Crafting is one of the marquee features of the latest World of Warcraft. It isn’t a quick or easy process, but players in War Within can make weapons that, at their top end, are on par with the best gear in the game. Here’s a step-by-step guide to crafting the most powerful weapons in season two of World of Warcraft: The War Within.
This guide is aimed at new or returning players. It’s also worth noting that while this is focused on weapons, most of this information also applies to armor.
Players with the following professions in TWW can make weapons:
- Blacksmithing: 1H/2H swords, 1H/2H maces, 1H/2H axes, daggers, warglaives, shields
- Inscription: staves, caster off-hands
- Enchanting: wands
- Engineering: guns
At time of writing, there doesn’t appear to be a way to craft a bow, crossbow, fist weapon, or a two-handed intellect mace.
Most of these weapons’ plans are locked behind TWW’s version of the Specialization mechanic, which was first introduced back in Dragonflight. You gradually earn Knowledge Points as you level up your professions, which can be spent in one of three to four Specializations to unlock most of the available weapon blueprints.
Up front: these weapons are all bind on pickup. If you’re planning to make them for yourself, you’ll need to learn the appropriate profession first. Otherwise, you can have other players or alts make them for you by using crafting orders.
None of these weapons require particularly hard-to-find reagents, but if you create them with the default materials, they’ll only be item level 577 to 602 depending on your character’s crafting skill. This is distinctly inferior to most other weapon drops in TWW season two.
To make more powerful weapons, you’ll need Sparks of Fortunes. This crafting reagent can be created by any character by combining two Fractured Sparks of Fortunes with 250 Valorstones. The former are an uncommon reward from many sources in 11.2, such as weekly quests or defeating raid bosses, while completing just about any activity in Khaz Algar awards you with at least a few Valorstones. Two-handed weapons require two Sparks to craft, while you only need 1 for a one-handed weapon.
If you use Sparks of Fortunes to create your weapon, it’s set to item level 634, and can go as high as 645. That’s not bad, especially if you’ve only just hit 80, but we can do better.
To make the most powerful crafted weapons, you also need Enchanted Crests. These are much easier to get than they were in the first season, as you can simply buy them off Syenite, a vendor outside the Artisans’ Consortium office in Dornegal. However, they do cost Undermine Crests, which are given as a reward in delves, dungeons, and raids.
You can get two Enchanted Runed Undermine (ERU) Crests for free in 11.1. One is given for hitting Renown level 20 with the Cartels of Undermine faction, which isn’t difficult. The other is one of the rewards for completing the raid quest “The House Loses,” which can be done by yourself in Story Mode.
An ERU Crest can be used in your crafting materials to upgrade your weapon to a maximum of item level 658. If you also buy a Runed Augmentation Matrix from Syenite, which costs 15 Runed Crests, you can kick your weapon up to 661.
To get the most powerful crafted weapon, you’ll need to craft it with an Enchanted Gilded Undermine Crest. These can be purchased from Syenite for 60 Gilded Crests, and the matching Augmentation Matrix goes for another 30. With these, you can take your weapon all the way up to a maximum of 681 item level. This is only three levels worse than gear from the mythic Liberation of Undermine.
Collecting that many Gilded Crests can take a while unless you’re already doing mythic dungeons and/or raids. The easiest way for a casual player to get Gilded Crests is to run Tier 11 bountiful delves. Make sure to get and use a Delver’s Bounty for one of them. You should walk away with 30-50 Gilded Crests in a week as long as you don’t run out of lives.
Alternatively, if you’ve got a friend or an easily bribed acquaintance who’s into mythic dungeons or raids, they’ve probably got more Gilded Crests at this point than they know what to do with. You can file a recrafting order for them in Dornegal so they can use their surplus Crests to enhance your weapon.
When you write it all down, the process of acquiring a high-quality crafted weapon in The War Within looks complicated, but it’s not that bad once you’ve done it for yourself. If you’re a casual WoW player looking for a power boost, however, you can’t do much better than making and gradually upgrading your own custom equipment.
Season two of World of Warcraft: The War Within is currently live as of June, 2025.
