WoW Reviews & Guides

Install Auctioneer 1st.

The idea here is buy items on the AH, disenchant them, and sell the enchanting materials for a profit. There are two basic methods for doing this, the first of which is to use the slash commands to find items that have low bids or buyouts less than the resulting enchantment materials. The second is to browse the AH in a specified category (items that are likely to disenchant to a specific material), and sort them by buyout value, looking for items below a specified threshold value.

If you are using the verbose mode of the tooltip, you will get a display of what the item will most likely disenchant into, as well as the estimated value of the resulting enchanting materials.

Regardless of the way you look at disenchanting for profit, you need to take into account demand when you first make your profit calculations. Just because you have been able to sell one reagent at a particular price does not mean you will be able to sell 20 at that price. This disparity is likely to be the greatest on newer servers where more expensive items are not really “commoditized” yet. While 1 linen cloth is not very likely to sell for much more than 1/20th the price of a stack of 20 linen cloth (if it sells at all), a single high level disenchant item might sell for 1/8 as much as 20 of them in a stack, or more than double the unit price. This can be very confusing when you are first starting out. The point is, you will probably have to lower your prices when you want to sell larger quantities.

Here’s an example of how you can go wrong. When you first start disenchanting for profit, you get your first Greater Eternal Essence and are thrilled to sell it for 10 gold. Seeing a great opportunity for profit, you might quickly buy up 20 to 30 high-level armors for 2-3g each and end up with 10 Greater Eternal Essences (among other things). Having spent only around 60 gold, you now have material worth 100 gold! Huzzah! You can almost smell your epic mount already.

But all is not well. You put all 10 Greater Eternal Essences on the auction house and wait 24 hours, but nine of them come back unsold. You discount them to 9g and one more sells. At 7g you are able to move 2 more, but it’s been 3 days and you’re still stuck with 6 Greater Eternal Essences and quickly diminishing profits. What happened?

Your supply outstripped the demand, and you had to drop your price to continue selling the reagents. When supply increases but demand remains the same, the price will fall. The moral of this story is to try to gauge the demand for particular reagents before you get really gung-ho with disenchanting. If you had simply disenchanted 4-5 items with really great profit potentials instead of 20-30 with mediocre to good potential, you would have been more likely to sell your items for high prices and not have had to worry about sitting around on reagents while waiting for demand to return.