality level is pretty convoluted and changes with base recipe difficulty and internal weightings on different categories of materials, so it can be a pain to calculate by hand. Fortunately, there is an addon called CraftSim that will let you calculate crafting outcomes with different material levels. If you really want to maximize your crafting points per gold spent, I highly recommend playing around with CraftSim! 

If you just want a quick and dirty rundown, the basic rule is:

-All 1 star mats = 0 bonus skill

-All 2 star mats = bonus skill equal to ⅛ of the base Recipe Difficulty

-All 3 star mats = bonus skill equal to ¼ of the base Recipe Difficulty

-A mix of mats = use the addon to figure out exactly how much bonus skill you’re getting :)

How Inspiration Procs Work

So if 3 star mats give the most bonus skill, we should always use 3 star mats, right? Well…not necessarily. Since 2 star mats are almost always way cheaper than 3 star, we can apply a little math to the situation:

This screenshot shows the SimCraft addon in action–please note you will not see all of these stats with the base UI!

You can see on the right side that my total Recipe Difficulty is 370 (base difficulty of 280 + 90 total difficulty from all of my add-ons). My current skill is only 265, but I can get a total of 70 additional skill from Material Quality Bonus (280 base difficulty divided by 4 if I use all 3 star mats).

So we can get up to skill 265 + 70 = 335. Sweet! Except hang on, that still doesn’t get me up to the 370 skill I would need to guarantee 5 star. 

This is where Inspiration comes in.

It's not guaranteed, but if we can hit an inspiration proc, we will get an additional 70 Skill Points added to my craft. So wewould have 265 base skill + 70 bonus skill from 3 star mats + 70 bonus skill from the Inspiration stat. Awesome, that gets me up to 405 skill! That's way over the 370 we need. 

But if we're over the skill cap that we need, do I really need all of those 3 star mats? Could we save money instead and buy some 2 star? The answer is, yes. If we used all 2 star mats, we would get 35 bonus skill (280 base difficulty divided by 8). 265 base skill + 35 bonus skill from 2 star mats + 70 bonus skill from Inspiration = 370. Exactly how much I need!

Remember, additional skill points past hitting the recipe difficulty don’t give any bonus. If we craft with at least 370 skill, we craft a 5 star item, period. And even if we craft with 369 skill (nice!), the item will still be 4 stars.

If Inspiration procs, we get the full amount of my Inspiration skill added to the base skill. If it doesn't proc, we get none of that amount added. Therefore it makes sense to use the cheapest materials possible while still making sure that Skill + Inspiration Skill = Recipe Difficulty. And then be prepared to recraft a few times to chase that proc.

The Bottom Line

-Recipe Difficulty = Base Recipe Difficulty + Extra Difficulty from any added components (Missives, Infusions, Embellishments)

-Skill = Base Skill + Bonus Skill from profession equipment, knowledge points, material quality, and Inspiration (if it procs)

-Inspiration = a % chance to add a specific number of extra skill points to your craft when it procs.

-If Skill >= Recipe Difficulty, you craft a 5 star

-If Skill < Recipe Difficulty, you craft lower quality (star level depending on how much lower your Skill is)

-Even if Skill < Recipe Difficulty, you can proc a 5 star if Skill + Inspiration >= Recipe Difficulty. This ONLY happens when you proc Inspiration

-If you don't want to do the math, you CAN buy all 3 star mats to cover all your bases, but you are likely wasting your money on extra skill points that do nothing for you.