Blacksmithing Guide for Dragonflight

Like always, Blacksmithing will be responsible for creating plate gear and melee weapons.

Dragonflight introduces Crafting Specializations, which you are able to unlock once your profession skill hits 25. These serve as a profession talent tree system fueled by Blacksmithing Knowledge, obtained from weekly quests, one-time treasures in the Dragon Isles, Draconic Treatises, and first-time crafts.

While you will eventually be able to unlock all talents, doing so will require a long time as the sources of knowledge are very limited, especially once one-time treasures and first-crafts are exhausted.

Besides crafting plate gear and weapons, Blacksmiths are able to make whetstones like the Primal Whetstone as an extra consumable for melee.

If you are a Horde player, none of the races have any smithing advantage, while Alliance players can be Lightforged Draenei for +10 skill points and the ability to summon an anvil, or a Dark Iron Dwarf with +5 skill points and 25% increase smithing speed.

Dragonflight introduces a few new concepts to professions, which can be seen in the annotated Crafting UI screenshot below:

• Most crafting reagents will now have detailed descriptions on how they can be obtained, such as their profession source;
• Quality, depicted by the number of diamonds on the top left corner of most profession items, is a measure of how proficiently the item was made, and how powerful it is. On crafted gear, this translates to extra item levels, while crafting reagents with higher quality contribute some skill towards any craft they are used on;
• Doing the First Craft of an item (as indicated in the UI) grants 5 Artisan's Mettle and one profession knowledge point, as well as significant experience, making it worthwhile to craft every item at least once;
• Crafting Specializations, the second option in the bottom tabs, are a new system which allows you to spend profession knowledge points for various talent-like bonuses to your crafting abilities;
• Crafting Orders, the last option in the bottom tabs, allows you to manage your orders, a new system which allows you to craft gear which requires bind on pickup materials for other players, as long as they provide these materials. You can also recraft equipment, in order to change its optional reagents and quality.

Recipe Difficulty represents the profession skill level needed to craft the selected recipe at its highest quality potential. It starts from your baseline profession skill, but can be improved with profession gear, specialization bonuses, the quality of the materials used to craft and other special items.

The Expected Quality bar under the recipe stats give an idea of the quality outcome of crafting the item under current conditions.

There are four new stats for crafting professions, which can show up on your crafting gear:

• Multicraft provides a chance to craft additional items;
• Resourcefulness provides a chance to use fewer tradeable crafting reagents when crafting;
• Inspiration provides a chance to craft a recipe with bonus skill (33% of Recipe Difficulty for crafts with 3 levels of quality, 16.7% for crafts with 5 levels of quality) added on;
• Crafting Speed increases your craft speed, allowing you to finish your crafts faster.

These stats, when activated, will show up on your Crafting Results panel, as displayed below:

All stats have their uses, but for Blacksmithing we recommend focusing on Inspiration and Resourcefulness for being able to craft higher quality items at lower costs.

Increasing your skill in Dragonflight is done by crafting items that grant skill points as usual, but the endgame of the profession is in the search for Blacksmithing Knowledge and using it to unlock Blacksmithing Specializations.

Some crafts require special bind on pickup reagents, such as Artisan's Mettle or Spark of Ingenuity. These reagents are heavily time gated in how they can be obtained, and thus caution should be used on what you use them for, especially early on.

In order to be efficient, we recommend trying to get as many first-craft bonuses while leveling Blacksmithing as possible, and also to get your Blacksmithing research on new crafts going. Once you start gaining knowledge, the best option is to pick a specific type of craft that you want to specialize into and using all of your points until it is maxed out. The higher ilvl pieces that you craft will be the most valuable, so specialization is key.

You can also choose to specialize into Specialty Smithing or Hammer Control, which both basically serve to make your crafts either cheaper or allows you to create specialized materials for future crafting.

Blacksmiths, like other professions, can use three pieces of gear:

• Flameproof Apron made by Leatherworkers;
• Khaz'gorite Blacksmith's Toolbox made by Blacksmiths;
• Black Dragon Touched Hammer made by Blacksmiths.

As shown in the image above, quality is a big factor in the stats you can get from the gear. Green versions are bind on equip and from trainer recipes, but blue versions require faction / renown grinding for their recipe and are bind on pickup, requiring you to submit a Crafting Order for them.

Speaking of crafting orders, all you need to do create one is to go to the NPC responsible for them in the capital city and open the auction-house like interface. Type a part of the name of the item you are looking to get crafted in the search box and pick the exact item from the list that shows up, resulting in the following interface:

Here you can pick between a Public Order, which requires you to supply all materials but should result in a very fast craft (as long as the gold Commission for the crafter is decent enough) as the whole server will be able to do your order, or a Personal Order, which requires you to specify a character that will then receive this order in their profession crafting log:

In public orders you cannot specify the quality of the crafted item. This means that, no matter your commission, there is a very high probability that an unskilled crafter will pick up the order and produce a low quality item, as that will still grant skill points without requiring materials from the crafter, making it useful even at a 1s commission.

Private orders do allow you to specify a minimum quality for the item, and you can always send them to your own alts or trusted players, who will then be able to contribute some, or even all of the crafting materials required themselves. This should be the favored method for anything but the most basic of crafts, but absolutely make sure to talk to the crafter first and / or put in a very large commission, as otherwise you are likely to have your order ignored, rather than finished.

All professions which craft gear can perform Recrafting, which takes an existing item and crafts it all over again in the hopes of a higher quality result, using a fraction of the original materials:

Recrafting's purpose is to allow you to craft gear upgrades as soon as you get their basic, low quality, materials, with the knowledge that you can easily upgrade the item later for a low cost, made lower by the fact the recrafting will only need a fraction of the original materials, which can then be maximum quality for the best chance at landing a top quality craft!

You can also use the work order system to submit a recrafting request, allowing you to recraft items you do not have the profession to make:

Blacksmithing Specializations are divided into four disciplines, each with a varying number of sub-specializations.

The best specialization is almost impossible to determine, but your best option is to pick one specific sub-specialization in either Armor or Weapon smithing and work towards it. Specializing into creating the absolute best of one very specific type of craft is the best option towards ensuring you get the most value and gold out of your profession. You also could choose to spec into Specialty Smithing and just focus on selling high quality intermediate crafting materials for lots of gold as well.

There are no combat bonuses anywhere in Blacksmithing as a profession. You should pick whatever type of craft appeals most to you and just work towards perfecting it, as the value of each craft will depend on how many other people specialize into it as well. There is no "best" build for any type of player.