Farming for enchant mats (old world)Follow

Just wondering if anyone has some thoughts about good spots to farm mats that us enchanters still need - like illusion dust, eternal and nether essences etc. I'm going to try the Plaguelands this evening - I'll post an update if I find any promising mobs...
Thanks in advance for any input...

I send my alt all my runecloth for creating belts to DE (most economical use of the cloth mats), this nets me a fair crop of lesser/greater eternal essences and I also DE a lot of the crappy healing greens from outland (why so many??)

The best place I found for green drops (20-30ish) was the harpy cave in 1K needles - insane RS rates there, and farming SM gave a nice yield of 30-40 greens/blues.

Apart from those, ZF was quite easy to solo at 60 on a hunter, and drops were pretty good there too, but outside of instances I think you have about the same chance of getting green/blue drops anywhere.


It's also viable to 'farm' the AH by searching through the short time auctions for stuff with very low start prices - enchantrix addon gives a pretty accurate estimate of what each item will DE to, and a reasonable average value of the DE'd mats to compare to the AH price (although I think this part of it is linked to the Auctioneer addon too).

Edit: and with the new 58+ greens, the 'old world' 50-60 greens have dropped massively in value, but still yield high-value essences when DE'ed.

Edited, Jan 31st 2007 7:02am by Tanq

I will go into WPL/EPL and farm Greens from the Scarlet Factions that reside there. I usually have a pretty good haul of DE'able items by the end of the night.

Bags are the most profitable product my tailor ever made. Usually 100% profit. People who started to make imbued netherweave bags as first on their servers probably made thousands of gold.

If you want my advise on the best place to farm disenchantable items, I'll tell you that it's the Auction House. There are always hundreds of items that can be disenchanted, and they sell for lots less than the mats you obtain. Think about it. How many mobs do you have to kill to get 100 disenchantable items?

the only problem is that buying off the AH takes lots of gold as chants don't really sale that good until like 225+ at least it seems

The chants may not sell well, but the mats do. The way to get cheap mats is to buy up low-priced greens and disenchant them. Know the price of the enchanting mats and buy up the greens that are cheaper than the cost of the green. This is what the /percentless command does with Auctioneer/Enchantrix.

Quick semi-hypothetical example:

You want Strange Dust to skill up your enchanting. On the AH, Strange Dust is going for 10s per. That could get pricey. So, you go look at some low level green items (armor and weapons). Scanning through, you notice 5 Soft-soled Linen Boots listed for a buyout of 15s each. Looks like someone crafted a batch and are looking to unload them. You have disenchanted these before and got 3 Strange Dust from them. So, for 75s, you can buy these 5 boots and disenchant them into 15 Strange Dust, which together are worth 150s. So, instead of buying 15 Stranged Dust for 1.5g, you've bought the same amount for half the price. In addition to using the Strange Dust to level your enchanting, you could now turn around and sell some of the Strange Dust to cover your costs, or to turn a profit.

This is just an example, but I'm sure there are plenty of people that can attest to the fact that working the AH for enchanting mats is profitable at the same time you skill up your enchanting. There are always, I repeat always, people undercutting and/or looking to unload low level greens. When I started my bank alt character with enchanting, I was buying up 30-40 greens per day and turning around and selling the dusts, essences, and shards. Low prices are so common, I would typically do a /percentless 60 or even 70 search because there were enough items at that profit margin to keep me plenty busy. I was making something like 5-10 gold profit every day. For a low level character, this is a decent income. Playing the AH this way is a sure-fire way to make money, as well as getting the mats to skill up enchanting. The profit margin will decrease as you move up to higher level dusts, essences, etc., but the concept stays the same and the profitability remains.

Sorry, post got a little long, but there have been several threads along the same lines lately. So, I figure there is a lot of interest.

This is stupid thinking. Buying off the AH doesn't take as much gold as you think. Buy cheap items to DISENCHANT instead of the enchanting mats. Sell what you don't use. You'll end up MAKING money, not spending it.

Edited, Feb 14th 2007 11:46pm by ohmikeghod

Since the expansion went out I am making 100% profit on runecloth bags, mooncloth bags and netherweave bags. It was totally crazy in the first days (think about 200% profits), now it is more stable, but still much better then before.
There is nothing else that can be made from runecloth or netherweave (I am at 340 skill now) that would give me that kind of profit. In fact, I have not made a single cloth item for a month - they all look like a waste of materials - I skilled up on bags alone.