Question about crafting gear and recraft.

[Mamut]

So on my alt I took crfating profession (LW) and on my main I have double gathering so did not engaged with crafting till now.

ANd now I wanted do make some pieces like belt or boots for my main on my alt but I wonder one thing. Would be cheaper to use low quality mats to make the item and later recraft it with high quality mats for better rank? Or the recraft can up the rank only by one and I would be forced to recraft multiple times to get the quality 5?

Or using the low quality mats will fuk up itemlevel and the item will be totally useless?

[ONCHEhap]

As recrafting costs a lot less mats, it can be worth making it first with cheap mats, and then recrafting with good mats, would end up being cheaper. But yes, it will make the item significantly worse, depending on your current crafting skill for the given item (if your skill is high enough, you'll probably still end up with something decent).

It's kind of a case by case basis really

[Twdft]

Or using the low quality mats will fuk up itemlevel and the item will be totally useless?

It won't be totally useless, but it is a good idea to craft with rank 3 mats. Not really intuitive, I try to explain:

An item takes a certain amount of skill to craft and it remembers with which mats it was crafted. If you use R1 mats it takes 3 recrafts with R3 mats to get to a point where it is the same as if crafted with R3 mats the first time.

For example the Int dagger needs 300 skill to craft at ilvl 392 = rank 5.
You only have a skill of 200 which would craft the item at ilvl 386 = rank 3.
Better quality of material can add up to 25% of needed skill. R1 mats add nothing, R2 mats add 12.5% and R3 mats add 25% of the 300 needed.
Your 200 + 75 from R3 mats would be enough to craft the dagger at ilvl 389 = rank 4.
If you skilled far enough to use glorious insight you could have 200 skill + 75 from mats +30 insight = skill 305 to craft ilvl 392 = rank 5.

Now for recrafts: it is using less mats to recraft. Dagger is 17 molten alloy to craft and only 7 to recraft. If you crafted with R1 mats in the first place, recrafting with R3 is kinda like using 10x R1 + 7x R3 mats when crafting if that makes sense. As I said, 3 recrafts with max rank mats is like crafting with max at first. So if you want to keep an item longterm use max from the start, if you know you replace it anyway just use as high mats as you need to reach an ilvl satisfactory to you.

Take a look at craftsim addon which allows you to look what ilvl you are able to craft an item without having the materials already:
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/craftsim