Profiting from Disenchanting

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This is a guide to profiting from disenchanting. So everyone knows what I’m talking about, I’m going to give you a short…

Crash course in Disenchanting

Disenchanting is a skill you learn when you become an enchanter. When you disenchant green (uncommon) or better quality gear (weapons and armor) you will destroy them and receive dusts, essences or shards which are then used to enchant your and other players’ gear. Your skill in enchanting determines the level of gear you can disenchant. For example, to DE an item which requires level 64 to equip, you need at least 250 enchanting skill. Here’s a table on this page: http://www.wow-europe.com/en/info/professions/enchanting.html 

For all practical purposes, 275 skill in enchanting is enough at this time. In WotLK we’re going to want more. Some items already require level 300 to DE, but you won’t find those at bargain prices on the auction house. There are many guides to skilling up enchanting. Do a google search.

Making Money With Enchanting

Enchanting used to be one of the WORST professions for making gold. If you’ve tried it you know what I mean.

There were basically two ways to profit from enchanting.

1. Offering to enchant other people’s gear for a fee
2. Disenchanting weapons and armor and selling the enchanting materials on the auction house

The first method is very slow and laborious and will require you to have rare enchants that people are willing to pay for. Even so, you won’t make much and it’s a headache to wait around for people, standing around in cities spamming your enchanting macros, and linking materials to tire kickers.

Disenchanting offered some interesting possibilities. You could disenchant your old gear and make a small profit from auctioning the mats instead of vendoring the gear. You could DE quest rewards and make a few extra gold, as well as bind-on-pickup items in instances. You could even offer to DE other people’s items for a small fee.

But the "real" money lay in buying underpriced gear on the auction house, disenchanting it and selling the mats at a profit. However, it used to be quite a tedious process where you had to do manual searches in various item level ranges etc.

But now with Auctioneer Advanced, it’s actually pretty simple and fast to do, and can earn you some serious gold without ever leaving your major city. This is a great gold maker for any class, one which you can use between battleground queues, while waiting for raids or party members.

Here’s how to profit from disenchanting

1. Make sure you have the latest version of Auctioneer Advanced Suite installed. Get it from www.auctioneeraddon.com
2. Go to the Auction House and click the Scan button or the small "play" button (doesn’t matter). Wait until the scan is finished
    
3. Right click the Search UI button 
   
4. Click the "Searchers" header, then Disenchant
5. Set it up as shown, or enter a lower or higher max skill as determined by your enchanting skill. Set a lower or higher minimum profit as you see fit  
6. Click the "Filters" header and disable all filters (i.e. make sure none are enabled)
   
7. Select Disenchant again and click the search button
8. Buy out the auctions that look interesting, retrieve them from your mailbox, disenchant them and put up the enchanting mats for sale
9. Profit

Configuring Enchantrix

Enchantrix is an addon that’s a part of the Auctioneer Advanced Suite. Among other things, it can show what an item disenchants into in the tooltip. We’re going to tweak the settings slightly for our purposes. Type "/enchantrix config" (without the "") to bring up the settings window for enchantrix. Here’s how I suggest you set it up.

Some additional tips:

• The disenchant value will be based on the stored data that Auctioneer has from your server’s and faction’s enchanting mats. However, and I’m not 100% sure about this, if there has been large price moves in enchanting mats, Auctioneer will be wrong about the current value of the items. For example, if you buy an item expecting it will turn into a large prismatic shard when DE’d, and the historic price of LPS are 30g, but the current price is only 10g, then you may lose money because Auctioneer may think the fair price is 30g. That will update over time as you make more scans, but I think there’s a lagging effect to it on purpose.
• To avoid the above, you can set fixed prices for various enchanting materials from the enchantrix config window. (/enchantrix config)
• Some materials are best sold in singles, other in doubles, stacks of 5, 10 or 20. Typically, dusts are sold in larger stacks, shards in singles, and essences in singles too.
• If you get lesser essences, wait until you have three and right click them to turn them into a greater essence. They sell better in my experience.
• Make sure you have the latest version of Auctioneer installed. www.auctioneeraddon.com