Crafted Gear and Sparks

Crafted gear is the only gear in the game you choose. Everything else is a drop, a vault pick or a vendor purchase constrained by what the game offers you. A craft is a piece you decide to have, in the slot you decide to have it, at a quality you control.

That makes it the answer to the slot that will not cooperate — the trinket that has refused to drop for six weeks, the weapon your spec needs and your raid keeps handing to someone else.

Crafting endgame gear needs two things: a spark, which the game hands out on a schedule and cannot be rushed, and upgrade currency, which sets the item level of what comes out. The better the crests you put in, the higher the piece starts.

Sparks arrive on a fixed cadence — roughly one a week from the season's recurring quests, with a catch-up mechanism if you have missed some. You cannot farm them faster, which is what makes them the binding constraint on crafting rather than gold or materials.

Costs scale with the slot: a piece of armour or a one-handed weapon takes fewer sparks than a two-handed weapon, which usually costs double.

Because the supply is fixed and the season is long, the question is never whether to spend a spark. It is what to spend it on, and when. A spark sitting in your bags at the end of a season was a free item you declined.

Some crafted pieces carry an embellishment — a strong extra effect you cannot get any other way. You may wear at most two embellished items at once, and the game enforces it.

This is the rule that shapes early-season crafting. Two of your sparks are effectively reserved for embellished pieces, because those two slots are where crafted gear beats a drop outright rather than merely filling in.

How to choose the two:

• Pick effects, not item levels. An embellishment is a extra effect, and the good ones are worth far

more than the handful of item levels separating one crafted piece from another.

• Put them in slots you will not replace. Wrists, waist, back and rings rarely get upgraded out from

under you; a weapon or a trinket often does.

• Decide before you spend. Two is a hard limit, and moving an embellishment means crafting again —

another spark you did not need to spend.

A craft's item level is set by the crests you put into it, and it lands on the same ladder everything else does. Feeding it your best currency produces a piece around the upper tracks; feeding it the tier below produces one a track lower.

In practice a craft aims at the upper tracks but not at their ceiling — it is a strong floor for a slot, not a best-in-slot piece.

The trade-off is worth stating plainly. Those crests could have upgraded gear you already own. A craft is worth the currency when it fills a slot that is *badly* behind; it is a poor deal when it replaces something only slightly worse, because you paid full price for a small gain and got no upgrade room back.

Crafting is a choice, so the useful question is which choices the best-geared players make. This is counted from the gear of top-ranked players across every specialisation we track — crafted pieces only, ordered by how many specs they turn up in.

A piece appearing across many specs is usually an embellishment worth having rather than a stat-perfect item — which is the point. If your spec is on that list and you have a spark spare, this is the lowest-risk craft available to you.

The planner does not schedule your crafting, and it will not tell you to go and get a spark — the game does not report any of that to us, so anything we said would be a guess.

What it does do is show you which slots are furthest behind, which is exactly the input a crafting decision needs. And the table above comes from the same top-player gear feed that powers the gear pages, refreshed on its own schedule rather than typed in by us.