Right now BoE flipping is still the best way to generate large amount of gold if you do not like farming. A lot of players are of course looking ahead to Shadowlands, and I’ve been getting a lot of questions about when we should exit this market, so I thought I would write a little bit about the state of the market.
BoE flipping still works
Over the last week I generated 3 million gold in BoE sales. Players still want corrupted gear, and I believe they will care about BoEs for the foreseeable future. Generally high level gear has kept it’s value at least up to the pre-patch for a new expansion, and usually even longer than that. That being said there are no guarantees in goldmaking.
Changes to corruption
Recently Blizzard added the ability to purchase corruptions from MOTHER in the Chamber of Azeroth. The available corruptions changes every 3 days, and she does not have all of them for sale.
This will obviously change the value of BoEs significantly. Uncorrupted gear is now much more valuable, particularly if it has a high item level. Generally item level is now more important than it used to be, as you can get the right corruptions on any piece eventually.
Sockets should also be more important for generating value than they used to be. Some corruptions will likely still sell better than others. If there are no twilight devastations on the vendor, you will consider paying a premium to get it on the AH, even if the premium should be smaller than it used to be.
My approach is unchanged
I still buy BoEs by looking at the region market value and using separate pricing levels per realm. Using the market value as a proxy for how good or valuable an item is works pretty well.
That being said there is an easy way you can get better intel on how much a BoE might be worth. The website wowpay2win.com has a easy to use filterable list to compare corrupted BoEs and their prices. I expect the point of the site is to highlight the pay2win nature of buying BiS gear off the AH as the best corruptions are crazy good.
If you are entering this market as a goldmaker however, this is just a great site to use to evaluate potential deals.
You can also use it to familiarize yourself with the relative value of the various item slots and corruptions, although keeping knowledge of 20 different corruptions in your head will be a tall order.
Should you start doing it?
It i most likely too late to enter the market now though. If you enter now you are taking on significant risk related to any changes Blizzard might make. Personally I will stay in the market and I literally bought a ton of BoEs today, but I have been active in it for a while, and I can afford to take the loss. As always with very rare gear the sale rate is usually relatively slow, if you just have one or two items available for sale then you can’t really expect to get sales.