Scroll of Stealth: A Disappointing Tale

So this weekend was not the cash cow I had been expecting. As I mentioned a few days ago, and as Kreaton of Not So Secret Society discussed today, this weekend was when guilds who had been diligently capping their exp would reach level ten. With level ten comes BoA cloaks, provided you're honored with the guild. And with BoAs comes enchants! At least, that's what I thought.

The current best enchant for the BoAs is Enchant Cloak - Stealth, which was changed to give +8 agi and +8 dodge. Though obviously amazing for agi dps classes, even casters should find this appealing for the added survivability.



Given that this is BiS for cloaks, that the enchant isn't easy to come by (exalted with Cenarion Expedition), and that not many people know of the stat change, I figured this would be an amazing niche market for me to control. So far, it turns out that controlling this market has been even easier than I thought. I'm currently the only one with the scrolls in the AH, but the market is stagnant. I managed to sell three yesterday at 300g a piece, but I've yet to sell more.

In preparation for the release of the cloaks, I bought up every mat in the AH I would need. I hoped that since the mats are BC era, not many people would post them, and without mats, people would be forced to just buy the scrolls. Turns out, a lot of people seem to have a backlog of BC mats! I've been doing what I can to buy out whichever market is cheapest, but it doesn't seem to have much effect. Thankfully, with the gap in the market, people have been posting most of the mats at wildly inflated prices, which will again hopefully deter people from making it themselves and buy from me instead. Though this certainly seems like a good tactic, if I just keep buying mats but don't sell anything, all I'm doing is losing money.

I've also made a macro that I've been using to bark with, in the hopes I'll have success similar to that with Fortune Cards. No luck their either. In fact, I think the scrolls I did sell were sold before I started barking! I've had maybe three people whisper me: one asked if I could do the enchant with his mats, one seemed surprised I "knew his guild was level ten," one asked if I could link cloaks, and one asked how much they were (500g in the AH at that time), but never any serious buyers and I never saw the wonderful "A buyer has been found for your auction" pop up.

So why isn't this working? Why would something that seems like such a sure thing fail completely? I've changed my macro a few times, first to let people who are too lazy to click the link know what the stats are, and again to say they're in the AH, I have no known competition, people love BoAs, so why only three sales?

I've a few theories. First, maybe I'm pricing them too high. I've decided to settle for now on around 300g per. This is fantastic ROI even with the inflated mat prices, but given that cloaks themselves sell for 1200g, I figure this is a fair price. If you're spending that much on a BoA, you ought to be willing to spend a little more to improve it.

Second, maybe there just aren't enough interested buyers. Since the cloaks can be used to get extra exp from 80-85, people who are using them for that might not care about the extra 8 agi/dodge. Though that's phenomenal at low levels, that's not much to care about from 80-85. Going along with that, maybe there just aren't a lot of people leveling their alts right now. The guilds on my server who hit lvl 10 this weekend are major raiding guilds. I would imagine that the members who are able to unlock the cloaks are the dedicated raiders and heroics runners, who don't care much for leveling their alts right now. And those who aren't honored probably have more important things to worry about than leveling alts, like getting geared so they can raid with the guild.

Then there's also the cost of the cloaks themselves. While I would like to think the person who is willing to spend 1.2k on a BoA is also the person willing to spend 300g on an enchant for it, there are probably plenty of people unwilling to pay 1.2k for a BoA! No cloak = no enchant. So again, the players who can pay for these probably have better things to do right now than level an alt, and those that can't afford one are also not going to prematurely buy an enchant for them.

And there's also the unfortunate name of the scroll. "Stealth" doesn't seem like it is a universally good enchant; it seems tailored to rogues. My macro has the item linked and the stats typed out, but I'm sure some people will just see "Stealth" and pass it over.

So as of right now, these are not selling anywhere close to as well as I had expected. I'm still going to do what I can to control the mats market (Small Prismatic Shards are only around 1g on my server, so it's really easy and cheap to keep buying them out), keep a few posted at all times, and continue barking when I'm on the alt that's selling them. Hopefully I can report success in the coming week, as more and more guilds unlock the cloaks.

Anyone else who is dealing in this enchant experiencing something similar? Anyone having success?