Thanks for the input guys. I did some info digging around the net and found out how the HQ number works now.

Basically if you craft a recipe with ALL HQ mats, it gives you 50% starting quality. Quality number depends on the item ilevel. So the formula is starting quality = sum[item ilvl / sum(item ilvl)] x 50% total quality.

Example below for crafting spinel ring using two materials, 1 Electrum Ingot with 40 ilvl and 1 Spinel with 40 ilvl. We can calculate that both Electrum Ingot and Spinel gives 637.75 HQ so if we craft with all HQ mats, this gives us 1275.5 HQ which is half of total 2551 quality. The below progress shows 637/2551 means that only one of the mats is HQ in this scenario.



My current gears/melds can only reach roughly 65% HQ progress so that means I need to use 90% HQ mats most of the time. Sometimes it can be just half of the mats if the mats have much higher ilvls.

I hope this helps.