by Whitney "Neinball" Fairchild - 10 years ago     show comments

There have been a lot of changes to the crafting system in Reaper of Souls, but we’ve got you covered on all of the updates.  I’ll be touching on Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting in this article with my write up on Enchanting following later this weekend.

Crafting Mats

One of the biggest changes to the crafting system has been the unification of all lvl 60 and lower crafting mats.  Now all items that previously salvaged into Subtle, Shimmering and Wishful Essences will now become Exquisite Essences instead.  Same goes for Fallen Teeth, Lizard Eyes and Encrusted Hooves, they’re all Iridescent Tears now.  Any of the pre-existing mats you have in your inventory will convert into Exquisites or Tears, so for the time being it’d be best to not up convert any crafting materials you have currently.

Similarly, all Blacksmithing/Jewelcrafting pages and tomes have been converted into Tomes of Secrets. Tomes of Secrets are now used for training up the majority of the levels of your artisans as well as in all rare crafting recipes from lvl 30 through 60.  Fiery Brimstones remain relatively unchanged, with the only exception being that any legendary of lvl 60 or below will salvage into one and that they are a requirement for crafting lower level legendaries and sets now too.  Demonic Essences now drop from elites of all levels below 60 and are used as a crafting materials in almost all recipes (both rare and blue) with a of lvl 25 through 60.  To round out the changes for the classic content is the addition of one new crafting materials, Common Debris, which is acquired through salvaging white and gray items.

Not surprisingly there are new lvl 70 versions of all these crafting materials to separate Diablo III classic from the expansion.  Demonic Essences and Tomes of Secrets are also being replaced with the new Death’s Breath and Scholarly Writings. There is currently no way to convert the lvl 60 materials into their RoS counterparts and I don’t expect that this will change during the course of the beta.  This means you should probably start getting rid of all of your crafting mats except your Demonic Essences and maybe a small number of Tomes of Secrets.

Salvaging works a little different in RoS than classic.  Now items will only salvage into their corresponding material.  Whites/grays salvage into white mats, blues into blues, rares into yellows and legendaries into legendaries.  This change really only effect legendary and rare items since they use to salvage into multiple types of mats, but it’s worth noting that in case you need more blue mats you’ll need to pickup more blue items.

The final change with regards to materials is that the new legendary patterns require a special item to craft.  Many require a base item to craft like pants requiring pants to craft, swords requiring swords, so on and so forth.  Some patterns also require individual unique materials to be farmed up, such as the new Demon’s Skin set requiring the aptly named mat call ‘Demon Skin’ to be farmed up.  These special mats aren’t fully implemented at the moment and even if one drops you can’t pick it up, we’ll have to wait and see how this gets handled in future patches.

Crafting

The process of crafting itself hasn’t changed but some of the mechanics behind crafting have.  Crafting will now take your class into account when rolling stats for the item unless it’s a class specific item, those will always roll stats for the intended class.  A crusader rolling chest pieces is going to find strength rolls and bonuses to crusader skills while a wizard will get intellect and wizard skill bonuses.  This makes crafting a great replacement for the AH while leveling since it will always be tailored to your class.

In Diablo III classic crafting was the pinnacle for certain gear slots like gloves and shoulders.  In RoS this won’t be the case anymore as crafted items won’t compete with legendary drops.  Legendary items roll higher base stats then rares do, making them flat out better in side by side comparisons before even factoring in their unique properties.  As of right now crafted legendaries have no unique properties of their own so they are normally outshone by their dropped counterparts.  I hope they change the crafted legendaries to make crafting stay relevant instead of enchanting becoming the only efficient means of using your crafting materials.

Lvl 70 jewelry patterns have been added to the Jewelcrafter to help round out all of your item slots.  With the addition of these patterns you can now easily outfit a new max lvl character with a decent starter set of gear, the stat differences between lvl 66 gear and lvl 70 is significant enough to make it worthwhile in investing the materials needed to deck out your character.

As far as crafting itself goes I think the number of mats needed still needs to be tuned a little.  You need far too many white items to craft anything.  This makes it feel like white/gray items are worth almost as much rares when they drop and a quick loot run has your inventory full of rare and white items with only a few blues.

Jewelcrafting

As of right now all gems under marquise are useless. Regular mobs now drop marquises as the baseline gem, even starting off at lvl 60.  The crafting costs over marquise quality are still a work in progress, ranging from 50mil to 10g.  We’ll get more info on this as Blizzard works on fleshing out the crafting system, but with all the lvl 70 jewelry requiring imperial gems (the next step above marquise) I don’t see any reason to hold onto any of your current gems beyond those that you currently have socketed.

Other than the new levels of gems and the new ring and amulet patterns there isn’t anything new going on with the Jewelcrafter.  I would like to see more lower level ring and amulet patterns added into the game so that you can craft yourself items as you power through content, but there could be new lower level patterns to find that I just haven’t come across yet.

Acquiring Patterns

All of the new set and legendary patterns require you to play on at least the Master difficulty level to even have a chance at dropping.  Even at this relatively lower difficulty setting the chances at them dropping are rather decent.  Just playing for a few hours on Master I was able to find three different patterns, they are definitely not repeating the mistakes of the old crafting recipes being obscenely rare.  I’ve still not come across any of the set patterns yet but the crafting materials required for them are currently bugged so I’m in no hurry.