Diablo 3 Artisans Overview
As you progress and earn Diablo 3 Gold their trust, you can upgrade your artisan’s abilities and gain more from your relationship with them. For example, the Blacksmith has the capability to repair your gear, buy your unwanted supplies, and create sockets for your gear. The Blacksmith can also craft for you mostly weapons and some kinds of armor.
Blacksmith
The Blacksmith’s ability to add sockets to gear is limited to items which do not already have sockets. This ability is also not limited by the quality of the item, so even a legendary weapon can have a socket added to it. This will greatly improve the quality of your item and provide you with a way to raise its cost on the auction house. Like Diablo 2, creating items will have a large amount of random stats as well as the standard predictable stats you’d expect when creating an item.
Upgrading Your Artisans
You can upgrade your vendors by supplying them with the right amount of materials and gold, not by crafting items. I see a real opportunity here for selling materials to other players who want to level their artisans quickly. Blizzard believes that salvaging will be the way you obtain your materials to upgrade your artisans, but I firmly believe that they are underestimating the laziness of their player-base!
Crafting Random Stats
If you manage to randomly craft the best item possible in terms of stats, then you will want to socket it, put the best gem in it, and sell it for as much as possible. This is the general strategy most players will follow when crafting with artisans for profit. Keep in mind that it will also cost money for the services of each artisan, so these fees will need to be incorporated into figuring out whether you can sell the items you create. These fees will cause a lot of issue for those who want to follow my lead and mix the artisan professions.
The best recipes in the game for your artisans will come from drops off monsters, so expect those to sell for quite a bit on the auction house. If you get the opportunity, buy these recipes and start crafting the items which they create. Despite the fact that anyone else could do this, most players will buy a recipe because they want the item, not because they want to sell it themselves.