A Misers Guide to Cataclysm Enchanting Mats (& a little gamble)

Do you ever stumble across something in game & wonder how many others have found 'your' little trick? I do & then I wonder if I should write about it or keep it to myself, especially if I haven't seen it on any of the myriad sites I read! But today, I decided to share - after all, that's what this gold blogging is all about isn't it?

This is really aimed at those of you who don't have easy access to a high level jewelcrafter to prospect, craft rings & disenchant them. I guess many of you will be familiar with buying cheap greens at the AH but just in case you missed that, this is what I do on a regular basis.

First up, I check today's prices on the AH for Hypnotic Dust, Lesser Celestial Essence (aka LCE), Greater Celestial Essence (aka GCE) & Heavenly Shard (more on these later). Dust is at 9g, GCE at 50g, LCE at 36g & heavenly shards at 63g. These prices form the basis of my decision making when bidding or buying at the next stage which is to sort the Armor subcategory by item level 78-85 & by bid price. You can see from the screen shot that Auctioneer tells you which items d/e to Cata mats & which to WotLK mats - very useful for the level 78-80 items.

You can also see that the highlighted one has a bid price of just 9.75g - thinking back to today's price for hypnotic dust (9g) this is a definite bid item - it d/e's to at least 2 hypnotic dusts on average, making it a bit of a no-brainer really :)

Generally speaking, I bid on almost every Cata item that has a bid price below today's price for 2 dusts or 1 LCE (roughly 20g usually) & that's being very conservative - I am looking for a bargain after all! You can repeat this process for the weapon sub section too but I rarely find any low bids in there on my server.

So where do the Heavenly Shards fit in? Right here! After I've exhausted all the greens, I move on to the blues.  This time, I'm not only watching for the Cata mats in the tooltip but the heavenly shard itself - some lower ilevel blues d/ench to Small heavenly Shard which is not really what we're after. I believe you need enchanting 500/525 to disenchant these but you can always grab the bargains now & d/e when you get there.



Bearing in mind today's price for Heavenly shards (63g), I look for bid or buy prices below that - today's price is high for my server so I put a cap of 50g on my purchases. As you can see from the screenshot - there are 5 auctions available on this page alone & by the time I'd finished, I'd either bought or bid on 18 different listings!

So where's the gamble? Have another look at the tooltip on the 2nd screenshot :) Spotted it yet? Yup, there is a miniscule chance of these blues d/enchanting to a Maelstrom Crystal which currently sell for about 1500g on my server & are used in the top level enchants & to purchase the very top level recipes from the Shard Trader in the Twilight Highlands.

Now that would certainly make my day, that's for sure!