Rebuilding the Anvil
At the risk of repeating myself, thank you to all the readers of this blog for referring your Wowin’ friends: we’ve had visits from over 80 different countries as of yesterday! I had no idea World of Warcraft was such a global phenomenon… onto business:
Most likely, you’ve all visited or at least heard of the Isle of Quel’Danas which arrived with patch 2.4. Among the many new features of this addition, is Tier 6 quality gear that can be bought with Badges of Justice. The gear vendor becomes available in phase 3, once the anvil has been rebuilt. Not all realms progress at the same speed (due to different populations, amongst other things), so an easy way to find out where your realm stand is this post on the official World of Warcraft forums. We recommend you making the necessary mat purchases for this investment around the start of phase 3 on your realm.
The clear winner here is going to be investing in enchanting materials; with new gear comes new enchanting demand, and with enchanting mats, comes no deposit risk. This essentially means that all the mats you buy now can be listed free of charge for however long you want. This will help to withstand any unpredicted market fluctuations that could occur.
Let’s outline some recipes that we believe will be most in demand:
- Enchant Weapon - Mongoose
- Enchant Gloves - Major Spellpower
- Enchant Weapon - Major Spellpower
- Enchant Weapon - Major Healing
- Enchant Chest - Exceptional Stats
- Enchant 2H Weapon - Major Agility
- Enchant Boots - Fortitude
- Enchant Gloves - Assault
- Enchant Boots - Vitality
- Enchant Ring - Spellpower
- Enchant Ring - Striking
- Enchant Ring - Stats
What do most of these have in common? Well, basic enchanting mats. So that is what you should stock up on. Here they are:
- If Void Crystals are cheaper than 2x the price of a Large Prismatic Shard, buy now. Otherwise, you can afford to wait a little bit. If you’re nearing the completion of the anvil and this is still not the case, buy shards.
- If Greater Planar Essences are cheaper than 3 Lesser Planar Essences, buy the former. Otherwise, buy the latter.
- Arcane Dust: staple enchanting mat. Stock on up.
We recommend against buying the other mats that may be needed for these recipes that aren’t part of the 5 basic ones listed above. They are simply too volatile to be betting on for anything longer than a short term investment (there will be a future post on such strategies).
Of course, the time to sell is in the few days following the completion of the anvil and thus the appearance of the vendor.
Start making space in your banks, fellow investors 
April 7th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
There’s no profit to be had in the ring enchants - they can only be done on your own rings.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
here’s an idea for money making:
currently (at least on my server) void crystals are going for 23g a piece, while large prismatics are going for 25-30. void shatter, boom! 25g+ profit.
Axel
April 7th, 2008 at 11:42 pm
darn. didnt read the full post, particularly the part about voids/large pris’s.
nvm lol (great blog btw)
-Axel
April 8th, 2008 at 1:14 am
Got some nice ideas from here, keep it up.
If like me you don’t need masses of things from badge loot and have a decent number of badges saved up, check the AH for prices of Nether Vortexes. They’re currently going for around 200g on my server and I have sold 8 over the last two days. If I see any for 150g or under, I buy them out and re-list them for 200g, 40g profit for no effort.
Badges are so easy to come by that this is a license to print money at the moment.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:46 am
I just wanna say this this blog delivers! I almost dont want too many people to know about it!
April 8th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Don’t waste your Badges of Justice on Nether Vortexes or Primal Nethers. When the SSO alchemy vendor is available you will be able to buy Epic BT Gems with BoJs. I’m led to believe these will be 15 BoJ each - the same as a Nether Vortex - and the gems will sell for 500g+, at least initially (I know I for one will be paying 500g for Lionseyes).
April 8th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Mike said: “There’s no profit to be had in the ring enchants - they can only be done on your own rings.”
I think the point is, enchanters getting new rings will need the mats to enchant them, and may buy them from AH.
April 8th, 2008 at 7:28 am
Think this would work with normal blue quality gems as well? Buying ore and prospecting it or just buying the gems when they’re low? I know I for one, and probably a lot of other people, can’t afford to buy the epic gems straight away and will have to settle for the rare ones at least for a while.
Might be worth looking into.
April 8th, 2008 at 9:32 am
This is a great tip.
Mike, this is more about turning a profit on enchanting mats when they spike on the AH after Phase 3, so there’s still money to be had from those enchanters that have to turn to the AH for their ring mats.
Yes, zombiedog, you can turn around rare quality gems, but there’s more money in transmuting and cutting metas than in most other gems.
If you’re a cutter, or know one, or can find someone who doesn’t want tips or will cut in bulk for a reduced tip (watch trade for those good Samaritans), you can sometimes turn a little profit over time on high demand gems such as Solid Star of Elune (12 stam). There isn’t much markup here, though, so tips can ruin your profit if you’re not aggressive.
However, meta transmutes give you a gem that often cost half what the final cut meta goes for. Buy the transmute mats when they’re selling low, cough up a tip for using a stranger’s cooldown, then get the gem cut. You still have room to tip the cutter too if you need to.
A great example of this is the Powerful Earthstorm Diamond, where I can get one transmute for around 60g-70g mats + tips (high end, I get mats in bulk so they end up costing me closer to 50g or less), which I then turn around for at least 120g, most often 140g.
Also, right now is THE time to be transmuting and cutting Ember Skyfire Diamonds because the recipe is a new rep reward from the isle. They’re not yet common among cutters so the AH doesn’t see a lot of them, though they’re an amazing spell DPS gem that people will pay top dollar to get. Same deal as above, transmute a Skyfire, find a friendly cutter and put these hot shots up for close to 200g.
Do we know for sure yet if the new epic gems will be soulbound?
April 8th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
I’ve been sending all those green items you get from the sunfury supplies package to my enchanting alt.
Already for the AH when the time is right
April 8th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Nick has an excellent point that I’d like to elaborate on. Look on the AH for level 65 or greater greens items. If you see any for less than 8 gold, snap them up. Even better, grab Auctioneer with Enchantrix. It’ll tell you what an item’s DE value is worth, this way you can speculate a bit better on the AH. I just spent over 2k gold in greens and blues just to break them into their enchanting mats. Resell mats for roughly 3k gold or so. Rinse, repeat. Best time to do this is typically after the weekends when raiding guilds have dumped tons of greens/blues on the AH to make some repair bill money back.
It is worth spending badges on Vortexes (vortices?) if you’re making threads for leggings - so long as you’re not holding onto badges for the better loot that is. Consider Kara clear gives you 22 badges a week. Run the heroic daily for extra badges and you can craft a couple golden spellthreads. Buy the Primal Lifes (or farm them with your herbalist…they’re quick and easy to get) and you’re almost looking at pure profit. On my server Golden Spellthreads go for 300 gold. I’ve sold several since the Vortexes have been available.
Excellent posts and I am learning lots of new things from the comments as well. Lovin’ this blog!
April 9th, 2008 at 1:19 am
The Epic Gems won’t be soulbound otherwise the average player won’t be able to cut them. I’ll now be focusing on them when we get the anvil sorted (hopefullly by the end of the weekend). Will be interesting to see how flooded the AH becomes.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:39 am
Probably teaching you to suck eggs here but…
As a long term enchanter, make it easy for people to buy your mats off the AH. Look at the popular enchants and the quantities required and post stacks of that quantity. I find stacks of 12 Arcane dust can sell faster (and a little higher) than stacks of 20 as people want to buy the exact mats for an enchant and no spares.
I’ve done the same in tailoring and list my shadowcloth in 6’s and will be doing so in 12’s in anticipation of the new Tailoring patterns
April 9th, 2008 at 4:45 am
Lets I wanted to contribute a piece I wrote on my blog to you guys to look over if you felt so where would I sent it?
April 9th, 2008 at 9:59 am
On a similar note- on proudmoore gems stayed cheap until the anvil opened, then doubled in price. I had a nice supply of pre-cut rare gems I had been holding onto for this moment, and it has been a good source of income for the last few days.
stars of elune, noble topaz, and living rubies go fast. Dawnstones go a little less quickly, but I’m still selling about 2-3 brilliant a day at a 150% markup.
April 10th, 2008 at 3:58 am
For Sunwell progression try this site
http://www.gorgonnash.info/index.html
You can see progress of US or EU realms here and its a lot more reliable than someone posting on the forum.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:12 am
Be careful on the void crystals unless you are an enchanter yourself with the void shatter ability. I made a dumb mistake by buying some cheap void and can’t find a chanter to break em. Also Void Shatter is on a 1 day cool down. My favorite money maker is prospecting ore and selling the [blue] gems. I almost always get 2 gems from 40 ore and make at least 50% profit depending on what gems I get.
April 10th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I know this may not fit your “Never have to leave a major city” theory, but I am making a ton of cash from the SSO gathering quest…and not from the quest itself which is why it might fit in with you guys.
I am shooting for Exaulted(will happen tomorrow) with SSO and doing all the daily quests available on my realm. Which includes the daily gathering quest. My main is a herb/alch so I am picking flowers like mad. After about a week, I have SOOOOOO many herbs in my bank.
Last night I spent 60g in Imbued Vials alone just to make all the elixers that I had mats for in my week worth of doing this quest.
I then sit in Shatt at the Alch table making potions and exilirs and putting them on the AH in IF.
So far I have made near 1000g just as an extra side note of doing these dailies.
And more over, I am not going out past getting the 8 items needed for the quest….sure if I see a dot on the map on the way back to Shatt I will pick it, but I am not spending hours farming to do this. I spend about 20 minutes on the quest a day and then sell the potions at the end of the week.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
on Crushridge EU prices dropped down as soon as we got the Anvil.
e.g. 1 piece of Arcane dust went form 1g5s to 70s.
I bought stack of it and waiting for better times, lol.
April 16th, 2008 at 3:14 am
For once, I’m actually going to have to disagree, at least partially. While demand may be spiking once the anvil is finished, the supply has gone up an insane amount, also.
With all the green daily rewards I get, I generally end up with 1-2 stacks of both Essences and Dust. With all these enchanters making all these mats, the market is being flooded, at least on my server. While this might make it a good time to buy, I doubt the increase in demand from the anvil is going to make up for the vast increase in supply. Prices will probably go up, but not necessarily enough to make the profit margins worthwhile. Of course, there isn’t a deposit on enchanting materials, so there’s really not much risk involved, either.
Of course, this only applies to dust and essences. Since greens don’t (or vary rarely, anyway) de into shards, I’d expect your predicted boom in demand to be much more effective in this part of the market.
April 17th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Ahh, I can post comments now. On the old site, the captcha was broken in Opera, preventing me from replying.
Essentially, Captain Chaos has already said what I was going to say.
At least on my server, this would have been really bad advice. Dust prices and especially essence prices tanked to fractions of their previous levels and are apparently not done yet with their drop. The flood of 68-70 greens is so big that the market price of essences is already far below vendor value (for weapons that disenchant into them, obviously). The vendor prices essentially are the only thing stopping the prices to tank much further, but with people not considering this widely, it will be a long time until market values stabilize above vendor values.
For reference, essences used to sell at 6g+ - 7g was possible on high demand days and now are hovering at roughly ~3.80 market value (as determined by auctioneer with scans multiple times a day) and MBOs of 3.50 and less.