The Green Parade

Posted by J.E. Douglas at 7:00 AM

Mommar here.

There has been an increase in green item drops the further that Mists of Pandaria matures as an expansion pack.  When players were going through their quests at the beginning of the expansion one or two green drops were the norm.  Now that many players are finishing up their dailies on the Isle of Thunder,  more lower ilvl items have become available on the open market.

The normal thought process has been to just instantly send these items off to either your own personal enchanter for conversion into materials,  or at best vendoring them for gold.   Some would cherry pick looking for certain items to drop on the AH for resell with conversion either into enchanting materials or gold for the rest.

Many players will pick and choose higher ilvl items so that they can advance into instances quicker.  Once they reach maximum level they are more apt to either craft their own items or purchase crafted items to reach the intended gear level.

I found myself going into autopilot mode when it came to gear and just sending it to my enchanter for conversion.   But the AH has been overpopulated with inexpensive materials all the way up to Sha Crystals.   This has also dropped the cost of many of the middle ground gear enchants (Colossus,  Windsong etc).   A decent profit could be squeaked out between the difference of the materials purchased and the enchants themselves.

But I decided to change my practice a little bit and taking the time to list the greens I had on the AH at reasonable prices.  Having TradeSkillManager on my add-ons list gave me a listing of the approximate disenchant value of an item.   Disenchanting value is an inexact total of what would be obtained,  so listing an item for up to three times the amount on the Auction House could net some decent sales.   Even if one or two of these sold it would raise my profit levels higher than if I just automatically disenchanted the item or vendored it.

So why would this work?   Are players really buying these items to upgrade gear?   The short answer would be yes.   Where I listed 40 items,  Five of them sold at Three times the value if I had just processed them normally.  I listed again and another first were purchased.  After three days I went ahead and processed any of the green items that were at a lower ilvl than 410.   This netted me again a larger amount of profit and continued to list the weapons and higher level gear.   Ultimately after a week of this I finished processing the rest of the items.

This would seem like a round about way of obtaining both gold and enchanting materials.  But with the Enchanting market being soft on many servers,  alternate methods need to be placed to process gear while still obtaining good margins of profit.

The other market that I seemed to miss was the market for transmogrified items.   Where an item might not be powerful stat wise,  it may be the design that some players are looking for.  Helms and weapons are especially useful to players looking for specific views of their character.  So before you look to just DE that item,  check on how it is viewed with your character and see if it looks interesting.   Where some helms are just plain ugly as sin,  certain helms and weapons can bring high value prices when they are in demand.

Good Luck and Good Hunting



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