Concentration & Professions Feedback - Crests, Concentration, Knowledge
Blizzard did a lengthy blue post about professions in The War Within, covering crests, concentration, knowledge, alchemy, acuity, and more.
Of particular interest is Blizzard's clarification on how easily players will be able to create maximum-quality crafts, as well as how players will obtain and interact with high-quality reagents. While in Dragonflight, Inspiration was required to reach the highest quality crafts for most gear, The War Within will allow players to eventually guarantee maximum quality on every craft!
Reagents, however, will be much more difficult to obtain at a high quality — and lower quality reagents will now matter much more in terms of their weight in a recipe due to an increase in the weight reagents count towards a recipe's difficulty.
Hambrick:
Are the current difficulty numbers for crests, missives, and embellishments final?
We just completed a tuning pass on all reagent difficulty and crafting difficulties and these changes will show up in the next Beta build. While still subject to change, these are real values that are representative of our intent and we would appreciate feedback on them once they are in your hands.
The design philosophy for crafting difficulty in The War Within is that a well-honed crafter who is fully specialized, equipped with the best crafting tools, and using Quality 3 reagents can guarantee maximum quality on every craft, with a few targeted exceptions on certain non-equipment crafts. Concentration is intended to offset shortcomings in any of these variables.
However, one major change coinciding with this approach is a significant increase to the difficulty curve of acquiring higher quality reagents. In Dragonflight, there was a skill threshold where you graduated out of Q1 reagents from gathering completely, defaulting to Quality 2 with the occasional Q3. Now, you will continue to gain
