Maximizing your profit from Living Steel

I have recently started selling Living Steel as a way to move my copious amounts of Spirits of Harmony. Living Steel is a mists of Pandaria material that can only be obtained by transmuting Trillium. They are still highly in demand, primarily for their use in the various Pandaria mount recipes.

My results

As we can see I have been fairly succesful selling these over the last 12 days. My crafting cost is about 1000 gold when you take procs into account so profit is decent. The volume is really nice as well so that makes it a very attractive market, especially if you do not have too much capital. The obvious thing to not is that due to my relatively slim margin it is incredibly important to find materials cheaply.

How it works

Recipes

Alchemy has two recipes for crafting Living Steel. One takes 6 trillium bars and the other takes 3 trillium bars and 3 spirits of harmony. The version that only uses trillium bars uses your daily transmute cooldown, whereas the spirit of harmony version can be crafted as many times as you want. Both recipes are affected by the transmutation master bonus which means that you get 20% extra on average.

Sourcing Trillium

There are a lot of ways you can get your hands on trillium bars. The main ways are listed below. You will need to compare them on your realm to figure out which is the cheapest method. For the Spirits of Harmony you can only choose to either buy them or farm them, so make sure you look for them regularly.

  1. Buy trillium bars directly
  2. Buy trillium ore and melt it (2 white and 2 black ores per bar)
  3. Buy Spirits of Harmony, turn them in for trillium ore and melt it (1.25 trillium per spirit)
  4. Buy ghost iron bars and transmute them into trillium (1.2 trillium for 10 Ghost iron bars, assumes transmutation master)

Keys to profitability

Transmutation mastery

This one is self explanatory. You want the 20% extra procs to ensure that this is profitable.

Cheap Spirits of Harmony

This is the easiest way to ensure profitability. If you have a miner you can turn spirits into both trillium bars and Spirits of Harmony. One very important thing to note is that the Heart of Fear farm, which was one of the main sources of spirits has recently been nerfed. This means that supply is likely to fall significantly. Make sure you take advantage of any Pandaria Timewalking weeks to stock up on cheaps spirits when they are more plentiful. The balance might change in favour of the daily cooldown version being the best way to craft living steel.

Sell in the right stack sizes

The main uses for the steel is in mount recipes. My biggest seller has been stacks of 1, but as we see I have done a lot of sales in batches of 4. This is likely due to the fact that 4 living steel is what is required for the Panther recipes. In addition the Sky Golem recipe requires 30 Living steel. I think that stacks of 10 will serve this market and also be useful for other crafters. Based on this we will use stack sizes of 1, 4 and 10.

Auctioning settings

As usual the main settings we care about are the minimum price and the stack sizes. Due to the recent nerf to spirit farms I suggest setting a high minimum price. The simplest way is to set the material price of spirits of harmony to dbminbuyout. As we can see below prices are currently about double what dbmarket is on my realm.

To set the material price to dbminbuyout head to the crafting section of TSM and go to materials, you can see how it should look below.

For the minimum price I prefer using straight crafting. We get 20% more on average which is not reflected in the crafting value in TSM so using crafting as the minimum price will guarantee a 20 % profit. With the spirit of harmony value set to min buyout we will likely be overcutting for a while so we need to set it to post at min price if the price is below our min price. Depending on how the spirit prices stabilize I might change the value back to default.

As always you can find the TSM settings in my pastebin.

 

If you like my blog, you should consider follow me on twitch and twitter because it will give you a live glimpse into my gold making adventures!

9 thoughts on “Maximizing your profit from Living Steel

  1. In Your first picture You look us u sell 70-80 living steel. But how did it when u said the best process to make living steel is the daily cd and u sell 70-80 living steel in 12 days its impossible to proc 12 daily cd 70-80 living steel. (sorry for broken english)

    1. I use the riddle of steel version without cooldown to craft them, as I have a lot of cheap spirits of harmony.

  2. you have been helping me so much with those tips haha

    is there any way that I can help you? unfortunatelly since I still living in brazil, patreon would be quite expensive for me. but maybe is there another way?

    1. Thanks man. Some ways you can help me include:

      Donating to my paypal bunnycuddle@thelazygoldmaker.com
      whitelisting thelazygoldmaker.com in your adblocked if you are using one
      Purchasing any games through my G2A referral link: https://www.g2a.com/r/lazygold
      Spread my blog posts throughout the internet.

      Thanks for being here and being active in the comments. It’s always nice to know my work is appreciated!

  3. Is this a good moneymaker for me? Ghost iron ore sells for 15 ea on auction house and Ghost iron bars are 70-90. Trillium bars only sell for 330 ea. That means if I only get 1 trillium bar per cast I will lose money. Bars for 10 trillium = 100 (7000-9000) = 10 trillium = 3300.

    My question is if I should either mine ghost iron, turn into bars and then sell them on the auction or what do you recommend?

    1. Based on the figures you quoted it looks like you can make a killing melting ghost iron ore into bars. The trillium transmute is profitable if you bought the ore and melted it. I’d personally stick to turning ore into bars at those proces, possibly turning trillium into living steel if it is profitable.

      1. Ok! Thanks, I’ll do that for now. Will check out your latest posts later, and thank you for the quick reply!

      2. Ok! Thanks a lot for the quick reply. I’ll check out your other posts later today 🙂

Have a question or a thought? Leave it here:

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.