Dragonflight uses Crafting Stations to make you feel immersed in your professions

Of all the crafting professions in World of Warcraft, most only have a few special recipes which require a specific Crafting Station to be used in order to create your item. You need to standing near a cooking fire or anvil to use much of Cooking or Blacksmithing, and so you can’t make items just anywhere the way that Enchanting or Tailoring or Leatherworking can. You can just stand there, wiggle your hands, and make a rifle or put together a nice shirt or even stitch together some Dragonscale armor, whether you’re in the middle of town or the middle of a raid.

At least you can right now, because in Dragonflight, there will be new specific crafting stations for every crafting profession — save for Blacksmithing and Cooking which already have Anvils and Cooking Fires to make use of. According to the Dragonflight Preview: More on Professions post, these crafting professions are intended to not only give you a common place to do your crafting, but also to help with the feeling of immersion.

Currently the preview has videos for the Engineering Station, the Enchanting Station, and the Jewelcrafting Station, as well as the very cool Portable Alchemy Station so that you can still make potions and Phials for your raid group without having to leave to go find a Crafting Station and then get a summon back.

It’ll be a little adjustment to get used to not just being able to do my Enchanting anywhere I like. I won’t pretend otherwise. But I do think that making it so that, instead of just doing an extremely boring dance where ever to craft items, we’ll now have to find an appropriate workshop-style location, is a good idea for making professions feel integrated into the world. For example, the city of Valdrakken has a crafting hub with complete Crafting Stations, vendors who sell various necessities, and profession trainers as well. Combine that with an auction house — yay, no having to go back to Org or Ironforge — and a Crafting Order NPC to give your produced item to while leveling your new professions, and it feels like professions are going to feel like a real choice your character makes in Dragonflight.