Community is starting to get worried Blizzard is doing a rug-pull.
The Mythic Infusion items just got nerfed to below the highest heroic ilvl even though the tooltip still describes the gear as “Mythically Powerful”. My hope, or cope, is that Blizzard is simply shifting things around and next beta build we will see the actual Mythic Infusion added that will end up with a cap of Mythic Ilvl +4… not true BIS, but close enough that we can all mostly get over it.
Otherwise, I don’t even understand what this crafting even exists for. That’s the only thing that makes sense to me about this.
As you suspected / hoped, this is just a bit of item level shifting across the board, with this particular change going in earlier than others. In the end, the epic crafted gear item level will not be changing relative to other gear.
Currently the intention is quality 4 mythic upgraded profession gear will be equivalent to the early bosses in mythic raids, with quality 5 being 3 item levels above that.
You should see these new item levels reflected in the next patch on Beta.
I will note that because this is Beta, we will be continuing to evaluate the specific role crafted gear takes in the overall gearing ecosystem, but our intention is absolutely to keep crafted gear as an important contributor to your gearing journey.
Crafting quality 4 or 5 items would be hypothetically possibly early in the tier. It would take the cooperation of multiple crafters to make the best profession gear, reagents, and someone specialized in the item being made, but it should be possible (although difficult) very early on with enough concerted effort!
To clarify on crafting orders and who can provide what:
Only the customer can provide:
Primal Chaos
Primal Focus or Concentrated Primal Focus (the optional reagent to raise item level for epic gear)
Either the customer or crafter can provide:
Any unbound reagents or optional reagents
As a general rule, if something is soulbound, it’s probably going to need to be provided by the customer.
There is one exception here that we aren’t 100% settled on:
Currently either the customer or crafter can provide the Artisan’s Mettle (recrafting will need some of this). It’s also needed for some higher end consumables that benefit professions and high end profession gear.
In general, the logic is that if it’s soulbound, it is that way because we want the player who will end up with the gear to need to take some effort to earn it, otherwise that reagent may as well be unbound and purchaseable on the auction house for gold.
Artisan’s Mettle is a bit of an exception because it’s a special reagent earnable within the profession ecosystem and only useful to those who are using a profession, or who are placing crafting orders. Keeping it from being tradeable means each crafter/gatherer needs to earn their own to help with their profession, but allowing it to be provided by either party during a crafting order means if you don’t engage in professions directly, you can still hit up a crafter to perform recrafting services for you.
We want professions to be a valuable source of gearing for everyone. With that in mind:
Primal Chaos will be available from a variety of max level outdoor activities as well as through raiding/m+/pvp, so even if you don’t do those things, you can still get it from heroic or mythic dungeons, various world quests, the world boss, rare creatures in the world, and more. It will take longer to earn primal chaos outdoors than say, clearing a normal raid will, but end game profession gear is meant to be valuable and achievable by everyone.
All you’ll need to do for a piece of epic crafted gear is earn enough Primal Chaos, acquire a Spark of Ingenuity (via a max level questline), and then either send a Crafting Order to an experienced crafter, or craft the item yourself. The regular crafting reagents can also either be gathered yourself, purchased on the AH and included in the order, or the crafter can provide them for you if you compensate them through your commission.
The current item level of base epic profession gear starts slightly lower than the Normal Raid tier at the lowest quality, and at the highest quality is slightly higher than starting bosses. This should make it some of the best item level gear achievable outdoors, and a meaningful part of your gearing journey no matter how you play.
