WoWconomics

Enchanting has always been my biggest money maker. Anyone who says you can’t make a profit with it, doesn’t know anything about the profession.

The traditional way is to stay in a major city, put tells in trade channel, and list all your most popular enchants. You can make some decent money on tips but you have to sit in a major city watching tells for a bit of time. To be honest, I have never done this! I do however watch trade chat while passing a city and if I see someone who is looking for an enchant that I have offering 10g a tip, and then sure I don’t mind making some quick gold.

Now with inscriptions, you can take your enchant mats and turn them into enchants to post on ah. The upside is, no more sitting around spamming trade. Also while you level enchanting, you can make them into a sellable item instead of re-enchanting the same item over and over again. Down side, you invest all your mats into a recipe that you don’t know if anyone will buy or how long it will take to sell. My personal preference is to sell the mats, since Enchant mats have no listing fee. If they don’t sell, they can be relisted at no cost but your time.

Now to the bread and butter of enchanting: Disenchanting! You can make money at any level of enchanting with this. The main idea is to buy or craft items that have a higher DE value than the sell value of the item or mats. Each server is different. The easiest way to determine if it is worth it to DE would to be use an add-on like Enchantrix and Auctioneer. I myself prefer to make my own list in note pad of how much I should spend at each level of DE but more on calculating those values later on.

DE basics

DE leveled are based on the following level ranges

Greens will give more dust and weapons will give more essences. Blues will give a shard for that level. Enchantrix or any other DE prediction add-on would be able to take you ah valuation of dusts, essences, and shards and tell you the “DE value”

You can now have auctioneer buy items with a DE % profit you like. I still prefer to have my list and manually search for armor greens for a level range and buy/bid on items that give me the profit margin I prefer.

Another method of getting items to DE for profit is to craft items that the mats cost less than the DE value. For these you need another profession such as leatherworking or tailoring. See those guides here for more information on what items to choose.

To determining the DE Value manually based on what you would want to pay for an item based on your minimum profit margin I have made a excel sheet that you can calculate the values that work best with your server.

Enchanting Excel File – Contains formulas to calculate DE values

Patch 3.0.3