Disenchanting Primer

A few people have asked me to analyze exactly what disenchanting I do and how I go about it. I am hesitant to give explicit numbers since no two servers are exactly the same. I have a friend who I may be going into business with and because of that and my desire to turn this experience into some sort of academic project I have an excel sheet of disenchanting guidelines I use. The prices below are in gold. This is all the juicy stuff:

Item Level	Max Price	Expected Value	Minimum Profit
36-40 Armor	2	4	2
36-40 Weapon	4	6	2
41-45 Armor	2	4	2
41-45 Weapon	5	10	5
46-50 Armor	2	3	1
46-50 Weapon	5	8	3
51-56 Armor	4	14	10
51-56 Weapon	10	17	7
64-70 Armor	4	6	2
64-70 Weapon	7	11	4
71-75 Armor	11	16	5
71-75 Weapon	11	16	5
76-80 Armor	20	40	20
76-80 Weapon	20	40	20

As a general rule the value of the materials your piece of armor or weapon will disenchant to changes every 5 levels or so. There are significant caveats to this analysis, but for now lets just look at the chart. I don't fiddle with anything below level 36, because in most cases the profit is less than 1g. The max price is obviously the most I will pay for the item. The expected value is approximately how much the piece is worth after it has been disenchanted. I always round downward to be safe, and because there are more items than I have time to buy. Minimum profit is the least I expect to make from the item. These values are on my server based on the enchantrix price from scanning the auction house regularly.

To access the different items what I do is go to the browse window in the auctioneer advanced and specify the level range I want to work with and change the rarity to uncommon. You also want to arrange the listings by bid price. I bid on all items that meet my requirements too. Just because the buyout price it out of my range doesn't mean the bid price is. I have plenty of time. I don't mind waiting for it.

As you can see from the chart the new wrath items are the most profitable. However those numbers represent aggregate expected value for the level range. Sometimes you get better stuff when you disenchant than others. I assure you, it balances out.

Some general advice though, stay away from non-wrath blues. Strangely enough they are usually worth less than the greens and cost more.

This gets even more complicated however. In addition to level requirements, armor/weaons have ilvls. Where the ilvl changes sometimes can be very valuable in wrath. When you search for items from 64-70 you'll see some items with ilvl 130 and up. Those are wrath items which are worth considerably more than BC items. There is another switch at ilvl 151. Items at that ilvl are worth around 40g a piece and can sell for as little as 5g.

The problem is that disenchanting takes time. For me it is no big deal. I buy all the items with one character, send them to another and read a book while I disenchant. I can also do it on my laptop at work. Since it only gets 10fps when I move, it's the perfect activity.

I will be adding screenshots and more information to this post later. Feel free to ask further specific questions in the comments and I'll try to update this post to address them. I'd like to make this post as complete and as valuable as possible.

Update 12/8

Prices for Northrend mats have cooled down a bit in the auction house. Remember to always use your data. My data is only useful to me and other players on my server. Hopefully, none of those people are reading this. What follows is a screenshot of me using auctioneer advanced and the information that is posted there. I know some people are still having trouble with the new version. If you would get used to the newfangled layout, I promise you'd like it better. You need to click to enlarge it to get any detail.

Hand Over Fist

This week went much better than I had expected. I am still floundering with the eternal and crystallized juggling, and to this day I can't give away the glyphs I made to level up inscription. I might be close to doing the unthinkable... putting them in the guild bank. If any goblins are reading I'm sure they are cringing.

The disenchanting business beat expectations though. I spent 10,000g on mats last week and brought in a whopping 23,300g in revenue. Not a bad week at all. I don't know if these kind of profits will continue, but I transferred another 10k for mat purchases again this week.

The big movers were the new dusts and essences. I always post in both full stacks and individually with both kinds of cosmic essences and infinite dust. The shards still aren't moving all that well, but I'm not too worried. Enchanters are going to need them to get some of the more advanced recipes and demand will continue to rise as more and more people hit 80 and start raiding.

Arcane dust and greater planar essences are also very popular. I'm kicking myself because Saturday I undercut someone who had about 30 individual greater planars up for 9g a piece. I usually keep fixed prices for my enchanting mats (11g for greater planar) since there is no deposit in the AH for them, but I really wanted them to move. When I checked Sunday everything we both posted was gone. What really irks me is that I inadvertently posted my full stacks of greater planar at the same low price.

Another one of the things I do with pricing when I post the same item both individually and in full stacks is that there is a price differential. Usually with a pretty competitive high price items like shards, individual items are a little cheaper than full stacks. Most people don't have enough shards to post full stacks of them, and there is a market for them, so they fetch a bit more as a full stack. On the other hand with a less competitive market like greater cosmic essences I will charge more for individual items than a full stack. There is not much price pressure so I can get away with higher prices and still give an incentive to people who buy in bulk.

This next coming week is all about leveling for me. I think I'll still at least double my 10k investment in the DE mats, but that will be all I'll work on for the most part this week.

A Businessman's Toolkit

There are tons of guides to essential addons on the web, but many of those don’t address the needs of the business people. I don’t need bar mods or threat meters. I need to get my mail faster and keep track of all my dough. I wanted to put together a list of what I use, because maybe there are one or two gems in there that you guys aren’t using.

First off, I use wowmatrix to download and update all of my mods. Back when you had to install them and update them yourself, I didn’t use mods that often because it was a pain, but now it doesn’t have to be.

Obviously auctioneer suite. I was pretty bitter about having to move to auctioneer advance because there is no more real support for igor’s mass auction that I know of. I’m sure that there are people smarter than me out there that know of a quicker way to put up a lot of different auctions up other than appraiser, and maybe you’ll comment here and let me know. Appraiser is great when you are putting up a lot of the same auctions, but when I have 50 different pieces of armor, I’d rather have good old Igor. I would spend more time buying and selling armor, which has been pretty lucrative in the past, but it takes too long for me to post them all.

Next you need a good mail mod. I use postal because it seems to get the mail the quickest for me and you have a contact list. You have to remember to change the speed in the options to make it grab the items quicker though.

I also use Fubar money fu. It keeps track of all of your gold by character, by session, by the day and the week. It screws up when I use different computers for wow since the information it gathers is saved to the computer. I get around this limitation by using different toons for different tasks. I have a toon that receives money simply to buy things to disenchant, so I can keep track of disenchanting costs. Then I have a toon that only sells DE mats to keep track of revenue. All my other buying and selling goes on with a third toon.

Another really useful mod to keep track of items you routinely search for in the AH is AHsearch and AHsearchnext. The menu system for saving searches is a little complicated, but once you figure it out you can save a lot of time typing searches. I look up all the eternals and crystallized elements everyday for example. Instead of having to type everything in, once it is set up you can just click on it from a dropdown menu. It also makes sure I don’t overlook an item I usually check prices for.

I also used to use wowecon. I upgraded a few weeks ago to the premium version and I haven’t had a good experience with it. It very well could be user error, but I find that for whatever reason it only tracks a very small number of my sales, which was the entire reason I upgraded. The module uses a good deal of memory as well, which is fine for my desktop, but it prohibitively expensive in terms of performance with my laptop.

Finally, if you are in a guild with your AH toon, you might want to use a chat mod like prat to filter all of your AH activity so you can keep track of whispers and guild chat. A few people have felt snubbed by me because I didn’t respond because I never saw what they typed. With a chat mod you can keep track of everything easier.