Patron orders are a new feature for crafting professions in TWW. Think of them as quests that reward items and currency useful to crafters.
Overview
When you click on the “Crafting Orders” tab at the bottom of your profession interface window, you’ll see a new tab at the top called “Patron”. As with other crafting orders, you can only access the information when you’re at your crafting table.
The Patron orders you see are yours alone – nobody else can fill them. You’ll find new orders there daily, but quests that give bigger rewards appear every 4 days, similar to world quests.
You can see what a quest rewards by clicking on the order or by mousing over the golden treasure chest icon in the Commission column (shown in the image above). The rewards for filling a patron order show up in your mailbox after you submit the order. The process of filling a patron order is identical to that of filling a public/guild/personal order.
Patron orders will frequently require you to use some of your own materials, but patrons will always provide sparks, acuity, and other special time-gated soulbound reagents. You can see which mats are provided by mousing over the Reagents column.
How do I unlock this feature?
Find Roldira in Dornogal ( /way #2339 59.2 55.8 Roldira ) to pick up a short introductory quest chain. She’s located inside the building behind the craft order station. This quest will give you a bag of reagents, 350 Artisan’s Acuity, and have you find your crafting station.
Patron Order Rewards
In addition to a small amount of gold, filling each order will give you 2 things from the list below. Rewards that are available only every 4 days are marked in blue.
- 30 Artisan’s Acuity
- 10 Artisan’s Acuity
- 1 Artisan’s Authenticity* finishing reagent that increases skill by 5-40 points
- 1 Crystallized Augment Rune
- 1 “Artisan’s Consortium Payout” – a bag containing random crafting reagents – not necessarily for your profession
- 1 Glimmer of Knowledge – 2 knowledge points
- 1 Flicker of Knowledge – 1 knowledge point
Knowledge points and Acuity are never rewarded by the same quest, but otherwise it’s a fairly random pairing. Quest rewards are not tied to the difficulty of filling the patron order.
*: Artisan’s Authenticity finishing reagents are items you can spend to give you a one time skill bonus when crafting an item. All but the 40 point one can be bought and sold on the auction house. The ability to use these reagents is typically locked behind certain knowledge point investments in profession trees. Here’s what they’re called:
- Apprentice Crafting License: +5 skill
- Stack of Pentagold Reviews: +10 skill
- Unraveled Instructions: +20 skill
- Artisan’s Consortium Seal of Approval: +40 skill (BoP)
Enchanting
Enchanters get patron orders, but not the ones that give knowledge points- they get those by disenchanting current expansion items.
Every 4 day rewards:
- 1 quest that rewards 30 Artisan’s Acuity
- 2 quests that reward 1 Crystallized Augment Rune each (these tend to require a higher quality – expect to use concentration)
- 2-3* quests that reward Glimmers of Knowledge (2 knowledge points each)
These quests expire after 7 days, so you have some time to build up mats or unlock recipes.
*: Alchemists, engineers, and jewelcrafters get 2 glimmer quests; blacksmiths, scribes, leatherworkers, and tailors get 3.
Daily rewards:
Every day, when daily quests reset, you’ll get a few new patron orders (usually 2, but more if you have catch up orders). These will have shorter expiration times (usually in the range of 10-24 hours), and they will be a random selection of the non-blue rewards listed above.
Knowledge Catch Up
If you fall behind your weekly quota* of knowledge point acquisition, you’ll be offered extra patron orders that reward a Flicker of Knowledge (1 point per order). These show up somewhat randomly at daily resets, and expire after 24 hours or less. They won’t appear all at once – they get dribbled out over time. It’s better to do the regular 2 point orders if you can, since you’ll be using twice as materials by doing single point orders.
*: your quota is the total of points possible from having done your weekly Dornogal quest + all of your patron orders. Treatises are not included. You can use a weak aura to help you keep track of this.
Why you might fall behind
- Recipe unknown: Sometimes you won’t be able to fill an order because you haven’t learned the recipe. A patron order can be for anything your profession makes – including recipes that come from raid drops, pvp rewards, and ones that are locked behind specialization requirements. It happens less often than it might if things were truly random – I think the system tends to pick something you know, esp. for the 2 point knowledge point rewards. Orders rewarding augment runes skew in the opposite direction – they are more likely to be from a non-trainer source.
- Quality: In other cases, the quality required for the order will be beyond your capability, even with concentration. The orders that reward knowledge tend to be on the easy side, but early in a profession even easy orders can be challenging. The orders that reward augment runes tend to have a high quality requirement.
- Expense: Sometimes the material cost of filling the order is simply not worth the knowledge points. Blacksmiths have it particularly rough in this regard with expensive alloys. You might want to set a limit on how much gold you’re willing to spend per knowledge point if you’re on a budget.