Sending a recrafting order for lapidary’s khazgorite clamps and I replaced the 2* +20 missive with a 3* +15 missive. This should have caused the recipe difficulty to drop by 5 relatively speaking from 420 to 415. Instead the difficulty went up to 435.
So it seems like both missives are adding to the difficulty instead of the 3* missive replacing the 2* one.
This seems to be a thing. Replacing anything keeps both the old and new difficulties added. Looks to me mostly a visual cosmetic, as I was able to Proc R5 on an item I wouldn’t normally with both added difficulities. Killing an embellishment with powder, still gotta deal with the embellishment difficulty. Replacing an infusion with a concentrated infusion, +80 difficulty!
I don’t know if its intended, but in a way as a crafter, does make it a tad more interesting.
It works correctly for items you craft for yourself. For smithing/engineering items that I’ve made for myself replacing the missive has adjusted the difficulty as expected.
So it seems only recrafting orders that are sent to another toon that are problematic,
I will test if it’s just a display bug with an item that should be 5* with an insight and see what happens.
EDIT: Result of test was unclear - inspiration procced so it came out 5* but not sure if the difficulty was set appropriately.
I think it’s “mostly” cosmetic, since someone had sent me a trinket for science. In theory I needed approx 6 over what I could inspire according to the tooltip, and was able to inspire it to rank 5 still. On the other hand, I have never been able to inspire 10 points over in a different profession.