Enchanting Changes in 5.4 & Other Enhancements Too!

One of the changes that struck me as interesting in the patch notes for 5.4 was the changes being made to item enhancements. This includes enchantments, leg armors, spellthreads and I'll be honest, I'm not sure which Engineering item they mean - the tinkers gears maybe? I had a few questions about exactly what this meant for us goldmakers but although I've been reading comments all over the place, none seem to make it any clearer so I thought I'd do a post about it & see what discussion we get in comments!

Items
All permanent item enhancements provided by Enchanting, Engineering, Leatherworking, Tailoring, and various vendors and quests are now able to be applied to items of any level. This means all enchantments can now be applied to heirloom items.

• High level enhancements applied to items equipped by low level players have their power scaled down to be similar to enhancements intended for that level range. 

• Low level enhancements applied to items equipped by high level players do not grow further in power beyond their intended level range.

How I see this is that all the current top level enhancements can now be applied to heirloom gear and will scale down as appropriate for your level - a big change as previously, only enchants with no level requirements could be used. This is a good thing for most enchanters or at least for those of us who only make gold with top level enchants. But I know there are some of you out there who specialise in the older enchants for heirloom market & for the twink markets - this was one of my question areas - will mid-level enchants scale too? What if the scaling means that some of the mid-level enchants are still better than top level ones after scaling?

I think the second bullet point in the quote above indicates that mid level enchants will scale but will stop scaling when their max level is reached. The Crusader enchant is a perfect example - it won't scale past 60 so the question then becomes - will people still use Crusader below level 60 (if it's scaled stats are better than the top level enchants scaled stats) & re-enchant for the rest of the trip to 90?

I suppose that will depend on how well the scaling works - min/maxers will take whichever of the two types gives them the advantage at each level but I think most of the player base will just go for the simpler option of max level enchants.

I think the other professions will see a boost in sales too - I'm not very aware of mid to low level leg armors & spellthreads in current use, to be honest but I think the same thinking will apply. Why enhance an item twice when a single top level will scale all the way after all?

So how am I getting ready for patch 5.4 and all the changes? I may be wrong but I've been increasing my stockpile of current enchanting materials & I've started farming for Motes of Harmony again on my Leatherworker's Tillers Farm - I'd like a little piece of the action on the Leg Armors market as well as scrolls! I've never really got heavily into the Enchants market - I'm more of a dabbler there but I'll go where the profits are so this could be interesting to say the least!

What do you think? Do you have experience with Heirloom enchants & Twink enchants market? I'd love to hear your opinion on this as it's not one of my strong points! 

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses!

Horde Gift Guide | Alliance Gift Guide

Image © Dullhunk under Creative Commons licence

New Crafting Materials for Patch 5.4

With the imminent arrival of Patch 5.4 and all the changes to crafting professions, I thought I'd have a little dig into which materials I'm going to need & how many I should be buying now. I'm not usually a fan of major stockpiling, I prefer to buy cheap materials every time I see them rather than when I want to craft & yes, that does mean I have a stock of materials but nowhere near the quantities that many gold makers pile up before a major patch.

This time though, the raw materials on my server seem to be dropping in price right now which is kind of strange but I'm not complaining! I've never really prepped for a major patch before for various reasons but I thought I'd give it a go this time round!

So what are the new materials that my Tailor, Leatherworker & Blacksmith are going to be making?

• Celestial Cloth = 10 Bolts of Windwool Cloth (4 bolts per stack of Windwool Cloth so 2.5 x basic stack cost)
• Hardened Magnificent Hide = 2 Magnificent Hides (1 stack of Exotic Leather per hide if I only use the daily cooldown to make it, 2.5stacks if I want to make as many as I like)
• Balanced Trillium Ingot = 1 Trillium Bar (made from 2 black & 2 white Trillium Ore or via Alchemy transmute of 10 Ghost Iron Bars (which is 1 stack of Ghost Iron Ore)).

Each of these materials is on a daily cooldown and is bind on pickup so you won't be seeing any of these on the Auction House. Each time you make one though, you will 'discover' a new PvP armor recipe or one of the new Epic item level 553 legs or belts. It's the crafted PvP gear for all three professions that interest me as a gold making non-raider. The Epic items take 21 or 28 daily cooldowns to make and I'm not sure the sale price of the final piece will make up for lost sales of the less expensive PvP gear.

The real kicker is the sheer number of PvP patterns to learn - for Tailoring it's 45, for Leatherworking it's 89 & for Blacksmithing it's 35 (that's if I counted them correctly in Wowhead professions tabs!). It's at times like this I almost regret Leatherworking being my main profession but it does have some advantages! OK, yes, it's going to take me twice as long to learn all the Leather & Mail armor recipes but it does mean that I stand a good chance of lower competition for the first few weeks. 

Think about it - in 35 days, any Blacksmith that's done their discovery every day will have all the recipes but so will all the other Blacksmiths so there will be competition on every piece of plate PvP gear! Leatherworkers won't even have half their recipes by then & given that Leatherworking isn't as popular a profession as Blacksmithing, there are fewer Leatherworkers to compete with me on those recipes that we have in common. The same thing applies to Tailoring of course but 45 days in and all the patterns will be learnt & available. 

On this basis a Blacksmith will need 1 stack of Ghost iron Ore per discovery so 35 stacks. A Tailor will need 2.5 stacks x 45 which is 113 stacks (rounded up!) and a poor Leatherworker will need 178 Magnificent Hides. The inequality in costs of these basic materials is really obvious at this stage - a stack of Windwool Cloth is 30-50 gold, a stack of Ghost Iron Ore is 30-60 gold but a Magnificent Hide which is on cooldown too is anywhere from 100-200 gold each and you need 2 of them every day!

Right now I have already got more than enough Ghost Iron Ore & Windwool Cloth to make all these cooldown items for both my Blacksmith & Tailor. My Leatherworker has been storing up Magnificent Hides for a couple of weeks now & I've been buying some off the Auction House when they fall to the 100g or less point but I'm still not going to have enough ready made. Luckily for me, the price of Exotic Leather has dropped sharply on my server this week so I may have to go the more expensive route & use the non-cooldown, 50 Exotic Leathers recipe to make extra Magnificent Hides.

Ok, so that's the armor crafting professions, what about the others? Well Engineering is getting a fabulous new mount - the Sky Golem - which requires Living Steel & also uses a daily cooldown item called Jards Peculiar Energy Source. This Peculiar Energy Source uses Ghost Iron Bars so that's more Ghost Iron Ore required. Then of course, there's the Jewelcrafting - a new raid & new Epic armor patterns means a bump in demand for gems (and enchants too) with Ghost Iron Ore being prospected to get them. I already have maybe 200-300 stacks of Ore sitting around so I'll be all set when the patch goes live. I'm not going to stop buying though - all those PvP Plate armors use Ghost Iron Bars as well so I'll be smelting until I'm blue in the face I think!

So if you like farming & you want a suggestion of what to farm over the next few weeks, I think this analysis kind of points you to Leather farming. You could go mining of course or on a mob killing spree to get cloth but my advice would be look for leather - less competition from bots and others players picking up cloth as they quest anyway.

How is your patch 5.4 preparation coming along? Have you got enough stuff or are you still buying up your Auction House? let us know in the comments below :)

****************

Check out some of my Squidoo lenses!

Horde Gift Guide | Alliance Gift Guide

Image © Photo Atelier under Creative Commons licence

Turning Linen Cloth into Gold

Girls Gone Shopping?

Linen cloth turned up on my Project Shoofly server at 3 - 5 silvers a piece! I just couldn't resist so I logged my other banker on that server (I have a normal, everyday banker for this kind of thing & my project banker, just to keep things seperate) & bought all the super cheap linen. I ran my little level 5 over to the enchanting trainer, made my copper rod then ran to the tailoring trainer. By the time I had converted the linen into bolts of linen, I had enough skill points to learn the Brown Linen Pants pattern. For just 2 bolts of linen & one coarse thread or about 15silvers, I then disenchanted them & got 3 Strange Dust.

Now of course, being the good goldmaker that I am, I didn't just make 1 pair of pants - oh no! I made 40, using up 8 stacks of Linen Cloth in the process. I ended up with 68 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essences, most of which I promptly listed on the Auction House for good prices.

I listed some of the Strange Dust as 3 stacks of 10 initially - at around 3g50 per item, I guessed smaller stack size might be more affordable if a buyer was watching their gold. When I logged in earlier today, all 3 stacks of 10 had sold, netting me a nice 99 gold. I'm averaging the cost at 1 gold per stack of Linen Cloth used so with 8 gold spent, I made profit already on just 30 Strange Dusts & I still had 38 dusts to sell.

Next I checked the Auction House again - no Strange Dust to be found so I listed my remaining 38 & wandered off while my banker made another 60 pairs of Brown Linen Pants. Total haul from disenchanting this time was 100 Strange Dust & 11 Lesser Magic Essence. I have been lucky to get into a level 25 guild though so the Bountiful Bags perk is helping here too.

I just checked again & another 20 Strange Dust have sold at 3g50s each as well as 5 of the Lesser Magic Essences so after AH fees, that's another 72 gold profit. I checked the Linen Cloth price too out of curiosity - not only do I have competition for Strange Dust now, the price of Linen Cloth is now over 1 gold a piece & only 2 stacks available.

Overall I spent around 20 gold on Linen Cloth & coarse thread. In the process of converting the Linen to gold, I also leveled my enchanting to 67 & my tailoring to 75 - not bad for a level 5 alt :)

Summary

Linen cloth & coarse thread cost to make 100 Brown Linen Pants - 20 gold
Strange Dust produced from disenchanting Pants - 168
Lesser Magic Essences produced by disenchanting - 20
Strange Dust already sold 50 = 165 gold
Lesser Magic Essence already sold 5 = 6 gold

Profit so far = 151 gold
118 Strange Dust still to sell
15 Lesser Magic Essence still to sell


Now obviously this isn't going to be a huge market & I would hazard a guess that it won't be a regular one either but keeping an eye on Linen Cloth & Strange Dust prices & jumping in when the prices are low, should give a nice little boost, especially as your lowbie bank alt can do it in town.