New Crafting Materials for Patch 5.4

With the imminent arrival of Patch 5.4 and all the changes to crafting professions, I thought I'd have a little dig into which materials I'm going to need & how many I should be buying now. I'm not usually a fan of major stockpiling, I prefer to buy cheap materials every time I see them rather than when I want to craft & yes, that does mean I have a stock of materials but nowhere near the quantities that many gold makers pile up before a major patch.

This time though, the raw materials on my server seem to be dropping in price right now which is kind of strange but I'm not complaining! I've never really prepped for a major patch before for various reasons but I thought I'd give it a go this time round!

So what are the new materials that my Tailor, Leatherworker & Blacksmith are going to be making?

• Celestial Cloth = 10 Bolts of Windwool Cloth (4 bolts per stack of Windwool Cloth so 2.5 x basic stack cost)
• Hardened Magnificent Hide = 2 Magnificent Hides (1 stack of Exotic Leather per hide if I only use the daily cooldown to make it, 2.5stacks if I want to make as many as I like)
• Balanced Trillium Ingot = 1 Trillium Bar (made from 2 black & 2 white Trillium Ore or via Alchemy transmute of 10 Ghost Iron Bars (which is 1 stack of Ghost Iron Ore)).

Each of these materials is on a daily cooldown and is bind on pickup so you won't be seeing any of these on the Auction House. Each time you make one though, you will 'discover' a new PvP armor recipe or one of the new Epic item level 553 legs or belts. It's the crafted PvP gear for all three professions that interest me as a gold making non-raider. The Epic items take 21 or 28 daily cooldowns to make and I'm not sure the sale price of the final piece will make up for lost sales of the less expensive PvP gear.

The real kicker is the sheer number of PvP patterns to learn - for Tailoring it's 45, for Leatherworking it's 89 & for Blacksmithing it's 35 (that's if I counted them correctly in Wowhead professions tabs!). It's at times like this I almost regret Leatherworking being my main profession but it does have some advantages! OK, yes, it's going to take me twice as long to learn all the Leather & Mail armor recipes but it does mean that I stand a good chance of lower competition for the first few weeks. 

Think about it - in 35 days, any Blacksmith that's done their discovery every day will have all the recipes but so will all the other Blacksmiths so there will be competition on every piece of plate PvP gear! Leatherworkers won't even have half their recipes by then & given that Leatherworking isn't as popular a profession as Blacksmithing, there are fewer Leatherworkers to compete with me on those recipes that we have in common. The same thing applies to Tailoring of course but 45 days in and all the patterns will be learnt & available. 

On this basis a Blacksmith will need 1 stack of Ghost iron Ore per discovery so 35 stacks. A Tailor will need 2.5 stacks x 45 which is 113 stacks (rounded up!) and a poor Leatherworker will need 178 Magnificent Hides. The inequality in costs of these basic materials is really obvious at this stage - a stack of Windwool Cloth is 30-50 gold, a stack of Ghost Iron Ore is 30-60 gold but a Magnificent Hide which is on cooldown too is anywhere from 100-200 gold each and you need 2 of them every day!

Right now I have already got more than enough Ghost Iron Ore & Windwool Cloth to make all these cooldown items for both my Blacksmith & Tailor. My Leatherworker has been storing up Magnificent Hides for a couple of weeks now & I've been buying some off the Auction House when they fall to the 100g or less point but I'm still not going to have enough ready made. Luckily for me, the price of Exotic Leather has dropped sharply on my server this week so I may have to go the more expensive route & use the non-cooldown, 50 Exotic Leathers recipe to make extra Magnificent Hides.

Ok, so that's the armor crafting professions, what about the others? Well Engineering is getting a fabulous new mount - the Sky Golem - which requires Living Steel & also uses a daily cooldown item called Jards Peculiar Energy Source. This Peculiar Energy Source uses Ghost Iron Bars so that's more Ghost Iron Ore required. Then of course, there's the Jewelcrafting - a new raid & new Epic armor patterns means a bump in demand for gems (and enchants too) with Ghost Iron Ore being prospected to get them. I already have maybe 200-300 stacks of Ore sitting around so I'll be all set when the patch goes live. I'm not going to stop buying though - all those PvP Plate armors use Ghost Iron Bars as well so I'll be smelting until I'm blue in the face I think!

So if you like farming & you want a suggestion of what to farm over the next few weeks, I think this analysis kind of points you to Leather farming. You could go mining of course or on a mob killing spree to get cloth but my advice would be look for leather - less competition from bots and others players picking up cloth as they quest anyway.

How is your patch 5.4 preparation coming along? Have you got enough stuff or are you still buying up your Auction House? let us know in the comments below :)

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