Greedy Goblin

Monday, May 9, 2011

Disenchanting for profit

I started this to get dust, dust and more dust, hoping that it won't cost me too much gold. Well it didn't. Actually it turned out to be a goldmine. Which surprises me to no end, as this "strategy" needs no brains, no risk, no real investment gold and not even a sub-optimal profession for raiding like skinning. It's dead simple. All it needs are two addons, one is Auctioneer, what you surely have already. The other is Enchantrix, which is part of the Auctioneer suite.

All you need is switch to the search tab after a scan, select "disenchanter", press search, then buy all. You must confirm every buy (thanks Blizzard), but at the end you have lot of green and blue items in the mailbox. Disenchant them, go back to the AH, switch to Appraiser and sell them. That's all. You can do it at any downtime.

As you can see I was busy disenchanting:
My profit (not income) is already 16300G on Alliance side, 6400 on horde (I transfer some dusts to horde as they don't sell fast enough), about 2K in yet unsold dusts and 1K in bids on more greens. That's 25K gold.

Let's calculate G/hour. 25K/7K = 3.5G, this is the profit on every disenchants. The time needed to disenchant is 3 secs, and another 3 to do the snatch from the AH. 1 more to list it. So the profit is 3.5G/7 secs = 1800G/hour. Nice.

Some tips to avoid inventory nightmare: have 4 enchanting bags, you can buy them cheap at bag vendors. So the greens can only fall into your backpack. Keep it clean before opening the mailbox. Also have a macro:
/cast disenchant
/use 0 1
/use 0 2
...
/use 0 16
As soon as the first green fell into your bag, press the macro key and the items one by one are disenchanted in your bag (one for every keypress). The items from the mailbox are keep falling into your bag while disenchanting. Remember, the mails can contain not just greens but unsold dusts and gold from sold dust and overbids.

At first you will build a huge dust inventory. It is because you are snipping hundreds of underpriced greens from the AH. Don't be surprised if the first scan gives 500+ greens. After you cleared the AH from greens, you will only grab new greens and the dust heap will diminish.

Up to profit fellow goblins!


PS: I may not be able to process comments for a few days.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I did a similar thing to get the guild cooking achievement (Time To Open A Restaurant - cook 10.000 Cataclysm recipes). I bought uncooked food from the AH, cooked it and resold. Raw mats such as Fathom Eel, Crocolisk tail and Deepsea Sagefish sell for 3-4g each on average, but the cooked items sell for 7-10g. on my server. Easy money!

Handera said...

What values do you set in the disenchant search criteria?

Anonymous said...

You can use the auto DE feature from enchantrix and a /click macro too.

No need to order anything, as enchantrix will ask you if you want to DE anything you put in your bags.

BTW, enchantrix also does this for milling too ;)

Anonymous said...

Doesn't Enchantrix have an auto-Disenchant option? You can even create a macro for it's pop-up confirmation window. I doubt that Disenchanting this way is really too different from using the macro that you posted, but I figured I'd mention it anyway.

Anonymous said...

Enchantrix also has a feature to auto-disenchant items in your bags, should you want to do your disenchanting in batches larger than 16.

Niv said...

I've been doing this for months. so little investment, so much profit out of nothing. although I'd never quite figured out how to do the macro. TY very much

-Nivv, Thrall-US

Phelps said...

If you use beancounter, you can also set Enchantrix to auto-disenchant things you bought through the disenchant search. (A click per item, just like buying though. Just /framestack to see what the button is called, and use a /click [buttonname] macro to automate that part to a button press.)

Lothildin said...

I've been mass disenchanting for a while, now. Actually, since they got rid of the deposit prices for enchant mats, back in tBC I think.
It has been paying everything I do untill I got JC in this expansion.

If you have JC and Enchanting, buy a lot of pyrite/elementium/obsidium, prospect them (I usually macro the prospect thing so I only need to keep pressing one button), turn all the green gems to miscelaneous gear, disenchant them, cut all the blue gems, sell everything.
I usually net 2k gold for each 1k gold I spend. 100% profit, most of the time, more or less.

And, if you prospect pyrite, you even get some Volatile Earth to sell for 8~12g each.

Add to that the guild perk that you can proc every DE/Prospect you make and you will be very happy with the result.

Anonymous said...

@Dan Prosser - If I remember correctly (it's been a while since I've used DE'n for profit) you want to set your values in correlation of dusts gotten from a piece of gear. For example, if a piece of gear yields 2.5 dust (could be more or less, I'm just using random numbers) you want to buy gear that costs less then what 2.5 dusts would cost. Say the dust sells for 5g each (again, random numbers for example). You would want your values to be set to buy gear that sells for 12g50s or less. The 12g50s price would have you breaking even, so of course gear costing less then that would be a better buy. If you use Auctioneer/Enchantrix, it will tell you in the item tooltip how many dusts/essences/shards can be gotten from DE'n that item. Sometimes you get more, sometimes less...but more often than not you get more.

Again, it's been a while since I've DE'd for profit, so if my method is wrong please feel free to correct me.

Anonymous said...

Oh...I forgot, thanks for this topic. After about 6-7 months of half-heartedly playing the AH, I've finally broken the 100k gold mark (now on to 200k). But it's good to be reminded of the various ways to make gold that may have fallen by the wayside.