Massive Crafted Gear Nerf in Dragonflight Season 3
In the first Patch 10.2 PTR build, the item levels of Dragonflight Season 3 have been revealed and Crafted Gear has taken a massive nerf.
Larger Increase Between Tiers
The important thing to point out is that the item level increase on the PTR right now is 39 item levels, but normally this increase is only 26 item levels. This means that players will be more undergeared coming into Dragonflight Season 3 than normal.
In Dragonflight Season 3, a Mythic geared player will have gear equivalent to LFR of the current raid (typically equivalent to Normal of the current raid).
Massive Crafted Gear Nerfs
The new Enchanted Crests used for Craft gear have been datamined and their item levels have been revealed:
- Enchanted Whelpling's Dreaming Crest — Caps at 434 Item Level
- Enchanted Wyrm's Dreaming Crest — Caps at 463 Item Level
- Enchanted Aspect's Dreaming Crest — Caps at 473 Item Level
You can see that the new Aspects crafted crest caps at 473 item level. What does this equate to in Season 3?
- Mythic+ Great Vault 12-14s: Item Level 473
- Mythic+ End of Dungeon 19-20s: Item Level 470
- Heroic Raid: Item Level 467 — 476
Unless Crafted Gear can be upgraded using Crests in Season 3, the max rank of crafted gear is only very slightly better than the end of dungeon rewards for doing a +19 or +20 and equivalent to doing Heroic raid, far from being close to Best-in-Slot.
Crests don't appear to have changed what Mythic+ levels or Raid difficulties they drop from.
Thoughts and Opinions
I think most people would say that Crafted Gear was very very good and probably a little too good in Season 2, but I'm not sure that nerfing Crafted Gear this much does anything other than making it relatively worthless after a couple weeks. With the Myth
