This is probably hands down the easiet and best way to make money (for me) I do my dailies, and Buy Netherweave/Arcane Dust in Bulk.

We have morons on BDF that try and sell Arcane Dust x 1 for like 1.75g+ and spam the first 3 pages of the AH with it. Also, even though I can DE there are many "snipers" I like to call them that gobble up any 61-64 Greens to DE (Bidding on one is impossible and I ofter find myself buying items for ~3g and get 1-2 Dust.....which isn't really a gamble/habit i want to get into).

I buy Netherweave for 2.9~g a stack or a Stack of Bolts for ~8g
And only buy Arcane Dust for less then 21g a stack.
Currently LPSs sell for 28g~

I haven't really done all the math, but I have over 1200g in the past 2 weeks because of this. I've sold tons of Shards, I raid, buy flasks and other things ect. Sure I'm not making over 10g a sell, but it all adds up especially when you let them flow like candy (and the market supports it).

Does anyone know the Lvl Range to buy Armor Items to DE into AD? And do most people buy stuff thats less then 4g BO (I know it varies per server).

Payday tomorrow, time to sell some Pizzas. 8)

Any armor that drops from outlands has a ~80% chance to disenchant into 1-4 (5?) arcane dust. the tipping point for 1-2 dust vs 3-4 is around lvl 64/65. To distinguish lvl 58-60 vanilla armors from outlands armors, have a look at the ilvl with an appropiate tooltip mod.

iLvl 80-99 Armor (Level 58-63 Outland gear)
~80% 2-3 Arcane Dust
~20% 2-3 Lesser Planar Essenances
~1% 1 Small Prismatic Shard

iLvl 100+ Armor (Level 64-70 Outland gear)
~80% 2-5 Arcane Dust
~20% 1-2 Greater Planar Essenances
~1% 1 Large Prismatic Shard

iLvl 80-99 Weapon (Level 58-63 Outland gear)
~20% 2-3 Arcane Dust
~80% 2-3 Lesser Planar Essenances
~1% 1 Small Prismatic Shard

iLvl 100+ Armor (Level 64-70 Outland gear)
~20% 2-5 Arcane Dust
~80% 1-2 Greater Planar Essenances
~1% 1 Large Prismatic Shard

None of the Classic WoW gear produces AD or LPE/GPEs. The greens there are all ilvl < 75, even if they require level 60 to use.

Great, I think I may have a spreadsheet saved at home that includes a loose list. Are there any other mods (one's that don't use tons of resourcesand other mods) like Enchantrix (Dependancy: Auctioneer)?

I've been using Gazmik Fizzwidget’s Disenchant Predictor for the same reasons.

I used to get terribly annoyed with the pages of x1 listings but I found that selling Arcane Dust x 1 is surprisingly effective if yours is the lowest on the AH. I typically average a 30s ea profit over selling it in bulk, though the volume the market will sustain (before getting undercut or running out of math challenged people) isn't too large.

And for every couple of DEs that result in a loss you get 2 or 3 Lesser Planar Essence or the 5 stack AD jackpot. My limit is usually 3g, though depending on the market or how bored I get DEing stuff and shuffling / relisting the results I'll go up or down.

There is always demand for this, and not just 1-stacks. Someone who has some dust but not enough for their specific enchant will buy one at somewhat higher cost rather than pay for a stack with extra dusts they don't need at the moment. There are many people that do not buy their enchant mats in bulk in advance, so putting up 5-stacks at a better deal than the 1s and more expensive than the 20s is also a decent way to make some sales.

I prefer to use the actual market value of the mats when calculating profitabilty of combining / DEing them, not what I paid for the mats.

Say I got all the mats for free. I combine and DE them, and sell the shard in the AH for 23g (our average price). If I sell the raw mats, I could get 25g in total. Now, why on earth would I go for the shard ?

If you take into account the amount of AH cut and deposit that you might lose by selling raw materials, you might be better taking the shard. That's really pushing it though, but you can also save the shards for the beginning of S4 as well, which you may be able to sell them for a higher premium.

Because you need a shard and the current AH price is more than 25g?

Kidding aside, I think the situation more complex than that though. I've just started making cogspinner goggles to get cheap shards (thanks to this thread, I would never have known about it otherwise). On my server, I can get mats for it off the AH at about 20-22g total. The mats involved have rather static AH prices (at least from what I've seen). Now for LPS, I can generally buy them for around 24g for when I want an item enchanted. That's a pretty slim profit margin, and not worth the hassle.

However, the LPS market is highly volatile. If I store up shards and wait for a good time to sell (when there are only a few shards on the AH or whatever), I can get 30g or more per shard. Now that's a good profit margin, and far better than I could get off just the mats since their prices are less volatile.

So I think when selling, the average price is less important than something close to the highest price, as you can choose when to sell your stock. Meaning even though looking at the average prices, mats and the shard might be worth the same, when analyzing the market and using a bit of timing shards could likely be worth a lot more.

Honestly, I have no idea what the prices are on your server so I'll use Mal'ganis. Selling arcane dust one at a time is about 1.4-1.5g. Selling arcane dust in stacks is about 1.2g per dust. The point is that you're never going to get 1.5g per dust if you're trying to push any sort of volume. This recipe converts all those dusts into shards without losing any of their value compared to selling them one at the time. Shards are very easy to sell.

So, to answer your question above: "If I sell the raw mats, I could get 25g in total. Now, why on earth would I go for the shard ?"

You can't sell the raw materials for 25g. You could do that maybe if you're willing to login every 20 minutes to make sure someone hasn't undercut you. You could do that if you were willing to only sell a few dusts a day. Otherwise, you simple can't get that price.

The point I was making about people buying greens for d/e is simply because that's how most people acquire dusts. I could have said instead, arcane dust is 1.5g if you're buying single dusts and 1.2g if you're buying a bulk. That's the crux of it.

With all of that taken into consideration, here's the list of mats with Mal'ganis prices (basically):

12 arcane dust x 1.2g (bought in bulk) = 14.4g
2 rune thread x 40s (exalted) = 80s
36 netherweave cloth x 15s = 5.4g

total = 20.6g

Large prismatics go for 26g+ and sell easily. Seems pretty decent to me considering how easy it is to acquire mats (they're always available).

I did this exact thing with a retired hunter and have no regrets. It cost about 800G to get to 300 JC and I made that back in record time mostly from running the crafting/prospecting/disenchanting racket.

Don't even bother buying patterns for blue cuts. I still only have three cuts, and as they do make me some money, it's not nearly the bulk of my income.

Leatherworking is primarily a DPS profession for drums now. It's damn near useless for a retired healer. Go for it!

You still aren't making a significant amount of money from making the goggles, you're making money from speculating in LPS. If instead of making and disenchanting goggles you simply bought shards when the price was low, you'd only be losing the small margin that you say is not worth the hassle. Making the goggles is only giving you money beyond that small margin if you're unable to buy cheap shards as quickly as you can sell expensive shards.

The goggles mats are all fairly high-volume items, and selling them in bulk for thier average price takes very close to zero effort.

I don't know why people are arguing. It is plain that the difference is simply the price of mats on their specific server.

If it costs you 25g to make a 23g item, then of course you aren't going to make money.
If it costs you 20g to make a 28g item, then of course it will make you money.

Raveneye posted the DE results (twice, , but just for a more concrete example:

I check the AH for greens lvl 64-70. I buy any that are 5g or less. The key to buying these isn't just the Dust you get (since you use those in crafting anyway), but also the Essences. At my AH prices, these 64-70 greens DE into about 8-8.5g worth of mats. If I just relisted the mats (which I do with GPE), that would be profit enough. But combining the Dust into Bracers and DE those is just that much more profit.

Then I will check the AH for Blues lvl 65-70. I buy any that are 25g or less. (This is the range at which it will DE into a LPS.)

My server has prices of:
~ 1.2-1.5g for Arcane Dust
~ 7-8.5g for Greater Planar Essence
~ 28-30g for Large Prismatic Shards.

I also check the prices of Primals, Gems, Cloth, Cobra Scales, Small Prismatics and Epics. Many people act like "playing the AH game" is a huge time-sink, when in fact it's exactly the opposite. When you know what to look for, you're in and out sometimes in minutes just buying/listing/crafting/cutting, and then collecting profits.

For what it's worth, in the limited time I have to play nowadays (3 newborns), this simple process has netted me roughly 20k gold in the last 3-4 months.

I've recently come into problem competition on one of my cash-cow markets and want to hear some opinions. Basically for the past week and a half there's been a person flooding the market with under priced goods. He's putting up to 6 or 7 of the commodity up per day for 70g each when the cost to make them is between 76-81g (and usual selling price would be something like 95g). I considered buying him out but it is quite a large investment to make in a market which generally has low demand but even less suppliers (hence why i was milking it for so long), and i don't want to 'fight the market' if he's willing to continuously throw half a dozen of them up at all times otherwise I'll end up with tons of the things and not enough buyers.

Right now i've just been waiting it out and occasionally checking the prices, should i simply declare this market dead for now?

Well if you count the 5000g/the hours spent, you get 51g/h
Then the baselisk killing spree sounded as alot more ease and less effort for the more
just my opinion.

Yeah I don't know what it's like on other servers, but on Daggerspine, the blue JC cut patterns just don't seem to have gotten any cheaper over the last year. They were always listed for 300-1000g a month after TBC was released, and they're still always listed for 300-1000g now. I've never bought a single one, I have half a dozen that have dropped for me or been given to me by guildies and that's it.

Funny, we have those same morons on BDF horde-side too. Effective or not, it's pretty annoying to have to hit the little "next" button 5 times just to get past the pages upon pages of AD x 1 auctions.

As someone else said, it's not just the 1-2 arcane dust, but the chance at greater planars, plus the (small) chance of getting an LPS that make that sniping worth it. I've found Auctioneer/Enchantrix to be pretty accurate at estimating these with expected values, assuming you've scanned enough for your data to be accurate. I just set it so it doesn't load until I go to the AH, not sure if that actually prevents it from wasting any resources, but it does cut back at least.

Off the top of my head, I think the median DE value of 61-64 greens on our faction's AH is around 7g, so I'd probably pick up greens for 3.

Just in case people doubt the value of convenience as a saleable commodity:

I crafted a Gyro-Balanced Khorium Destroyer today with a nether I had in my bank. Rather than sell my nether as "you bring me mats, I make your gun" for ~100g, I bought mats off the AH and crafted it myself, and listed the gun on the AH.

Materials for the gun cost 675g. I listed it at 1000g bid 1300g buyout before raiding on my bank alt, then logged onto my main for 7 hours of raiding and then an alt-Karazhan.

Log back in after Kara to a nice hefty payout.

Effective nether price: 625g, less AH taxes. You'll not get that by spamming trade "WTS EPIC GUN YOUR MATS MY NETHER".

I repeated the same experiment with a single Runic Spellthread, buying up underpriced Primal Mana (13g each) and paying some tailor for his nether (55g). Listed the finished product at 325g and did posted it about the same time as my gun. Likewise, it sold, for an effective nether price of 140g.

It takes a certain amount of risk, but considering the reward (if you know your markets well), it can certainly pay off.

Edit: Manas are now selling at an astoundingly low rate of 11g apiece. I'm doing it again.

I had a little try at sniping greens last night but someone else was obviously doing it too because I kept getting outbid on the price. I was going up to a max of about 3g50 as 2x Arcane Dust would about make even on them, anything higher was pure profit.

I also started the Arcanoweave Bracers disenchant system yesterday with some early success. Its interesting to see how the price of materials fluctuates even over a short period such as three hours. My first batch of 360 netherweave I bought was priced around 2g90-3g a stack, and I picked up 120 arcane dust at 36g a stack (1g80 each). Shifted the ten LPS in under 20 minutes at around 31g each and made a tidy profit of about 30g. I invested this straight back into it but luckily this time I found heaps of netherweave on at between 2g30 and 2g50 a stack which really boosted my profits for the second sale of 11 shards. Over the course of 3 cycles investing all profits back into the venture I made around 150g for the day.

The important thing here is it requires very little in game time, just click the craft button a few times and list. Despite me placing around 33 LPS on the market the prices continued to rise, the second batch I sold all at 34g BO and the 3rd I sold at 35g99s BO and they all flew off. There seems to be a huge demand that whilst not exhausting the supply is certainly eating into the higher priced ones. Theres still a page buffer on the AH of shards at 40+g bo that never shift but thats pretty good, it serves to raise the average price each time someone scans it.

After I'd finished for the day I checked the AH, Netherweave was up to around 3g40 a stack so I decided to leave it, but I did manage to buy 15 stacks of Arcane Dust at 30g a stack (1g50s each) which was very cheap compared to what the prices had been all day and I figured this was the best way to do it, buy each mat in bulk when its cheap and when you can make the bracers.

Next experiment is I'm going to list a ton of shards on a long BO the night before the Arena points are calculated, see if I can place them mid-market instead of undercutting and still sell due to demand rising when people buy their new gear.

[e]Delete, double post.