OutDPS!

I posted the podcast and a guide yesterday, so I figure I deserve a hunter break. Instead of a link to the fail blog (oops), I figured I would write the next installment in my series about how to fund your raiding habit.

It’s no secret that most rich players have an enchanter. Enchanting, when combined with some other crafting skill, allows you to do some wonderful things and make absolute boatloads of money. The easiest and least complex way is to produce enchanting mats. Let’s leave aside for now the process of getting there, and assume you have an enchanter capable of disenchanting northrend greens and blues and some sort of crafting profession. You can make more money that you ever would farming by buying mats, crafting gear,  disenchanting it, and selling the enchanting mats.

This process is a little grind-ey, as you actually have to click the disenchant button as many times as you have gear, however this goes faster than farming any day, and the rest of the process is 99% afk.

Let’s take leatherworking as an example. Arctic boots are made out of 8 borean leather. On my server, borean leather can be bought for between 6 and 10 gold per stack. Less, if you can find someone who took skinning for the crit bonus and hates the AH. Now, the first thought you should have is whether you can vendor the boots for that or more- and the answer is surprisingly often yes. Even if that’s the case, use auctioneer to determine whether the disenchant value of the green is more than the vendor value. If it’s enough more, then you’ll want to make and DE these greens.

Making them is easy enough- just empty your bags, fill them up with the raw mats, click “craft all” and go to dinner. Assuming your enchanter is not the same character as your crafter, mailing them is also easy- here’s a macro that will put all greens in your bag into the mail if you have a letter open:

/run for bag=0,4 do for slot=1,GetContainerNumSlots(bag) do local texture,itemCount,locked,quality=GetContainerItemInfo(bag,slot) if quality==2 then UseContainerItem(bag,slot) end end end

Now to help with the disenchanting, you could make a macro that disenchants a specific item name and just press the button as many times as you have items, however I prefer to use auctioneer’s auto-disenchant feature. Be careful, this will disenchant your offset gear unless you specifically tell it to ignore those items. Luckily, the window that comes up has a handy “ignore” button.

Now you’ve got a pile of enchanting mats to sell, and enchanting mats sell like hotcakes. They’re the most liquid market in the game- thousands of stacks are bought, sold, used, and created every day. This means that if you’re the lowest price, you’ll sell your whole stock fairly quickly. In a market this liquid, your overall profits will be higher if you don’t blindly undercut. My advice is to list them in multiple sized groups, and as you get more experience, you’ll see what sells fastest.

On the fastest selling sizes (for infinite dust that will likely be 1 and 20), undercut the lowest price that has any serious amount of stock put up. For example, if you are posting stacks of 20, and there’s 4 stacks for sale at progressively higher prices, and then 10 stacks at a price higher than those four, undercut the group of 10, but not the other ones. Unless they’re all really closely priced (within 1%).

On the slower selling lot sizes (for infinite dust, that’s 2, 3, and 4), undercut the price of the same sized stacks.

That’s it for today- I have some ideas for the next economy post (possibly how to get an enchanter to the level required for northrend mats production on the cheap), but in the meantime, feel free to put requests into the comments.