Earlier this week, Blizzard uncovered a bug within World of Warcraft concerning an important crafting material and has temporarily disabled its creation while the company works to address the matter. As a result of the issue, the World of Warcraft development team alerted their players about why the item in question was not working and gave a timetable for when a fix would be issued.
Given the delicate situation surrounding the bug, the affected item may have a small but noticeable impact on World of Warcraft's intense player-run economy. Aside from the economic ramifications, the bug has an unintended side effect that could be exploited by crafters to gain an advantage over other players in the meantime. At the time of writing, the bug fix was still being worked on by Blizzard, but players should expect a fix soon.
The affected item in question, Enchanting Vellums, can be crafted by players with the Inscription profession at low levels. These vellums in turn can be used by World of Warcraft players with the Enchanting profession to store the enchants they create to sell them at the auction house for gold. However, a bug was discovered that allowed for rank 3 enchants to proc more often than intended if an Enchanting Vellum was used in the process. This would allow lower-level Enchanters to gain skill points faster and potentially create an imbalance in the player economy with rank 3 enchants flooding the market. As a result, Blizzard disabled players from making more until the bug was fixed. However, players can still use the Enchanting Vellums they already have, or purchase them from NPC vendors for a small fee.
When the Dragonflight expansion was released, the crafting system was overhauled for the first time in the game's history. The changes drew immediate comparisons to the crafting systems in Final Fantasy 14, thanks in part to the introduction of wearable tools and equipment for each profession, and the introduction of a ranking system for crafted goods. Going between three ranks and five ranks, these grades determine the potency of items such as weapons, armor, food, and potions. While the crafting changes have been a welcome sight for the game, only tell if and when new recipes and changes will be added as Dragonflight shifts toward its post-launch patch cycle.
This is not the first time that crafters have had issues crop up within Dragonflight, as Blizzard issued a ban wave in December for Tailors that took advantage of a bug, though the bans received were temporary. While no such bans concerning Enchanting have been reported at the time of writing, Blizzard has shown that it will do what is necessary to keep the World of Warcraft in-game economy running as smoothly as possible.
World of Warcraft is available now for PC.
Source: Wowhead