BfA Goldmaking: The end of expansion wind-down

With Shadowlands on the horizon now is the time to look at how the end of the expansion will look. Eventually most of the BfA items will be useless as far as power increases go. This means the value will trend down. 

Power increases are always the most valuable items

Players are always most willing to pay for power increases. Most of the power increasing items in BfA will be irrelevant once Shadowlands rolls around. Some items will keep value if they have cosmetic effects. Ultimately this means that most items we are currently trading will lose most of their value. 

The question then will be how the road looks until then. 

Let’s look at some Legion examples

To get an idea of how long items may retain value and how the price will behave from now until Shadowlands launches. Of course we still don’t have an exact launch date, but we that does not matter much. 

The overall trend is that the last peak for most items is reached some time around the launch of the last raid tier in an expansion. From that point on demand only goes down and prices fall. 

Materials

First let’s look at some materials. Below you can see the charts for Stonehide Leather, Starlight Roses and Empyrium Ore. The green line is the one we are interested in representing the region price on EU. The per realm prices are a little to volatile to be useful. As we can see the general trend for all three items is a slow decline in price. This decline will have already begun for most BfA markets. We should still expect crafting to be profitable however, so don’t quit yet. 

Crafted items

For crafted items there are some more differences. Below you can see the price graphs for Empyrial Cosmic Crowns, Mark of the Hidden Satyr enchants and the flask of the Seventh demon. The enchant lost a TON of value, whereas the decline for flasks was quite a bit slower. The crafted gear kept it’s value much better and remained relevant all the way up to launch. You can also see the spike in hidden satyr enchants once players realized it is fantastic for twinking and leveling, but that is more of an anomaly. 

Gear is more useful than enchants

Ultimately gear is more useful than enchants, both for end of expansion gameplay and for leveling in the new one. As such we can expect gear to retain slightly better value over the next couple of months than consumables. Long term the value can increase as players stop crafting BfA stuff as well. 

Overall I think you should keep at it with BfA methods for quite some time as they will remain good sources of profit most of the way up to Shadowlands launch. 

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