**NOTE** - In case any of you are looking at this from the distant future these numbers are accurate as of the October 12th 2022 beta build.
Hello Goblins!
I hadn’t seen a detailed summary of prospecting ore in Dragonflight so I decided to do some research myself. Before I get into the results I want to first start by defining the objectives of my tests along with the methodology.
Objectives:Like many of you, I am striving to be incredibly efficient not only at Dragonflight Launch but also during the duration of the expansion. With profession knowledge being such a prized and limited resource, I wanted to gain an understanding of how prospecting worked under the new system. Specifically I sought out the answers to the following questions:
How do the new profession stats (Skill / Resourcefulness / Inspiration) affect prospecting?- How do the Jewelcrafting Talents affect prospecting?
- How does Severite (New name!) compare to Draconium prospecting?
- How does the quality of the prospected ore affect the results from prospecting?
- Is leveling the profession required to prospect effectively?
- Is it worth it to have a “Prospecting Only” alt?
- If so, what’s the minimum amount of work that I’d have to do to make a max efficiency prospecting alt?
Methodology:In order to perform the test I setup three character each with a varying degree of Jewelcrafting proficiency. Here’s a summary:
Character 1 - “Lazy Larry”: This character did literally nothing besides pickup jewelcrafting and start prospecting. It had a total of 5 skill points and zero talents or gear spent.- Character 2 - “Casual Carl”: This character leveled JC up to 25 which allowed me to unlock the “Enterprising” talent specialization. I then spent the minimum of 35 points to fully unlock the prospecting specialization. This included 9 additional points in Enterprising (to unlock the Prospecting specialization) and a full 25 points into prospecting. This character ended up with a base prospecting skill level of 50 (25 from my profession skill and another 25 from the prospecting talent). Weirdly, the enterprising talent skill points did not count towards prospecting.
- Character 3 - “Sweaty Sharon”: This character was built to see how high you can take prospecting and see if the investment is worth it. I leveled my jewelcrafting skill to max and filled out all relevant talents for the character. This character had a base prospecting level of 155 (100 from profession skill, 25 from the prospecting talent, and 30 from the Jeweler’s toolset mastery talent)
Before we get into the tests that I performed I wanted to point out a few important talent benefits:
The “Prospecting” talent wheel gives you a higher chance to proc Fractured glass which is a non-gem reagent- The “Prospecting” talent wheel increases crafting speed
- The “Prospecing” talent wheel gives you a proc chance to yield Prismatic ore which (Not implemented) can be further refined to more Gems. As of now it’s unknown how valuable this is.
- The “Jeweler’s toolset mastery” not only increased my overall skill but also provided a decent bump to inspiration and resourcefulness
The Tests:The tests I performed were quite simple. I prospected 5,000 of the highest quality of both Draconium and Severite on each of the three characters and recorded the results in a spreadsheet you can refer to here:
LinkNote: Because I was using the highest quality of ore it added 63 skill to each of my crafts resulting in a per craft skill level of 68 / 113 / 228 for my characters.
The Findings:Before I get into the exact findings and results I want to first say that I think the current implementation is very well thought through and I am happy with the current design. I hope there are no major changes before this goes live.
Question 1: How do the new profession stats (Skill / Resourcefulness / Inspiration) affect prospecting?Skill: This is the big one. Skill level affects a number of different things when prospecting.
Most importantly, skill is required in order to get higher quality gems. A skill level of 150 guarantees a 2 star gem and 250 guarantees a three star. More on this later.
Additionally, skill also directly affects the RARITY of the gems yielded. The higher the skill the higher the percentage of my yield were rare or epic gems.
Inspiration: Inspiration serves as a proc chance that increases your skill level by a flat 83 (this does not scale with inspiration stats or skill) on the craft. This means that for Lazy Larry his craft skill went from 68 to 151 when inspiration procced resulting in a 2 star gem as opposed to a one star. However, for Casual Carl inspiration was less effective. Carl’s base skill was 113 and a proc of 83 only got him to 196 which was not sufficient for him to receive a rank 3 gem.
Resourcefulness: In its current iteration is either bugged or absolute trash. On my higher skilled characters I was not getting near the 7% return on input materials that I expected. Instead it was closer to 3.5 - 4%. I did submit a bug report on this.
Question 2: How do the Jewelcrafting Talents affect prospecting?This one is much more straightforward. Outside of increasing the stats above, the talent tree had the following results:
- Fractured glass drop rates were increased 25-30%
- Prismatic ore dropped at a CONSISTENT RATE REGARDLESS OF SKILL at roughly 30 per 5000 ore
- Fast prospecting is a god send
Question 3: How does Severite (New name!) compare to Draconium prospecting?Draconium yields far more gems than Severite, as a matter of fact almost exactly twice as many. It also yields a far higher percentage of rare gems as opposed to uncommon ones. Most importantly, it also yields the epic gem “Illimited Diamond” although at an exceedingly low rate.
It’s impossible to say definitively which one will be better to prospect right now, but what I will say is that Draconium is so hard to come by that it will be very hard to justify blowing it up for gems when Severite is widely available. That said, this also has the effect of causing the epic diamonds to be ABSURDLY expensive. I legitimately think that for the first long while of dragonflight those are going to be reserved for bleeding edge guilds only.
Question 4: How does the quality of the prospected ore affect the results from prospecting?This one is also a simple answer. One star quality ores add 25 to your prospecting skill, two star add 56 and three star add 83.
This implies that it is only worth prospecting higher quality ores if they get you above the 150 / 250 skill thresholds for yield that were previously discussed in the skill section.
Question 5: Is leveling the profession required to prospect effectively?This answer is a hard yes and frankly I love it. If Dragonflight is like every other expansion in the history of the game the higher quality gems or iLVL items will absolutely sell more than anything of lower quality. Right now there is not currently a way to upgrade lower quality gems into higher quality gems which means that for those looking for the best of the best a JC that has Max JC level + Prospecting talents will be required.
There is, however, one caveat to this. In the event that max rank gems are not required in order to craft the highest end gems or jewelry then the value of having max rank gems (and thus prospecting) is greatly diminished.
This is a simple math problem that I’ve not yet done where you look at the required skill level for max gem or jewelry crafts and see if reaching that number is possible without having max quality input materials. I plan on looking into this over the next few days and will report back with my findings.
Lastly, there is value in certainty of prospecting results. If I have a character that has high prospecting skill I can model out expected yields based on various quality level of inputs. This is no longer a situation where everyone prospects the same so each goblin's ROI will vary based on how much they have invested in prospecting.
Question 6: Is it worth it to have a “Prospecting Only” alt?Like all things gold making the answer is “it depends”.
Right now we don’t know the value of prismatic ore prospects and that is a huge reason to spec specifically into the prospecting talent wheel. For me, I am going to bite the bullet early and spec into it on my JC main. Not a lot of people are going to need mythic quality gear / gems early on and I just want to get it done so I can reduce my character count as best I can.
It's also appearing to be quite difficult to hit level 100 in JC without rep grind patterns so this furthers the pain on doing this only on an alt.
Question 7: If so, what’s the minimum amount of work that I’d have to do to make a max efficiency prospecting alt?At bare minimum you would need to get a character with 100 skill in base jewel crafting and 125 points into the skill tree (35 into enterprising and another 90 into Jeweler’s toolset mastery. There are two alternatives. You can save 60 points by not speccing into the inspiration and resourcefulness sub stats on the Jeweler’s toolset mastery specialization which would bring you to 65 points. Additionally there’s a world where they decide to update enterprising to also affect prospecting and that would require another 20 points.
So yea, that’s it I suppose. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them. Hope this was useful for someone!
There's a couple of very good you tube guide about professions in their current state. From a goldmaking perspective, speculation is that blacksmithing and jc will be top contenders for profitability (based on what I recall of the videos). Emphasis was placed in the depth of the system and difficulty in utilizing a horde of alta to profit. Like with SL, my alchemist never made it past 53 and I still profited. That won't be possible, I think in DF. I'm currently considering my main and maybe two alts to prioritize. Trying to decide what six professions to prioritize with those 3 (also considering my gameplay and needs of my guild). I'm currently thinking LW main, JC first alt, Inscription second alt. Not sure though.