New Blacksmith transmute in 5.4, old one is now pointless

The new transmute for Blacksmiths in patch 5.4 is the Balanced Trillium Ingot (BTI). This transmute basically renders the older Lightning Steel Ingot (LSI) introduced to craft the new weapons from ilevel 489 to 503 defunct. So thanks. BS was handed a transmute for vanity and downgrades on the patch content, and then given another.

Screw off developers, this seems like a very short and shitty merry-go-round of mindless transmutes with no forward planning. What ever happened to giving progression through a profession, where materials and patterns progress? A leads to B, then C, etc. In essence the Blacksmiths will drop any interest in LSI now and just wait for BTI. Silly.

Balanced Trillium Ingot is used for at the very least new Pants and Belt patterns for Blacksmiths and hopefully more items. If it is just for these two slots then I’ll probably pass on this new “feature”.

Given I launch snark at the devs, here is what I would have done in its place.

Recent 5.3 PTR changes for DKs and Legendary reward for Blacksmiths

For Death Knights the May 14 tweaks have some relevance, and the new “Reborn” style weapons can now apply the Legendary upgrade.

As I said, it was very disappointing that the Reborns were same as the LFR drops – and they still are disappointing. This brings a 30 day crafting slog up to the scale of a random LFR drop. I’m seriously contemplating dropping Blacksmithing for Enchanting or some other profession with regular solid buffs beyond Bracers and Gloves socketing.

More after the break.

Achievement bounty

I’ve been getting the odd and strange achievements recently, and instead of sliding them by there are screenshots.

Firstly here are some shots from the Blacksmith quest-line to use the Thunder Forge, then onto some random shots from doing daily quests, the 5000 quest achievement, and also getting Mortigen’s Black Prince reputation to Exalted. Then another for looting 50k gold.

Standing atop the Thunder Forge

Mortigen staring at the forge itself after clearing up the Mogu hanging around the entryway. This forge really deserves more attention, it is beautiful.

The Achievement for Pay to Slay, which I don’t understand the meme for.

And the Achievement for 5000 Daily Quests. Jesus that is a lot of regular activity.

And I am also now Exalted with Black Prince.

And then “Got my mind on the Money”, to loot 50k gold.

Blacksmithing the new Bars

The new Blacksmithing daily conversion grants a special BoP Lightning Steel Ingot bar, and also grants a chance to learn a pattern you don’t have. I really like this idea. Many of the BS patterns were expensive in mats and low use, but I like having the oddd chance to pick them up while creating a daily bar.

Even better was the fact that the pattern to learn it drops from a PvE kill (from Itoka) and has a small mini-quest to complete. This is spot on, and should be repeated for each tweak or enhancement to each profession. It is a way to bind players into the world.

As silly as it may sound too – these Lightning Steel Ingots are core materials for a set of ilevel 463 BoE items, which can be further enhanced to ilevel BoE 476.Yes, finally we have a way to craft 476 BoE items.

For my character who is still using a crappy upgraded blue weapon in my Tank set, it might be better. Sad, but hey – an upgrade is an upgrade. It will take 15x uses of the daily cooldown, so a fairly high investment in time.

Related articles

• Lightning Steel Ingots (ownedcore.com)