The Alicite Experiment

I was perusing the AH the other night, as I do when I'm bored, and while going through my regular checks of uncommon gems, I saw that someone had posted ten stacks of Alicite for 180g each. Since that's 9g per gem (the vendor price if I cut them), I figured this would be the perfect time to try to get some statistics as it's quite unlikely that I'll be able to get that many for that cheap. So I cleared out my bags and created 100 Alicite Pendants. And here are the results!



Out of 100 crafted, eighty-seven were green and thirteen were blue. Those 87 green pendants disenchanted into 136 Hypnotic Dust and 38 Lesser Celestial Essences. That comes out to about 1.5 dusts and .4 essences per disenchant, which seems reasonably close to the values up on wowhead. I've yet to see statistics on the rate of blue procs while crafting, but I saw a 13% proc rate and I think I heard somewhere that someone was getting one in 8, so it might actually be a 12.5% chance. Alto has also reported a "10-15%" rate in his post "Alicite and Jasper - How to Beat the AH," which makes the 12.5% chance to proc seem reasonable. If I get another opportunity like this, I'll be sure to keep notes and hopefully get some clearer statistics.

Enough stats, time for the gold! On my server, Lesser Celestial Essences are around 20g, Hypnotic Dust is around 14g right now, and Greater Celestial Essence is around 50g. So 136 HD at 14g each nets me 1,904g and 38 LCE at 20g would bring in 760g. But while LCE are obviously more profitable, I don't usually see them selling nearly as well as GCE. I can rarely keep enough GCE in stock, while when I have posted LCE, it just sits there. So though it means potentially missing out on a decent amount of gold, in order to get a faster return on my investment I would need to change the LCE to GCE, leaving me with 12 GCE and 2 LCE, for a total of 12 * 50g + 2 * 20g, or 640g. A whopping 120g less than selling the LCE raw, but probably worth it for the quicker return.

So the totals on the enchanting mats are 2,664g if I sell the LCE, or 2,544g if I go for the quicker return. Less the 5% AH fee means I should expect to get 2,580.8g with LCE, or 2,416.8g with GCE. And since I spent 1,920g to make this (1,800 on Alicite, 120 on settings), that turns into a 660.8g or 496.8g profit depending on which route I choose. I apologize if having the prices for either selling the LCE or making them into GCE makes this look a little messy, but I do think it's important to know your options. Obviously, if GCE are selling for more than three LCE, you should convert them. But if you're in my situation where three LCE are more than one GCE, but LCE don't sell and GCE do, it's not a bad idea to do these calculations to figure out if the potential loss is worth the quicker turn around. Anyway, back to the gold.

Though crafting and DEing all these was quite a pain (especially since I had to move so much stuff around on my toon, clear bank space, mail things to other toons, etc...), a 496.8g return for maybe ~30 minutes of my time (that's including the time it took for me to make space, forgetting to check the afk crafting, and other general distractions) is quite nice.

But wait! There's more! You thought I'd forgotten about those thirteen blue Alicite Pendant, didn't you? This is where the real kicker is. As Alto points out in the article I linked earlier, the blue procs actually sell reasonably well! Up until I read that, I'd just been DEing them too as a quick way to get shards, but selling them is a much better idea. Though they don't sell too quickly, I have been able to sell a few here and there for around 200-250g each. If I set an average price for these at 200g each (I've posted the majority at 250g, but there are always undercutters...) that's a potential for 2,470g! (including the 5% AH cut)

So for my 1,800g, I am looking at a potential profit of around 3,000g! (2,966.8g with the prices I've used, to be exact). Now that is quite an awesome return for my time and money.