Enchanting My Way to Gold

There are quite a few ways to make some serious gold with enchanting, today we will look at the new materials and enchants with the arrival of Mists of Pandaria.  Most of you who read my blog know that I do not like farming; in fact the only farming I do like is when I farm the Auction House.  Enchanting is no different.  Right now we have a highly fluctuating marketplace which is not unusual at the start of an expansion.  So how do we profit?

Enchanting materials are fast movers right now, with people wanting to enchant their new gear and others wanting to level their enchanting to max level as quickly as possible.  That gives us some opportunities in flipping materials such as; Spirit Dust, Mysterious Essence and Ethereal Shards.  I am skipping Sha’ Crystals for now as they are not really moving in volume yet.  There is one wrinkle to consider in the materials flipping; Enchanters can combine several items to upgrade, or they can degrade an item.  This is giving us a huge opportunity from time to time so that we can convert over supplied materials into undersupplied markets.

Here is a chart to examine the opportunity based on my server’s current prices:

Conversion Table	Qty		AH Price	Total Cost		Profit
Spirit Dust	x	5	3	15	= 1 Mysterious Essence	15
Mysterious Essence	x	5	30	150	= 1 Ethereal Shard	-80
Ethereal Shard	x	5	70	350	= 1 Sha' Crystal	-50
Sha' Crystal			300

Notice that creating Mysterious Essence can generate a nice 100% profit line while converting the other materials could be at a loss.  This may be different on your server as well so use your numbers to figure out where there is opportunity to profit.  This can also be deceiving, the model says we would lose 80 gold by converting 5 Mysterious Essences into 1 Ethereal Shard.  But what if we used 25 Spirit Dust at 3 gold each and converted them into 5 Mysterious Essence and then converted those 5 into 1 Ethereal Shard?  Our cost basis would be 75 gold with a current market price of about 70 gold so we lose 5 gold.

Why mention this?  Because the market is in flux so much that prices can go up and down fast and we want to be able to produce enchants for profit so we have to look at the cheapest method to do it.  The other night I went to make some enchants and the AH had Ethereal Shards going for 125 each.  But the weird part is that the Spirit Dust and Mysterious Essence’s were going for the same rate I listed above.  So using this conversion method I was able to produce Ethereal Shards for 75g by buying up all the dust at 3g or less and converting them into Mysterious Essence and then finally into Ethereal Shards.  I listed a few for sale and made some enchants.

Buying and flipping in this type of market is also volatile, be prepared to sit on mats sometimes because there is so much supply hitting the market and look for those times when supply is down.
Enchants can make some serious gold as well, but there are two ways to do it; Flipping enchants and crafting them.  Crafting them is simple once you have a maxed out enchanter, look for the enchants on the AH and determine which ones are selling for more than their materials.  Easy math and in some cases you can generate profits as much as 500% of the base cost to make them.  

But don’t forget to check out those enchants that are listed dirt cheap.  We have a ton of people still leveling their professions and some of these people will craft enchants and then list their products cheaply on the AH to get rid of them.  They are not worried about making a profit; they were only worried about maxing their profession.  This gives us a huge opportunity.  Some of these lower level enchants (level 550-590) may not be as popular but they can make some tidy profits.  I found 35 enchants on the AH the other night selling for1 gold to 2 gold each.  They used Mysterious Essence and Spirit Dust which means their cost to make was roughly 30-60 gold each.  Each person who listed them simply undercut the last person.

I bought them all and then relisted 10 of them at 50 gold each.  I sold 3.  Big deal?  Let’s do the math, I spent about 50 gold buying all 35 enchants and then sold 3 of them for 150 gold total which means I profited about 100 gold for doing nothing.  The price dropped again and now I have tons of these but so what?  I can do this again and even if I build up a supply of hundreds of these, I will still have made gold.  I can give these away to guildies or store them for later resale when the markets normalize.

Bottom line: Do not under estimate all of those really cheap enchants.  Many of these may be cheap only for the next few weeks while people dump their supply on the market.