Professions & the crafting endgame 🔨
v0.27–0.28 rebuild professions into a full crafting endgame: three gathering skills feeding ten crafts, a skill-tier ladder that gates which recipes you can train, a masterwork proc that can turn any craft into something better, crafting masters on Artisan Row, and ten archetypes that say who your character is. Exact reward numbers are still being tuned.
🔨 The shape: gather raw materials (Mining / Logging / Herbalism) → level a craft and climb its tiers → train recipes gated to your tier → craft at your discipline's station, hoping for a masterwork proc → declare an archetype that defines your identity.
Gathering
Three gathering professions, tracked independently:
- Mining — ore and stone from veins
- Logging — timber from trees
- Herbalism — herbs and plants
Harvesting is wired into the normal play controls — walk up to a node and gather, no separate mode. Proficiency builds through successful harvests and shifts your output toward rarer grades (common → uncommon → rare → epic → legendary), though the very rarest grades stay rare no matter how skilled you are. Nodes now carry real material tables with rare gather events, and respawn per-viewer — two players can see the same node in different states.
Tools matter. Vendors sell basic gathering tools; better ones are crafted, and higher-tier tools unlock richer nodes and work them faster over a long session. You can slot tool effects onto them:
| Tool effect | Does |
|---|---|
| Gatherer's Cache | Extra quantity per node |
| Artisan's Eye | Higher material quality |
| Quickening Charm | Faster node respawns |
Each effect starts with 20 durability charges, spent faster against equal-or-higher-rarity targets and barely at all on low-rarity ones.
The crafts and the skill-tier ladder
Every craft runs its own recipe list and its own flat skill value. The ten crafts sit in a fixed ring, and where a craft sits matters — neighbours share recipes and trends, and each craft has an opposite five seats away.
| # | Craft | # | Craft | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Armorcrafting | 6 | Cooking | |
| 2 | Weaponcrafting | 7 | Inscription | |
| 3 | Jewelcrafting | 8 | Enchanting | |
| 4 | Alchemy | 9 | Tailoring | |
| 5 | Engineering | 10 | Leatherworking |
The six core crafts — weaponcrafting, armorcrafting, tailoring, leatherworking, alchemy, cooking — carry the deepest tier ladders.
Tiers, not a 0–300 bar. Your skill in a craft buckets into a tier every 25 points: skill 0–24 is the free common tier, 25–49 is tier 1, 50–74 tier 2, and so on. Recipes are bucketed the same way, so a recipe's tier and your capability tier compare directly.
- Recipe training is tier-gated: you can only train recipes up to your current tier (recipes you already knew are grandfathered in).
- Diminishing returns on skill-ups: crafting at or above your tier gives full skill; a craft one tier below your capability gives reduced skill; two or more tiers below gives nothing. Common-tier crafting is always free (no cost).
Enchanting & salvage sit off the wheel: disenchant items into materials, then apply an enchant onto a specific instanced copy of an item.
Masterwork procs
Craft outputs are deterministic at the recipe's defined quality — with one twist. Every successful craft rolls a single masterwork proc (base 3%) that bumps the item's quality and adds bonus stats. The odds rise with the tier of the materials you feed in and with trending reagents (below), so investing in better mats and following the trend pays off.
⚙️ Market throttles. To stop maxed specialists flooding the economy, crafting carries a small copper fee scaled to item value and a cap of ~10 crafts per rolling 60 seconds. Craft for use and trade, not for spam.
Trending pairs & the Crafting Guild
Your flat craft skills are watched for the adjacent pair they're trending toward. Push a pair's combined skill past one full tier (25 points) and the Crafting Guild takes notice — it delivers a letter on your first trend crossing. Trending reagents tied to your pair also raise your masterwork odds, rewarding players who commit to two neighbouring trades rather than spreading thin.
Where you craft — Artisan Row
The single level-20 Highwatch hub is retired. Six crafting masters now set up on Artisan Row, each tending a typed station for their discipline: you craft at the station that matches the recipe. A field crafting station lets you craft on the move when you're away from town.
The ten archetypes
Each craft also stands for an archetype — a broader identity beyond just working the trade. You hold one active archetype at a time; it's a statement about who your character is, recognized in how the world addresses you.
- Choosing one: you declare your first archetype through an early Zone 1 story quest that formally accepts you into that identity. Until then you have no archetype.
- Switching: possible but not casual — you complete a repeatable "make amends" quest for your old archetype, and each successive switch costs more, so the choice stays meaningful.
Your active archetype gates your crafting direction and endgame power, and sets the craft ceiling for your identity. (The exact rewards and recognition are still being filled in — expect this to grow.)
Getting started
- Pick up Mining, Logging or Herbalism and gather while you level.
- Feed those materials into a craft and push its skill up through the tiers to unlock better recipes.
- Lean into an adjacent pair so the Crafting Guild notices your trend and your masterwork odds climb.
- Declare your archetype via the Zone 1 story quest when you're ready to commit, and craft at your discipline's station on Artisan Row.
See also: Drops & materials, the World Market, and the Gilded Strongbox to store everything you gather.