Craft ilvl 331 Gear in Midnight S2 — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:02] lot of different ways to gear up in season 2 of Midnight, more than we've ever had before. But one of the easiest, most accessible, and most upgradable option comes from your Spark of Tides. Everyone can get these sparks very

[00:15] easily, and they can be used to create item level 331 gear with a little bit of time and effort. The process does tend to confuse players a bit, though. So, we're going to go through how to get your Sparks of Tides, how to use them to

[00:28] craft high item level gear, and how you can upgrade that gear into some of the best loot in the game. Now, before we jump in, be sure to hit up that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video. Sparkcrafted gear seems

[00:41] to be one of the most misunderstood gearing options in Midnight, which is a shame because it's arguably one of the most reliable and most flexible options available to every kind of player. I know there are a lot of returning

[00:54] players for season 2 who may not have seen this system before. So, we're going to go through the entire process of getting your sparks and turning them into some crafted gear. Getting sparks is super simple. There

[01:06] are three weekly quests that can offer them as a reward for completing them. The unity against the void weekly quest in Silver Moon, which lets you pick and take part in. Trailing Zalatath from Verissa in Silver Moon asks you to

[01:19] collect fading void whispers which can drop from dungeons, delves, treasures, and rares. And then turn back the surge on the coiled aisle asks you to complete three curse surges which are special events in the coiled isle zone that you

[01:31] can see on your world map. Each quest can reward you with one spark, but there are limits on how many you can acquire at any one time. We have a cumulative seasonal cap that increases by one per week. And a very easy way to check the

[01:46] current cap is to look for the tidal spark dust in your currency tab. If you hover over that, it will show you the current seasonal cap as well as how many sparks you have already received in the current season. If you're behind on

[01:58] sparks, you'll also have a chance to loot them from endgame content like raid bosses, dungeon runs, or delve clears until you're caught back up. So, it's miss a couple weekly quests or you rejoin the season halfway through.

[02:14] So, we now have a few sparks, but how do we turn that into gear? This is going to depend on if you want to craft your own gear or not. To craft your own gear, you'll first need to level up your profession to about 50 and learn the

[02:27] are locked behind profession specializations. So, you need to spend some profession knowledge in the appropriate spec and nodes. For example, to craft a two-handed sword, you'll need to unlock the weaponsmithing

[02:40] specialization in blacksmithing. Head to the left towards the blade section and put enough points in there to unlock the first point in long blades, which will Blade, Blood Knight's Warblade, and Magister's Mana Sword. It's actually

[02:55] very easy to see where a recipe comes from. Just find the recipe in your list, click on it, and hover over the recipe unlearned text. that will tell you whether it comes from a vendor, how much it might cost to buy, or if it comes

[03:08] from your specialization trees, and which tree it's located in. Each piece of gear usually requires two sparks to craft, but two-handed weapons require four sparks as they cover two gear slots. So, when you have the recipe

[03:21] learned, gather up all the materials you need, plug in your sparks, and you're need, plug in your sparks, and you're good to go. You can craft your own gear. Now, the next step is to craft that same gear, but at the highest rank possible.

[03:34] five. And the higher the rank, the higher the item level. So, our goal is to always craft spark gear at rank five where possible. And it's much easier to craft at rank five than you might think.

[03:47] There are five main ways to increase your crafting prowess. The first is to just use higher ranks of raw materials. Here's my two-handed weapon craft using the lower tiers of materials. And then when we plug in the higher tier, you can

[04:01] see the massive jump. This is why many crafters require the higher materials if you're getting an order made. They make it so much easier to reach rank five. The next way to boost your rank is to buy or upgrade your profession

[04:15] equipment. There are three pieces that every profession can equip, and each one provides a skill bonus. If you can afford it, I would recommend picking up the blue tools as they do provide higher bonuses. You can buy all of these off

[04:27] the auction house if you don't want to faff around with other professions to make your own equipment. The most important factor is definitely your profession knowledge, but this is also much easier than it first looks.

[04:40] After you've chosen your recipe to craft, just put points into notes that increase that recipe skill. The further down each tree you go, the more specific you will get. So, for the two-handed sword example, this node will massively

[04:54] this middle node increases your skill for all blade crafts, and then the first node increases skill for all weapon crafts. This is important if you want to be able to craft a lot of different items at rank five. Armor is a great

[05:09] example here. It's usually enough to just put points into the two general nodes for each armor craft. Not only does this let you unlock all of the recipes much faster, but as you can see here, these points let me craft hands,

[05:23] braces, and belts all at rank five, and that only costs 60 knowledge points. You knowledge by picking up the one-time treasures scattered around the midnight zones. You can use an add-on like handy notes to show you exactly where each

[05:38] treasure is to make collecting them extremely quick and easy. You'll also earn knowledge the first time you craft any recipe. There's a weekly quest for each profession in the crafting area of Silver Moon that rewards more knowledge,

[05:51] and you can complete patron work orders to earn a lot of knowledge as well. Even if you just wait for orders that provide all of the materials. The last way to increase your crafting skill is to simply level up your profession. Each

[06:04] level increases your skill, which is the deciding factor for your result. So leveling from 50 to 100 will get you much closer to a rank five craft, though it's definitely not required. The fifth factor doesn't actually

[06:19] increase your skill. Instead, it lets you skip to your next rank by using concentration. So, our goal isn't actually rank five. It's only rank four. you can use concentration to bump it up to rank five instantly. Your

[06:34] concentration refills slowly over time. But if you're only crafting for yourself, you'll basically never run out. Combine all of that together, and you can craft your own gear at rank five very easily. The best part about this,

[06:47] though, is that you only have to do it once. Professions don't really change as the expansion unfolds, for better or worse. So, setting things up now will let you craft your own gear right away in season 3 as well.

[07:03] this, you can still use your sparks to get some easy gear upgrades by visiting the crafting order clerks in Silver Moon. Just find the item that you're interested in in the menu. Gather up all the materials, making sure to grab the

[07:16] higher tiers of materials where needed. Plug in your sparks and you're good to go. You can either send the order as a public order, a guild order if you're in a guild, or a private order to a specific person. Now, public orders give

[07:29] you zero control, so you could get back an item at any rank. You could get a rank five craft, or you could get a rank one craft, at which point you may as well just do it yourself. So, I would recommend you never send public orders

[07:41] as they are currently implemented. This is probably one of the weakest parts of this entire system, and it'll be interesting to see if they ever allow us to actually put rank requirements on public orders in a future patch or

[07:53] expansion. Guild or private orders let you set a minimum rank requirement, guild with crafters you can trust, feel free to set it off and hope someone fills the order. But for most players, you'll need to rely on private work

[08:07] orders. You'll need to find someone in trade chat who can craft the item you're order to them by entering their name in the private order box. Just bear in mind, most crafters will ask for a good chunk of gold, especially towards the

[08:21] start of a season. So, it can be cheaper in the long run to set everything up yourself. Now, whether you're crafting yourself or to make sure you're using a missive. You can add these down at the bottom as an

[08:34] optional crafting reagent, and misses let you choose the stats on your gear. So, your crafted gear can always have your best in slot stats. You just need to remember to add in your missives. Another way to add additional power to

[08:47] embellishments. These are added in the same way as an optional crafting region. different effects and some are better or worse for different classes. So, I would double check your class guides on Wow Head or Discord as they usually have a

[09:02] section for your specs best options. You can only equip two pieces of gear that have embellishments on, so you can only use two of these effects at a time, but you can equip as many pieces of crafted gear as you want. a full set if that's

[09:17] your jam, but only two pieces can have embellishments on them. A lot of folks seem to be confused by that, which may be one of the reasons players aren't using their sparks for some easy gear upgrades.

[09:29] But all of this time and effort only gets us to item level 305, which doesn't sound very impressive, does it? I agree. But how does item level 331 sound? Quite a bit better, right? The real power of this crafted gear comes from the fact

[09:45] that it can all be upgraded by using crests. 80 hero crests will take you up to item level 318, which isn't too bad. But then 80 myth crests will take your gear all the way up to item level 331, which rivals some of the best gear in

[10:00] the game. And all it takes is a couple of sparks and some crafting knowhow. Now, you don't have to add these crests in the first time you craft a piece of gear. You can add them in later via a recraft. If you're crafting your own

[10:13] the top of your profession. Choose the item you want to recraft, supply the materials, add in the sparks, and you're good to go. This means you never have to wait to craft your items. You can make them at item level 305 if that's a

[10:26] decent upgrade for you. And then when you earn enough crests later on, you can upgrade it. For a crafting order, you'll need to make a recraft order instead, which is again at the top of the menu. Plug in the item materials and crests.

[10:39] you'll need the name of a player who can complete your new craft at rank five. Now, getting your hands on some crests to fuel these upgrades is fairly straightforward. You can get hero crests from high tiers of delves, nightmare

[10:54] prey hunts, various weekly quests, middle tiers of mythic plus dungeons, and heroic raid bosses. So, there are plenty of options for hero crests, even if you don't do group content. For myth crests, the options are a bit more

[11:07] limited. The fastest way to earn them is by running mythic plus 9 or higher keystone dungeons. You can also get them from raid bosses on mythic difficulty. After you reach rank four in the new delve seasonal track, tier 11 bountiful

[11:19] delves will reward you with five myth crests per run up to 20 per week. So, these big upgrades are available to solo content players, too. It will just take you a bit longer to get there. As you gear up, you'll also be able to trade up

[11:33] your crests, which can help speed things up quite a bit. After earning the Champion of the Mist achievement by equipping a piece of item level 308 gear or higher in every gear slot, you can trade champion crests up to hero crests.

[11:46] After doing the same thing with item level 321 gear, you'll be able to trade hero crests up to myth crests. So eventually, everyone will have much easier access to those 331 crafted gear upgrades.

[11:59] rewards that are worth mentioning. The first time you defeat the season 2 Delve nemesis. On the lower difficulty, you get 30 hero crests, and on the higher difficulty, you'll get 30 hero and 30 myth crests. All of these crests also

[12:13] don't count towards your weekly caps, making them a great way to get ahead on gear upgrades. You'll get these rewards even if you're in a group, so you can go easier, and everyone can earn their bonus crests. And then the first time

[12:27] get an item that starts the quest, a cracked keystone. That quest asks you to complete any keystone dungeon, and it will reward you with 20 hero and 20 myth crests. So, you can actually craft your first item level 331 piece of gear very

[12:42] quickly if you combine all of these sources together. If you're wondering what items to craft and in which order, it's largely going to depend on what kinds of content you like to take part in. Your Wowhead class guide should have

[12:54] a section for their recommended crafting gear order under the gearing section of the guide. But most players in specs will want to get a weapon crafted as early as possible, as it provides the largest power spike. That's why you'll

[13:06] an item level 331 weapon in the first week of the season, and that's what I plan to make first as well. After that, crafted gear becomes an amazing way to replace your lowest item level pieces of gear, especially for the slots that

[13:20] don't conflict with any tier gear. So, that's your cloak, braces, belts, and everything you should need to know to turn your sparks of ties into very powerful pieces of gear, and how you can upgrade them to item level 331, even if

[13:35] you're only focusing on solo player content. Do you have any leftover questions about how any of this works? And do you think the profession system needs another revamp as we head into the next expansion? Leave all your thoughts

[13:47] in the comment section below. A big thank you to all of our supporters over here on YouTube. You can see their names on screen. If you're interested in links in the description or click the join button just below the video. If you

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