Blacksmithing in Dragonflight

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

Dragonflight offers Crafting Specializations, which you can acquire whenever your career skill reaches level 25. These serve as a vocational skill tree structure that is powered by Blacksmithing Knowledge, which may be gained through weekly tasks, one-time treasures in the Dragon Isles, Draconic Treatises, and first-time crafts.

While you will ultimately be able to unlock all abilities, it will take a long time because knowledge sources are extremely restricted, especially if one-time prizes and first-crafts are spent.

Besides crafting plate gear and weapons, Blacksmiths are able to make whetstones like the Primal Whetstone as an extra consumable for melee.2.

Best Race for Blacksmithing in Dragonflight

Horde players have no advantage in smithing, however Alliance players can be Lightforged Draenei for +10 skill points and the ability to summon an anvil, or a Dark Iron Dwarf for +5 skill points and a 25% improvement in smithing speed.

Crafting UI in Dragonflight

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.

Crafting Stats for Blacksmithing in Dragonflight

Recipe Difficulty denotes the amount of professional ability required to create the chosen recipe to its utmost grade potential. It begins with your base profession skill and may be enhanced through profession gear, specialty bonuses, the grade of resources used to make, and other unique items.

Under the recipe stats, the Expected Quality bar indicates the quality outcome of making the item under present 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 are useful, but for Blacksmithing, we recommend focusing on Inspiration and Resourcefulness to be able to make higher-quality products at a reduced cost.

Leveling Blacksmithing in Dragonflight

In Dragonflight, you can level up by manufacturing objects that earn skill points, but the goal of the profession is finding Blacksmithing Knowledge and applying 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.

To be efficient, we recommend attempting to obtain as many first-craft bonuses as possible when leveling Blacksmithing, as well as starting your Blacksmithing research on new crafts. Once you start earning knowledge, the ideal choice is to specialize on a certain sort of craft and use all of your points until it is maxed out. The higher ilvl items you create will be the most valuable, thus specialization is essential.

You can also specialize in Specialty Smithing or Hammer Control, both of which help to either make your crafts cheaper or allow you to develop specialty resources for future manufacturing.

Best Blacksmithing Gear

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.

Quality is a key impact in the metrics you may acquire from the gear, as demonstrated in the graphic above. Green variants are bound on equip and from trainer recipes, however blue versions need faction / renown grinding for their recipe and are bind on pickup, necessitating the submission of a Crafting Order.

Crafting Orders

To establish a crafting order, just go to the NPC responsible for them in the capital city and access the auction-house-like interface. Enter a portion of the item’s name in the search field and choose the specific item from the list that appears, resulting in the following interface:

You can choose between a Public Order, which requires you to supply all materials but should result in a very quick craft (as long as the gold Commission for the crafter is reasonable) because the entire server will be able to do your order, and a Personal Order, which requires you to specify a character who will then receive this order in their profession crafting log:

You cannot select the quality of the created item while placing a public order. This implies that, regardless of your commission, an untrained crafter is quite likely to pick up the order and manufacture a low-quality item, which would nevertheless offer skill points without requiring materials from the crafter, making it useful even at a 1s commission.

You may define a minimum quality for private orders, and you can always send them to your own alts or trustworthy people, who will then be able to contribute part, or even all, of the crafting materials necessary. This should be the preferred way for all except the most simple crafts, but make sure to talk to the craftsman first and/or place a very big commission, since else your order is likely to be ignored rather than completed.

Recrafting

All professions that make gear may conduct Recrafting, which involves taking an existing item and crafting it from scratch in the hopes of producing a higher quality product with a fraction of the original materials:

The purpose of recrafting is to allow you to craft gear upgrades as soon as you obtain 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 that the recrafting will only require a fraction of the original materials, which can then be of maximum quality for the best chance of 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:

Best Blacksmithing Specializations and Talents in Dragonflight

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

It is very hard to select the ideal specialization, but your best bet is to focus on one specific sub-specialization in either Armor or Weapon smithing and strive towards it. Specializing in the absolute finest of one very particular sort of craft is the greatest way to ensure that you obtain the most value and gold out of your vocation. You may also specialize in Specialty Smithing and only offer high-quality intermediate crafting materials for a lot of money.

Raider / Mythic+ Blacksmithing Specialization and Talents

There are no combat bonuses in the profession of Blacksmithing. You should choose whichever form of craft appeals to you the most and focus on improving it, as the worth of any craft is determined by how many other people specialize in it as well. There is no “best” build for any player type.