Blizzard announced it will be adjusting the required gold and requires Pages to level Blacksmithing. If you’re considering power leveling your Blacksmith tomorrow, you have been warned. It currently costs about 645,000 gold to level your Blacksmith, which is probably quite a bit more than the average player earns from level 1 to 60. That doesn’t include the 50 Pages of Blacksmithing, 50 Tomes of Blacksmithing and 45 Tomes of Secret required which I imagine most players find and sell on the auction house anyways. Blizzard stated that they want players to be able to level their Blacksmith along with their character, which is currently not likely unless you do something else to make extra gold.

There are also changes coming to Jewelcrafting, but not to the price that it costs to level (which is only about 120,000 gold). The first 7 tiers of gems will only require two of their subsequent tier to be created. Back when the commodities auction house used to work (remember that?) it was cost prohibitive to combine the lower tier gems. You could actually make money selling 3 chipped gems and then buying a flawed one of the same quality. These jacked up prices are sending lower tier prices down to their vendor value, which just makes it smarter to vendor the gems in game opposed to use them to create the next tier. However, I don’t think this change is going to have much of an impact.

“Other areas of concern have been both the gem combination system and Blacksmith leveling and crafting costs. The intent, especially with the Blacksmith, is that he’s leveling with you, you’re able to use him as an alternate source for upgrades. Our design goal is that once you get to level 60, his recipes are actually good enough to help fill a character’s potential itemization gaps. To correct these issues, we’re looking to adjust the Blacksmith costs for training (gold and pages) and crafting from levels 1-59, and reduce the cost of combining gems so that it only requires two gems instead of three (up to Flawless Square). Both of these changes are scheduled for patch 1.0.3.”

Patch 1.0.3 will be available in the next couple of weeks. Patch 1.0.2, which doesn’t contain these changes will be pushed out “this week.”

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