Making Gold From Disenchanting

This is a guide to making gold in World of Warcraft with disenchanting.

How disenchanting works

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 disenchant an item which requires level 64 to equip, you need at least 250 enchanting skill.

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 disenchant, but you won’t find those at bargain prices on the auction house.

Making Gold 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 materials instead of vendoring the gear. You could disenchant quest rewards and make a few extra gold, as well as bind-on-pickup items in dungeons. You could even offer to disenchant other people’s items for a small fee.

But the “real” gold lay in buying underpriced gear on the auction house, disenchanting it and selling the materials 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.

How to make gold with disenchanting

Make sure you have the latest version of the Auctioneer addon installed.

Go to the auction house and click the scan button or the small “play” button (doesn’t matter). Wait until the scan is finished

Right click the SearchUI button

Click the “Searchers” header, then Disenchant

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

Click the “Filters” header and disable all filters (i.e. make sure none are enabled)

Select Disenchant again and click the search button.

Buy out the auctions that look interesting, retrieve them from your mailbox, disenchant them and put up the enchanting materials for sale at the auction house.

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.

Additional tips

• The disenchant value will be based on the stored data that Auctioneer has from your realm’s and faction’s enchanting materials. However, and I’m not 100% sure about this, if there has been large price moves in enchanting materials, 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 disenchanted, and the historic price of large prismatic shard is 30g, but the current price is only 10g, then you may lose gold 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.