Now blizzard had said that they would allow crafting/pvp/raiding to progress at about the same rates. The first tier of crafting is easy, it just requires things you can solo. The second tier is a little harder with primal nethers, it requires you to run many, many non-heroic level 70 instances since the drop rate is so low, or to run a much smaller number of heroic instances.

The burning question was, where does the item for the third upgrades (nether vortex) come from. I guess now we know.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...79823960&sid=1



Which brings us to an interesting point. If you look at the item it's soulbound, and so are the craftable pieces. So you couldn't pay a raider to make you the item, nor could you make the item if you weren't in a high end raiding guild. Doesn't this kind of defeat the point.

I think the point of the smithing weapons is not quite what you think it is.

The idea is not to let non-raiders get high quality weapons by soloing. The idea is to let a blacksmith stay 1 tier ahead of the content he is doing.

Solo farm for an 81 dps one-hander, when the very best you can get without Heroics or raids is 71.x. Heroic 5-man for an 88 dps onehander; the best you can get from heroics or karazan are mid-70s to mid 80s, depending on where you're going.

Non-raiders won't craft the tier 3. I think most people will get the second tier eventually, but the third tier is in the game I think specifically so that smiths don't start raiding and go "oh, well, that smithing weapon was pretty good, but I see raid drops have outdone it. /vendor"


The first and second tiers are both awesome weapons, and if you aren't progressing through raiding, an 88 dps one-hander will give you everything you need.

I thought the point was to reward people for having a crafting profession. Previously it was useless to have them since you could just gather the mats for whatever item you wanted and trade them to someone who could.

With Nethers there are both BoE and BoP crafting recipes, it might be too early to tell if all recipes that require Vortexes are BoP.

Yeah, it's no different from how you if you are too incompetent to do Heroics, you can't pay someone else to upgrade your first-level weapon to its second form.

Well, you could actually. I know of someone who got a guild group together to clear all but the final boss of some heroic instance (forgot which one) to swap out a group member for some unguilded blacksmith who wanted to upgrade his weapon. (I suppose)
He wouldnt ive numbers, but I'm sure they got some nice gold out of it aswell.

Anyway, your point still stands of course, as this is in no way different from selling BWL loot.

iso rewards for engineering- well beyond getting yelled at when I forget the repair bot for the 15th time.

I had assumed that all these recipes were examples of BoE's that can be made by raiding crafters with Nether Vortices and then sold to the plebian masses:

http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=36349
http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=36351
http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=36352
http://www.thottbot.com/?sp=36353

This is mostly speculation on my part, informed primarily by the fact that none of them are "upgrades" from the previous BoP leatherworking sets (like the blacksmithing BoP upgrades), and none of them follow the BoP sets naming styles.

Of course, until someone finds any of those recipes...

there are no craftable items to my recollection that uses bop items to create boe item. i highly doubt anything will be different here.
correct me if i'm wrong though...

there are several BoE items that require BoP mats.

personally, i'm gathering up some mats for
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=23542

there's several others in the blacksmithing lineup that require the exact same mats, for various BoE epics.

Pre-TBC, there was the Skin of Shadows that was required for at least one (Shifting Cloak) BoE item, which used to be BoP.

However, did they not change Skin of Shadows to be BoE in one of the last patches?

I don't remember Skin of Shadows ever being BoE really.

There are many. In fact, as of now, I can make:
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29724
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29729
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29733
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29732
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29734
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29728
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29731

They all require a Primal Nether each.

Anyway, without further discussion about the amount of time and $$$ I've spent on the AH, my general impression for BOP materials --> BOE items is as stated earlier in the thread; so that there's a reason to actually have various different professions in the raid and not a set of herb/alch clones.

As to Primal Nether/Nether Vortex, this reminds me a little of how MC fire resist crafting mats dropped in MC, and helped the guild prepare for Ragnaros. Instead of resist gear though, these are general gear upgrades for your raid should you have the relevant profession and recipes in the raid force.

Selling it to the casual crowd? I'm sure it'll come about sooner or later (just like people selling FR on the trade channel late in WoW 1.0's lifetime) but at the rate Nether Vortexes are dropping, (seeing as we've only now heard of them yet ~10 have killed Hydross), I'd say the recipes that require them are going to be in-guild deals for quite some time.

To me, the advantage of craftable weps for smiths, is that you don't have to rely on the random luck factor of instance drops to be effective, since a warrior or rogue without a good weapon is far less effective than one with a good weapon. I'm reminded of the fact of seeing 3 rag weapons in 11 months of killing him, and seeing 2 ashkandi's from nef in 6 months of killing him.

I was just thinking of asking if DNT was seeing those drop yet, since most guilds will need upwards of 60 of them, if they have at least 3 smiths. Sounds like they need to be a bit more common a drop...

Well they may have much more common sources later on that haven't been discovered. What we may be seeing now might be the equivalent of looking at the level 2 smith BoPs if your only source of Primal Nethers was non-heroic instances.

There is no word on what kind of stats these belts have right? Or if they are even in-game?

Come to think of it, where would the recipe come from? Naxxramas-Blacksmith-Dude v2?

If I remember Tseric's post from awhile back he said, "People would be well into their Tier5 before acquiring their 3rd crafted weapon". This led me to believe that they would be dropping in Tempest Keep. Pretty interesting you got them off random trash in SS. Interesting to see how this pans out.

Considering TK25 & SSC are both T5 zones, and you need about '20' vortex of a rare drop rate per person to upgrade, His statement remains valid and its not really interesting at all.

Given that Magtheridon was intended to be defeated long before he was, I very much doubt that SSC->TK was intended to be linear progression, no matter how ill-conceived that notion was. So if you assume that the droprate is reasonably high when farming the equivalent of half of the T5 content available, Tseric's estimation is right on the money.

Going into TBC, I figured that Primal Nethers would be a neat way to make sure Smiths were making money by crafting items for people. So far, it's only proven to be an efficient way of preventing items from getting made until someone who isn't lazy or trying to craft their own T2 item gets the plans you need.
I see the situation with Nether Vortex turning out quite differently. Obviously we can do little more than speculate at this point, but given the LW patterns on Thottbot I think it's safe to assume that there will be a wide variety of premium items being sold by guild banks to the masses, if and when they become available in greater quantities.

TBH one aspect about this I feel is... 'good' provided theres BoEs to be sold:
Guild Banks - since TBC I've honestly found next to no way to readily make cash from a guilds perspective. It was always nice being able to help dampen the consumable cost on the guild by being able to provide contributions, or being able to constantly provide flasks for tanks and such. Its nice that theres no huge need for them ala token drops and silly things... but still :<

I just wonder what happened to our random blues/greens on final raid bosses!

We've been killing ORB's. The four dragons drop 170-200g each, so does Onyxia (3-4 runs with mains and alts), Azu drops about the same. So, we get "some" money at least. I think quick scheduled BWL runs could bring in tons of gold as well.