Preparing for Battle for Azeroth: Blacksmithing

So in our series focusing on preparations for BfA we will turn our eyes towards Blacksmithing. As I laid out in my high level post on expansion prep one of the opportunities a new expansion brings with it is the possibility of making good long term investments.

Do we care about stocking up on Blacksmithing stuff

One commenter on my post last week noted that the sale rates for the tailoring items was quite low. This is usually true for most crafted transmog markets. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, but it does mean you need a lot of different items. If you have a lot of different items posted you will sell a decent amount.

With an average sale rate of 1.5 per item per realm per month then you would need to keep about 20 different items posted to get one sale a month. Profit margins are often in the 100-200% range so this is usually well worth it.

I have outlined my thoughts on which markets will remain relevant in BfA and we will continue to figure out which materials we want and how many of them we should be buying.

Legion Blacksmithing

Legion blacksmithing can only really craft armor. Due to the fact that we all wielded artifact weapons there are no weapon crafts this expansion. Weapons are usually the most valuable transmog slots, but we will make do.

This means that the items we are likely to keep in stock in BfA are the two armor sets blacksmiths can craft, Leystone and Demonsteel armor. One advantage of Legion Blacksmithing is that you need to go to Highmountain both to craft the demonsteel bars and the finished items. This is likely to be a hassle for a lot of players. You can park your blacksmith there and just click create all and go AFK while he’s crafting to get a ton of bars.

Which materials do we need

Once again I will base my calculations on rank 2 recipes. If you have a large number of rank 3 recipes you will need about 30-40% less on average.

We will also be assuming that Blood of Sargeras goes BoE so we are stocking all the items regardless of BoS.

The materials you will need to keep this market in stock are then:

  • Felslate
  • Leystone Ore
  • Blood of Sargeras
  • Infernal Brimstone
  • Stormscale (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Armguards)
  • Shal’dorei Silk (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Greaves)
  • Stonehide Leather (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Gauntlets)

How fast do the items sell

To calculate how many materials we need we need to approximate the sale rate. The best proxy is to use the crafted gear from Warlords of Draenor. This might not be correct, but it is the closest comparable we will find.

The good news is that the sale rates for Truesteel gear are substantially higher than the hexweave ones. This indicates that blacksmithing gear has a much higher demand than the crafted tailoring gear.

As you can see from the table below the monthly sale rates vary from 1.8 to 4.2 for the boots.

How much do we need?

We finally get to the answer. Based on the assumptions listed above we will on average go through the following in a month:

  • Felslate: 602
  • Leystone Ore: 666
  • Blood of Sargeras: 25
  • Infernal Brimstone: 14
  • Stormscale (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Armguards): 72
  • Shal’dorei Silk (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Greaves): 18
  • Stonehide Leather (ignore if rank 3 Demonsteel Gauntlets): 84

If we just take the main materials and translate this up to two years worth of sales (about one expansion) we get the following numbers:

  • Felslate: 14 429
  • Leystone Ore: 15 984
  • Blood of Sargeras: 591
  • Infernal Brimstone: 317

What if you want to buy Demonsteel Bars?

The finished demonsteel bars can often be found quite cheap on the Auction House. Purchasing the finished bars will save you a lot of time as you won’t have to craft your own bars. If you want to stock up on bars in stead of the ore the numbers shake up as below for stocking up for the entire 2 year period. You won’t buy any felslate and you will buy substantially less Leystone Ore.

  • Demonsteel Bar: 7 215
  • Leystone Ore: 8 769

Does it make sense to buy this much?

Once again there are two things wee need to consider in terms of whether or not buying all of this makes sense. Can we store it? And can we afford it?

If we stock up everything on the list for 2 years we would need about 180 item slots. This is quite a lot. If you have a decent amount of rank 3 recipes this will decrease. We can also decrease the storage by converting the ore into demonsteel bars which is a lot more compact.

Ore is also substantially more expensive than Cloth. If you want to stock up on everything needed to keep these items in stock for 2 years you would need to spend about 450 000 gold at current EU mean prices. This means that going for the full stock will only be for players who already have a lot of capital.

If you just want to stock up for one month it would cost you about 20 000. So the opportunity is certainly there. Prices will also likely keep falling as BfA approaches and you can likely get these materials way cheaper by the time August rolls around.

Happy shopping guys!

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