#0 - Dec. 20, 2006, 3:21 a.m.
The Basic Idea
Buy cheap armor and weapons, disenchant them, and sell the resulting crystals/shards/essences/dusts for a profit. Easy!
Addons
I use three:
Auctioneer (http://www.auctioneeraddon.com)
Tracks Auction House prices, adds improved searching/sorting capabilities, suggests prices when creating your own auctions, and automates the posting of multiple auctions. This is a must-have addon for anybody using the auction house.
Enchantrix (http://www.auctioneeraddon.com) - included with Auctioneer
Comes with a database of disenchantable items, and what they disenchant to - helps you choose which items to buy. (If you want to sell enchants as well, it will help you calculate what to charge for them based on Auctioneer's prices for the reagents). The current beta (as of 2007-08-06) appears to be stable and gives reliable results for all items, including those introduced in TBC.
CT_MailMod (http://www.ctmod.net) - part of the CTMod package
Automates the sending/receiving of mail - open up to 50 mails with one click. You will be dealing with a lot of mail if you start doing this seriously. :)
Preparation
* Use Auctioneer to scan the Auction House. If you haven't used it before you should run scans regularly for a week or so, so that it can build up a good database of prices. Prices vary through the week - usually higher at weekends - and to a lesser extent through the day, so it is important to scan regularly over an extended period. To speed up the scans you can configure Auctioneer to scan only in the Trade Goods category, unless you are interested in prospecting in other areas.
* Train up your enchanting. As of patch 2.x, the maximum level of items you can disenchant depends on your enchanting skill. To disenchant items up to level 60, you need skill 225, and for items above level 63 or so, you need skill 275. You can train up to skill 60 with disenchanting alone which is a start; consult one of the "powerlevelling" guides in this forum for details on how to skill up efficiently from there.
* Learn how disenchanting works. When you disenchant an item, it may disenchant to several types of reagent - perhaps more than one reagent of a given type, but never to more than one type. For example, a level 41 green armor piece may disenchant to 1-2 Dream Dust OR (less frequently) 1-2 Greater Nether Essence OR (even less frequently) a Large Radiant Shard.
Weapons and armor disenchant to different items depending on their level requirement:
Levels 5-10: may disenchant to Strange Dust, Lesser Magic Essence
11-15: Strange Dust, Greater Magic Essence, Small Glimmering Shard
16-20: Strange Dust, Lesser Astral Essence, Greater Magic Essence, Small Glimmering Shard
21-25: Soul Dust, Greater Magic Essence, Greater Astral Essence, Large Glimmering Shard
26-30: Soul Dust, Lesser Mystic Essence, Small Glowing Shard
31-35: Vision Dust, Greater Mystic Essence, Large Glowing Shard
36-40: Vision Dust, Lesser Nether Essence, Small Radiant Shard
41-45: Dream Dust, Greater Nether Essence, Large Radiant Shard
46-50: Dream Dust, Lesser Eternal Essence, Small Brilliant Shard
51-60: Illusion Dust, Greater Eternal Essence, Large Brilliant Shard, Nexus Crystal
57-63: (Outland and raid items) Arcane Dust, Lesser Planar Essence, Small Prismatic Shard
64-70: (Outland and raid items) Arcane Dust, Greater Planar Essence, Large Prismatic Shard
60-70: (Outland and raid items) Void Crystal
Notes:
* Dusts drop most often from armor; essences from weapons.
* Dusts and essences drop in larger quantities in higher level brackets if they appear in more than one, e.g. a level 36 item may yield 2-5 Vision Dust, while a level 35 item may yield only 1-2.
* Blue items almost always yield a shard; greens yield one 4-5% of the time.
* Nexus and Void Crystals drop almost exclusively from Epic (purple) items, although very rarely (<1% of the time) a Rare (blue) item may yield one.
* Some green weapons/armor are not disenchantable at all, so be careful when bidding. Prominent examples are enchanter-crafted wands and the Twilight Trappings items (Twilight Cultist's Cowl etc.).
* Internally, the results of disenchantment are actually determined by item level, not required level. At low levels this isn't really noticeable on most BoE items, because there is a direct correpondence between item level and required level (required level = item level - 5). Above level 55 things become more complicated; see http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=118924062&sid=1 for more info.
Buying
With Auctioneer and Enchantrix installed, when you mouse-over an item in the auction house a tooltip pops up telling you what it could disenchant to, with probabilities, and an expected value based on Auctioneer's price database. Because disenchanting is somewhat random, this is only a statistical estimate, but a good guide if you are disenchanting on a large scale. The simple rule is, if the item is "cheaper enough" than its expected disenchant value, buy it!
You can look for good buys in any way you like, but I generally do the following:
1) Pick a level bracket (say, 46-50), item type (weapon or armor) and quality (Uncommon, Rare or Epic) and Search.
2) Look at a match and note its disenchant value in the tooltip. The value should be the same for all items of the same quality in the search results.
3) Figure out a maximum bid price. I usually bid up to 80-85% of disenchant value, but you may want to be more conservative. Remember that when you sell an item, the auction house takes a cut of 5% of the final sale price, so bidding much above 90% is a bad idea unless you have good reason to believe the estimate is too low.
4) Sort the list by current bid
5) Work through the list bidding on everything until you hit your bid limit. Remember to check all the pages.
Tips:
* If an item has a low buyout, or a buyout very close to its current bid, you may want to buy it outright instead of bidding
* If an item has a very low bid, consider bidding higher than the default to discourage others from outbidding you - better a smaller profit than none at all.
* Supply, demand and prices change, so don't be rigid in choosing your bid limit. If a reagent looks particularly rare at the moment, consider raising your limit. If there's an oversupply of a reagent, or you have a ton of it yourself already, you don't need to be so aggressive.
* Concentrate on level brackets which provide items you need, or think you'll need. Don't bid blindly on everything, or you'll end up with a huge surplus of certain reagents and fill up all your bags.
Disenchanting
Not much to say here. Grab your winnings from the mailbox and disenchant them.
Don't be disheartened if you make a loss on an item. So you paid 2g50 for something that yielded one lousy Illusion Dust; but next time you may get two Greater Eternal Essence from the same item - instant 10g profit. It's a gamble, but if you bid sensibly, the odds are in your favor in the long run.
Selling
It's mostly the same as selling any other type of item - know your market and set your prices accordingly. However, a few tricks:
* Lower level dusts and essence (up to level 40) are mostly bought by people who are skilling up enchanting themselves, and are buying in large quantities. You can save yourself some time by selling only full stacks of these reagents. Lower level shards (glowing and below) tend to be hard to sell - learning enchanters usually go for the dusts and essences because they're cheaper.
* At higher levels, there are still people skilling up, but also non-enchanters buying ingredients for individual enchants. I usually sell singly and in stacks of 5 and 20 to cover all bases. Lobotomy suggests tuning stack sizes to the amounts required by individual enchants:
Dream Dust: 1, 2, 5, 10
Illusion Dust: 1, 4, 6, 15
Greater Eternal Essence: 1, 2, 4, 6, 10
Large Brilliant Shard: 1, 2, 4, 6
etc.
* Check prices for different quantities individually - single items and small stacks are often more in demand than full stacks, and can be sold for proportionally more.
* Keep your bid price close to or even the same as your buyout, to avoid people bidding, winning, and undercutting you. There is no deposit on enchanting reagent auctions, so no penalty for them expiring. I have mine set at 95% of buyout, but I sometimes go a little lower if I want to undercut someone.
* Watch for disparities in the prices and supply of lesser and greater essences: lesser essences often sell for more than a third of the price of greater ones. (I guess many people don't know that you can split/combine them). This applies to Large/Small Prismatic Shard as well, if your Enchanting skill is high enough to perform the conversions.
* Don't flood the market. You may have 20 stacks of Vision Dust itching to be sold, but it's very unlikely that you'll get rid of all of it in 24 hours, and oversupply drives prices down. I usually limit myself to 4-6 stacks of dusts, 2-4 of essences, and 1 of shards, sometimes more for the lower level reagents that tend to sell in large quantities if they sell at all. You can always replenish your auctions if some of them sell.
* If you find you are running low on a particular reagent, jack your prices while you restock. Far better for your auctions to expire than to run out of a reagent when there's a shortage, and see people selling it for twice its normal price.
* Adjust your prices to track the market, but don't lower them too far. Floods never last forever, and after a while you should get a feeling for a baseline price where things will always sell eventually.
