8.3 introduced a completely new system of gear randomization, corruptions. This system applies to BoEs as well as normal BoP items from Nya’lotha. The corruptions are absolutely incredibly powerful and there is a HUGE number of different combinations, making it almost impossible to price your BoEs accurately if you don’t have TSM, so this market is ripe!
BoE Flipping basics
BoE flipping is extremely expensive. So far in 8.3 I have spent more than 4 million gold on BoEs. This is still more than my sales, and will remain so for several weeks most likely. This is not a beginner market, so if you have less than 1 million gold you should probably stay away, build capital and get ready to try your hand at this when Shadowlands rolls around.
BoE flipping in BfA has been focused on finding strong titanforges with a lower price than their value. Extra bonus rolls like sockets have typically been the main way to find value, but you can also just rely on players wanting to sell their BoEs quickly. We aim for about 20 % profit margin. Purchase prices have to be chosen on a realm to realm basis. Higher population realms typically have lower prices. To get an accurate idea of the value of an item you have to use the region market value. Any one variant is very rare, so market value on a single realm will usually be wrong.
Shopping scans
I use the normal shopping searches in the TSM UI. I have favorited a search that returns all the BoEs over item level 430, which is what I use to look for deals, as shown in the screenshot. I also set the base shopping price to dbregionmarketavg so that the percentages are evaluated compared to region market prices. You do this under settings -> shopping.
Item levels and bonus rolls
In 8.3 each BoE can drop in 4 different item levels, depending on the difficulty it dropped in. It goes from 430 for LFR up to 475 for mythic BoEs. Of course item level is the first factor we will consider. Higher item level is obviously better, but corruptions can be significantly stronger than 15 ilvls, so it’s not the be all end all this time around.
Corruption
This is where the big money comes from. Each item can have one of 19 different corruption, and most corruptions can have one of three different tiers with stronger effects and more corruption for higher tiers. The most powerful corruptions are typically the ones with unique effects like damage procs. Ehcoing Void, Infinite Star, Twilight Devastation and Twisted Appendage are the big ones.
The stat focused ones are also good, in particular the ones that give you x % extra of a secondary stat. The corruptions will be the main reason why players can’t price their items correctly. Knowing the value of a corruption is hard, and it varies between armor types as different classes prefer different stats. You can check out class guides on Wowhead to get a leg up on your competition, but you don’t have to, as the region market value will usually be a good enough indicator of something that is underpriced.
The value for the best corruptions can be crazy, like this 430 off-hand with a max rank Infinite Star corruption. The region value is 1 million gold.
Sockets
All the items can roll a socket as well, which is a huge performance increase. A socket will also, like corruption be a source for mispricing from players that only consider item level when posting. The Lurking Schemer’s Band ring always comes with a socket though, so sockets are not a source of value for this item.
Eternal Palace gear
We will still also flip BoEs from eternal palace. Of course they can’t be corrupted, so they are less attractiive, but they still remain your best bet for gearing. Some slots have overlap with BoEs from Nya’lotha: plate gauntlets so you should never buy the Gauntlets of Crashing tides. For finding deals we will approach these items the same way we have done since 8.2 as outlined in this post.
Boil it down to dbregionmarketavg
The way I do it is to just boil it all down to looking at how the price is relative to the region market value. Most items will have sufficient numbers in your region that this will give a great idea of the value. Then you just need to determine how the market looks on your realm. When you run a shopping scan you will see the items ranked by region market value. I would start with a maximum price that would give me 3-5 candidate items to consider. Then set your minimum shopping price to 20% more than that.
If you look at the screenshot below I would likely set my maximum price to 90% region market, and I would set my minimum auctioning price to 110%. Then you can adjust as you try things out. Selling items for more than region market value is something you can do fairly consistently.
TSM Setup
My TSM Setup needs to be adjusted for this market. Set your pricing based on the method I wrote about and change the auctioning operation in the included group.