Sunday, January 10, 2010

Profession How To Part 3: Enchanting


Next professions: Blacksmithing and Alchemy

Enchanting. A strange market I must say. Many enchant scrolls on my server sell for LESS than the material cost of the mats, even if you craft JC rings to DE for mats and buy in /2 for very low cost. Namely cloak enchants, tuskarr's, and defense enchants. I've found that weapon enchants and low end enchants (striking, super stats, icewalker, etc.) sell the most, but weapon enchants get you the most profit per sale.

I don't DE gear to sell mats, I use every bit I get. Turning gems and crystallized earths saves about 1g on dust, but since that takes a lot of time i only do it when there are NO mats on AH for an acceptable price and I need to refresh my stock. Here's a link to a great post on the JMTC forums for a spreadsheet to calculate the material cost of each enchanting scroll. Did wonders for me, the thread is only 2 pages long and will give you an idea how to tailor it to your own prices. It is rather intuitive. If you don't have MS excel, you can get open office and work with it just fine.

These are my minimum sales prices and enchant list of ones that are worth selling (for my server). I'm going to emphasize that these are only the ones that sell on MY server. For you, some regularly used enchants like shadow armor or defense to chest might be well worth crafting and selling. Unfortunately the scrolls are being sold for half of what it costs to make (guess how I get my own gear enchanted!). Even with my guild giving a 50% discount on enchants for raiders, I still buy most of mine from the AH because of this.

All of my sales are based on the following assumed material pricing, which is the max I pay per item:

Abyss crystals: 30g/ea
Greater cosmics: 13g/ea
Infinite dust: 30g/stack
Arcane dust: 2g/ea
Void crystals: 8/ea
Armor vellum: 30g/stack
Weapon vellum: 120g/stack
Large prismatic shards: 4g/ea
Righteous orbs: 25g/ea
Large brilliant shards: 10g/ea

If you're finding that prismatic shards are a bit pricey, here's a friendly reminder that saved me tons per scroll in materials: void shatter

.Weapons.
Staff greater spellpower - 300
Accuracy - 310
Berserk - 440
Crusader - 150 (recipe drops from this guy and others in the same spot. Took me 20 kills for the drop. however it is also boe so you might be able to buy it.)
Great potency - 25
Black magic - 330
Mighty spellpower - 270
Superior potency - 195
Massacre - 360
Exceptional spellpower - 55
2h greater savagery - 40
Goose - 280 (Moroes in karazan, lvl 70 raid in deadwind pass. If you don't have the key or a lock pick of some sort, you can drop through the floor on the back side. 100% drop rate). Remember to be in a raid group!


.Gloves.
Crusher - 110
Exceptional spellpower - 15
Armsman - 60

.Bracers.
Major Stamina - 100
Superior spellpower- 120
Greater assault - 110
Striking - 14

.Boots.
Icewalker - 16
Greater fortitude - 25
Minor run seed - 15

.Chest.
Powerful stats - 170
Super stats - 20

.Cape.
Titanweave - 75
Greater speed - 90
Wisdom - 140

.Shield.
Intellect - 25
Major stamina - 40 (Purchased from this npc in shattrath)


Also of note is that scrolls have zero deposit cost, so you can list as many as you please and only have to worry about the 5% AH cut when they sell, helps keep your profits high. What I do is I keep a stock of 4 scrolls of each armor enchant and 2 of each weapon enchant (except mongoose, I keep 4 of them on me) while posting 3 and 1 of each respectively. In addition to that, I try to keep a load of enchanting mats in my bank for all northrend enchants along with a handful of TBC mats for mongoose and a few others I'm experimenting with. I currently sit with over 20 stacks of dust, 20 stacks of cosmics, 10 stacks of abyss, and whatever cheap TBC mats i find i buy. Here's a great post by the goblin about a nice spot to get some extra cheap greater planars and occasionally dust.

Keep a close eye on how much you pay for materials and how much you list for. When I first got into this market a few weeks ago, I came to find out that I had sold a handful of enchants 10g below material cost, heh woops. But as with getting into any new market you need to expect to make a mistake here and there. Because of that I highly recommend using the spread sheet I posted at the beginning so you can see for yourself just how low you can post your enchants for.



AH giggle of the day
I have been dealing with several AH campers in my JC market for the last week or so, hence the lowerish profits. But now they are making their way into all of my other markets and ONLY post things there when I log on, namely enchanting and blacksmithing. For the longest time I never saw them post a single item from those professions, but now they are camping almost every market I am currently in. So what am I doing? Letting prices plummet to near material costs in less than 15 minutes each time I post.

Now the profit for myself and may others is nearly nothing. Last night, belt buckles dropped from 75g to 35 in no time which is a measely 5g profit BEFORE AH cut and not including losses on deposits. My next step was to then invade THEIR markets. Now they don't have any amazing profits either. Unless they're already caped, they're about to lose a lot by selling me very under priced goods =D

Lesson learned:
Be careful who you start some AH PvP with, they might have more loose cash than you do.


Thanks for stopping by!

4 comments:

  1. Be careful of holding large inventories of dust. The price on my server, at least, has crashed since 3.3. In early 3.2 it was 3-4g each on the AH (with JC costing me ~1.60 each), but the price fell to ~2g each in late 3.2. In 3.3 the price has plummeted to 0.75g each, and I cannot compete via JC.

    Correspondingly the cost of all dust-only scrolls has fallen, too, and things like Bracers - Striking are no longer viable markets. I've been trying to draw down my dust inventory due to this, focusing on the remaining high-margin enchants.

    Regarding competitive auctioneers, my favorite bait is to post a few test auctions just below their best prices. If they are watching you too closely and relist immediately, you can push their profits down without risk of selling any yourself at below-cost prices. Then, when their price is lower than your craft cost, and you don't think they have a secret source of mats, buy them out!

    Oh, and make sure to friend your regular competition. It helps to know at a glance who is online and when they log off. Your competitors have likely done this to you, which is why they know to go recheck and repost auctions just after you log off.

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  2. Out of interest, as for stacks of Infinite Dust, the prices have plummeted everywhere, and I happen to have a reasonably large stock of them. However the same thing happened (on my server at least) with TBC mats, but I held onto them and now they're worth quite a bit, do you think it would be worth holding onto the Infinite dust until Cataclysm for any alts wishing to powerlevel a profession?

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  3. I found that the Enchant Chest - Greater Stats sells pretty well too. I sell them from 150-200g each on my server, as they are the best enchant for the heirloom chest gear.

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  4. I bought Enchant Chest - Greater Health and sell that as a BoA chest enchant - i can buy the mats for around 40s and sell the enchant for 85-100g ;)

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