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!

Postponed!

So, I am working on getting a guide to the Enchantrix addon up, similar to my Auctioneer guide. However! Tomorrow is my 4 year anniversary with my girlfriend, and I will be out all of tomorrow night. So, unless I get it done in the morning, which is iffy at best, it'll be one more day. Sorry, folks!

Primal Water and Primal Air for Alchemists

In response to a request, here's some info about primal waters and primal air.

Now, alchemists can transmute water to air, which is nice to have, as air can be somewhat difficult to farm sometimes. On my server, primal air is the most expensive primal of all, and the least available, likely owing to that it has no particularly awesome farming spot (use my search bar if you're interested, I think I covered good farming spots in another post). Also, the recipe to transmute primal water to primal air is indeed a revered reward from the Cenarion Expedition, so a huge amount of people aren't going to be doing it.

What it comes down to is patience. The cooldown on transmuting Primals is a long one, so it isn't as though you'll be making a ton of gold a day by doing it. But, you WILL make gold. Primals are one of the most easily sold items, in my opinion. I always sell mine through the trade channel, and they always sell well, if you undercut the AH by a gold or two. Again, the problem is simply time taken to transmute. If anyone wants to try this, my advice is to grab up multiple Primal Waters at the lowest price you can, and keep them in your bag to transmute whenever you can. When you market them in /trade, be sure to give the option of buying them individually, in case someone doesn't want "10x primal air!".

On a related note, you can also transmute Primal Earth to Primal Water, via a Sporeggar revered recipe. Primal Earth is just dirt cheap, because it's so easy to get. You can make a much bigger profit with this recipe, transmuting Primal Earth to Primal Water (in the neighborhood of 20g profit, on my server).

Guide Me!

Wow, my posting schedule has sucked lately: about once per 3 days.

I'm drying up on material! There are only so many great tips, and tons of just so-so tips out there. So, guide me, folks. Post a comment on the type of tips you want to see: grinding, tricks, auction house stuff, other addons, blah blah etc etc!

Thanks a bunch.

The Orb of Deception

I think one of the best things about the expansion for World of Warcraft is that at level 70, you can do a lot of things alone that you couldn't do at 60. Thankfully, no one bothers to do some of these things, so if you pull it off, you can make some serious cash.

Enter, the Orb of Deception. It's a trinket that transforms a member of one faction to look like a member of the other faction. I know, it's totally useless! But the "cool" factor, or the "I just have everything else" counts a lot here. These things go for 500 gold, easily. It's a rare find on the Auction House these days.

So how do you get it? Head to the Dire Maul Arena. Keep an eye on you chat window and wait for Skarr the Ubreakable or Razza to yell something: that means they are at the arena (takes a few hours to respawn, so go kill time mining or something while you wait, or farm the instance). Soon as one pops, go and kill it! They have about 10% chance to drop the Orb, but will always drop SOMETHING decent. Azeroth blues sell for TONS more than Outland blues, so you are guaranteed some gold!

If you aren't a caster who can kite, or a hunter, you may want to take a friend. Of course, if you have decent enough gear, burn your cooldowns and take some potions, you'll probably be alright.

Quick Linen at the Defias Windmill

Here's one for the lower level folk out there amid my scant readership.

Westfall is the best place in the game to farm linen. Linen, you say? Who cares about linen? Well, a lot of people care about it, particularly people leveling up tailoring and first aid skills. Linen goes for about a gold a stack, which is good money at lower levels.

The Defias Windmill is on the Northwestern shore of Westfall. It isn't noted on the map, but I have supplied a handy reference here. That isolated block of white dots is the windmill. Now, here's the kicker - the mobs here respawn more or less instantly (Defias Trappers and Defias Looters. They go down fast, they come back up faster. If Blizzard hasn't fixed this yet (and I don't think they have), they probably never will, so it's a good tip to know. You can farm tons of linen here, and small change in copper because they are humans, and they carry money. And of course the random green drop.

So, there you have it. For the low level trying to get some cash, or the any-level trying to SAVE some by not buying their way through the lower levels of Tailoring and First Aid. Happy farming!

Vanity Sells - Blood Elf Bandit Mask

For those of you who have never seen it, this is the Blood Elf Bandit Mask. Bask in its glory. Yes, it takes up your head slot, and has no stats. But it looks as cool as hell, and that has some definite weight when it comes to pricing! And yes, this is somewhat difficult to get, but not too hard if you know how. This, one of the coolest "vanity items" in the game, sells for maybe 50g or more, depending on the server. I have almost never seen them on the auction house, and I know plenty of players, even high level ones, don't even know they exist! So, yeah, this can sell for lots of gold.

You need to head to Azuremyst Isle and kill the Blood Elf Bandit. Now, here is where it gets tricky. Scope out the map (click the link to go to Thottbot), and you'll see that the bandit pops up in a number of places. They will stay in the general zone they spawn in, but they are STEALTHED. Not that a high-level player will have trouble seeing a stealthed level 7 mob, but still, it makes it harder. And if you kill it, there's only a 10% drop chance on the mask! Rough, I know, but that just drives the price up. Also, the mob respawns a short 2 minutes after being killed, which is nice.

So what do you do? Simply run a route that takes you through all the spawn points (pretty much just a big oval, folks, not too hard). Really, unless there is competition, you should be able to find and kill him every 7 or 8 minutes, so you can probably get 1 mask per hour, more if you're rather lucky.

Now, this is an ALLIANCE zone, so it's more likely to be farmed by Alliance toons. So if you get one, it's worth a shot putting it in the neutral Auction House, because however rare it is for an Alliance to have it, a Horde having it is even rarer! Adjust the price accordingly, and let your Horde friends know it's available. Or, if you're on a non-PVP server, put it up for sale with your Alliance toon, buy it with your Horde, and then relist it on the Horde auction house at a higher price. Ooo, sneaky!

So, next time you have nothing to do, give this a shot. It's a bit unconventional, but hey, some players LIVE for having cool looking characters (especially on RP realms). Happy farming!