Patch 4.1 Enchanting Speculation

Alright! So, on the off chance you haven't heard by now, patch 4.1 is now on the PTR! Check out Wowhead for a list of everything going on in this new patch. I will just be discussing my thoughts on Enchanting and how it will be affected by 4.1.

There's really not much in the notes that directly lends itself to gold making. Nothing about Pyrite prospecting in to Epic gems, no new glyphs, no new crafted BoEs, nothing particularly obvious. However, what will definitely have an effect on the market is the new 5-man dungeons, which will be dropping Epic level gear! As Faids pointed out yesterday Maelstorm Crystal prices will drop as a direct result of people being able to disenchant the epics that will be obtained through the new dungeons. She wisely suggests that now would be a good time to start moving any stockpiles you might have left. But I want to go a bit more in-depth on exactly how much the prices will drop, and how that will affect the enchanting market at large.



First off, I do not believe we'll be seeing a complete tanking of the MC market, with cheap crystals flooding the AH like we saw with Abyss Crystals in Wrath. This is because there is still a fairly strict iLevel requirement to get in to the new dungeons. You must have an average iLvl of 346, which means you will need to have a full set of heroic level gear, or at least few Epics to balance everything out. So people won't be able to rush in and start farming epics shortly after they hit 85, and with fewer people able to run these dungeons, fewer MC crystals will be produced as a result. The iLvl of these epics is also lower than what you can get now, so players who are already well geared may be less inclined to farm these dungeons, so that's even fewer players adding MCs to the market. Of course, there will still be a huge increase on the number of MCs in the market, because Enchanters will no longer be the sole source. Anyone who is running one of these dungeons with an enchanter will have a chance to get one and sell it, and assuming that many of these dungeons will be run each day, that's a lot of chances to get a MC and sell it.

My estimate is that MCs will be worth somewhere around 500g a piece a few weeks to a month after the patch goes live. So while this may be slightly sad news for those currently selling these almost exclusively, for everyone else this is good news, and it's possibly even great news for enchanters in general. More affordable Maelstorm Crystals means more affordable enchants. More affordable enchants means more people able to buy them. More people able to buy them means more sales, and more sales means more gold! Of course, there will also be more competition, but I believe the price for the crystals will still be high enough to bar some competitors from entering this particular market. I'm not sure what the market for MC enchant scrolls is right now but I'd imagine it's not fantastic. I should certainly become much more viable after 4.1.

One other thing, that might actually prove useful to you now. I have a hunch that the BoE Bracer Recipes will become much more popular and more expensive after the patch. I don't know what it's like on other servers, but on mine these things are all over the AH, and their prices are steadily dropping. I doubt they're more common than the Meta Gem Recipes, I think it's that they just aren't making people enough gold to justify spending thousands of gold on them. The enchant takes two MCs, which on my server are around 2k each. So that's over 4k gold to get them enchanted. I haven't tried making a scroll of this enchant to sell on the AH, simply because the investment is a bit more than I'm willing to risk, and I haven't tried barking my services in trade because I don't care too (I snagged the recipe for cheap, not too worried about making it back), so I don't know if there's a market, but common sense tells me most people would rather use those crystals on a weapon enchant than some bracer enchant. However, once the price of MCs drop, these will become more attractive to a larger player base. And if that's the case, and it becomes apparent that there's some good money to be made from selling these enchants, more people will want to know the recipe, meaning it's likely that the price of the recipe will rise. If I'm right, now might be the time to learn these while they're still relatively cheap. Of course, this is highly speculative, and I certainly would not recommend that you invest a large chunk of your capital into these recipes. But if you have the gold to spare, it's something to consider.

Those are my thoughts on the matter, anyone agree or disagree?