Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Enchantrix

Enchantrix is one of the many great Norganna addons available (same maker as Auctioneer!). Currently, it is in beta stages, and is not part of the Auctioneer pack, as it was in the past. When Burning Crusade was released, Blizzard made some changes to some key formulas for determing what an item will disenchant into, and so Enchantrix needs something of an overhaul. It can be downloaded as a fairly stable BETA standalone from this page.

The idea behind Enchantrix is simple, and much like Auctioneer, which you will need in order to use this as it is intended. Through many scans, Auctioneer gatherers a database of prices on all items it sees on the Auction House. That includes all of the enchanting materials. What Enchantrix does is check its database for what an item can disenchant into, at what % chance, and use Auctioneer data to turn out an estimated gold value of the materials you get for disenchanting it. The goal is that you find an item for sale for sale that can be disenchanted into materials worth MORE than the item.

First thing's first. Download Enchantrix, unzip to your Addon folder. Now, we need to do one thing before getting started. Go to your Enchantrix folder in your WoW directory, and open "EnxConstants.lua" with Wordpad. Look for the table labeled "const.StaticPrices". This is where Enchantrix gets the info on how much the Enchanting materials are worth. Change these to reflect the prices on your server to make Enchantrix more accurate. Please not that in the file, the prices are listed in terms of COPPER. 100 copper to 1 silver, 10,000 copper to 1 gold. Keep this in mind when fixing prices. If you want to change the price for a Large Brilliant Shard to 10 gold, that is 100,000 copper.

Make sure you enable it at the character select screen, and log in to your banker!

Enchantrix should load automatically. Just in case, type in "/enchantrix on". This makes sure that it will display the information on the item tooltip (mixed in with the Auctioneer data). Now, type" /enchantrix show" to bring up a nice GUI to mess with your settings. Generally, these are find how they are. If you change them and restrict the results you get from your searches, you're only hurting yourself. In the end, it's YOU, not Enchantrix who will determine if something is a good purchase. The program can't do everything. :p

Let's make some sense of what you're seeing. When you mouseover a disenchantable item, you will see something like this:


Obviously, the highlighting is my own. What do these values mean to you? Well, from the top

  1. 99% Small Prismatic Shard x 1.0 -- There is a 99% chance to get 1 Small Prismatic Shard. (If a 2.5 or something comes up, no you won't get 2.5. You could get 1, 2 or 3 of them)
  2. 1% Void Crystal x 1.0 -- There is a 1% chance to get 1 Void Crystal.
  3. Disenchanting requires skill 225 -- Self explanatory. You need 225 skill to disenchant it.
  4. Disenchant value (HSP) -- This is the "highest sellable price", or an optimistic estimate of what Auctioneer thinks you can sell it for, based on information from past scans.
  5. Disenchant value (median) -- This is the value based on the average selling price in all historical auctions. It's usually the reliable one, as it's based on your ever-updated Auctioneer data.
  6. Disenchant Value (baseline) -- This is the value of the pieces as determined by a website like Allakazam or Thottbot. As those tend to derived from multiple servers, this may or may not be accurate on your own server. My advice is to ignore this value, unless you fixed the lua file as I explained above.
That sums up the basics of it. Simply check the Median value and see if the pieces are worth more than the item you are buying. HOWEVER. Some annoying players will try to list their materials at far, far more than they are worth. If you scan these, it will screw up your values. Check directly what materials are worth before putting them up for auction, as the results from Enchantrix can be inaccurate.

So, how do you make money with this? Here are the slash commands you need to know to search your Auctioneer data. Yes, these 2 are all you really need to know.
  1. "/enchantrix bidbroker " -- Same as Auctioneer. So, "/enchantrix bidbroker 50" will return items that can be sold for AT LEAST 50 silver. If you put it 500, it would be the ones that sell for at least 500 silver, or 5 gold, so always think in terms of silver.
  2. "/enchantrix percentless " -- This will return items that have a buyout a certain % LESS than the disenchanted pieces are worth. "/enchantrix percentless 50" would return only items that have a buyout 50% less than the disenchanted materials could be sold for. Higher values yield higher profit results, but fewer of them
Being successful with Enchantrix requires some patience, and a willingness to take risk. After all, you might buy that item hoping to get a Nether Essence, but against all odds, you get only a small radiant shard. It does happen, and it WILL happen. Of course, it can happen in reverse, too! If you want to play it safe, only stick to items that can be disenchanted into ONE thing. That way you know what you'll be getting. Bear in mind, this will somewhat restrict your buying options.

Also keep in mind, if something is listed at a high profit, say 20 gold, and there is a 10% chance of a Nether Essence, or something else very valuable, but a 90% chance of worthless junk, that 10% is inflating Enchantrix's estimation of the items value. Don't let Enchantrix do all the work! If you don't understand stuff like this, and just buy everything listed as profit, Enchantrix (like Auctioneer) will lose you money.

As one of my readers pointed out in the comments, Enchantrix isn't a huge Auction House money spinner. Like I said (also in comments!) it is almost always more profitable to sell an item than disenchant and sell the parts. But yes, sherretz has a good point in that perhaps the best use of Enchantrix is on random greens you pick up Thanks, sherretz, and for the number error too!

And I can't believe I forgot to point this out. If you're level 70, hit Scarlet Monastery or ZF, or Uldaman or another instance. Those BoE blues the bosses drop have decent odds on disenchanting into decent materials, probably worth more than the item itself. I did a post about Scarlet Monastery like that, if anyone is interested. Same principle works in any instance, but SM is probably the most efficient.

I'm going to do some more posts on this, including good Disenchanting items from vendors, and crafting ones if I can find some decent ones. See you later!

4 comments:

myke said...

Great post - very informative. Some questions for you:
1) since the tooltip displays both the auctioneer data and the enchantrix data, we have all the info we need to determine whether we would make more profit reselling the item intact or whether to sell the product of the D/E, right? Take the screenshot that you posted, for example. Since the item sells for considerably more than what the product would, reselling the item likely better.
2) does Enchantrix add a tab to the AH window, or do you search for D/Eable items using the Search Auctions tab? Are the resell items distinguished from the D/E items? Does affecting the search parameters for Enchantrix affect the search parameters for Auctioneer?

Thanks again.

wavey said...

In my experience, it is almost ALWAYS more profitable to sell the item, not the disenchanted stuff. There's so much on the market, prices are way down. The only expensive materials are from high level items, which would also likely sell more intact. But it's nice to keep an eye on that stuff anyway.

No, Enchantrix adds no tabs to the Auctioneer window that I can see. To search for viable Enchantrix buys, use "/enchantrix broker silver", where silver is the minimum profit you're looking for by disenchanting the item. Also see the percentless explanation in my post, which is another way to search.

As far as I know, the Enchantrix search parameters are wholly different from the Auctioneer ones. There is not much to be gained by fiddling with the Enchantrix parameters in "/enchantrix show", because you're better off manually looking through the results for good deals.

sherretz said...

Before BC, I found Enchantrix most useful for trash. When I got a random green or blue, it would tell me if it was worth more DE'd or vendored.

Considering the monster drop rate of greens in BC, that would be the main reason to use Enchantrix. Either that or to find some cheap items that you can use to help level your Enchanting.

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Also, there's an error in the post. 100 copper = 1 silver. BUT! 100 silver = 1 gold; so it should be 10,000 copper to 1 gold, not 1,000.

myke said...

Good point sherretz, if you're going to train a profession, it's best if you can minimize cost. Auctioneer + Enchantrix are great for reducing the money-sink-iness of Enchanting for sure.