Today I am taking a first look at the BoE flipping market in classic. I just started dipping my toes into it, and I have some ideas about how it can work, so let’s dive in.
BoE flipping basics
BoE flipping is as the name suggests based on flipping Bind on Equip gear. There have been several different BoE markets throughout the history of WoW. Most recently in BfA and Legion the focus has been on raid gear. Before that there have been opportunities in leveling gear and twink gear.
So those are the three categories of gear you can potentially flip, let’s take a look at these items in classic.
Classic gear
Max level gear
The biggest difference between classic and BfA is of course the fact that there is now titanforging. The existence of multiple versions of the same item in BfA makes it much harder for newbies to price their items. As such it will be much easier to price items correctly in classic. Thus it will be harder to find good deals, at least for epics.
In Phase 1 there are some classes that have random greens as options for their pre-raid BiS gear. This includes “of Frozen Wrath” items for mages and “of Shadow Wrath” items for warlocks. These items can be very hard to price accurately for newbies and represent a nice potential opportunity. Outside of that I would look through BiS lists to find candidate items. Then you add them to the group and scan for them when possible.
Leveling gear
Right now leveling gear should be passing it’s initial peak. Players are mostly closing in on 60, so the market is drying up. This means you may be able to find good deals, especially for weapons. There are no definite obvious niches yet though. Leveling gear has mostly worked well when there has been a predictable large increase. The best time for this market was flipping Cataclysm gear with level 77-79 required back in MoP as this gear represented a MASSIVE ilvl spike.
Twink gear
Twink gear is going to be interesting. Right now no one is twinking, so twink demand is nowhere to be found. When BGs open in phase 3 however, we should expect a lot of players to eventually start twinking. I have not finalized the twinking group yet as there will not be demand for a long while. That being said I would definitely start looking at what items are useful for twinks and consider purchasing them.
TSM settings
The TSM group is split up by item type. It is not exhaustive, but it contains a good amount of useful BoEs. The End-game group contains all MC BoEs, most relevant World drop BoEs and most of the rare BoEs that are Pre-raid BiS or close to pre-raid BiS.
I’ve set the maximum shopping price to 60% dbhistorical and the minimum auctioning price to 80% dbhistorical. This is the base setup I’ve used when flipping BfA BoEs. I chose historical over market as the market value will be to unreliable, particularly for rare items. It may be useful to use region market in stead, but I will have to do some testing to figure that out. This market is very risky, as you will potentially tie up LARGE amounts of gold, so be careful and don’t spend more gold than you can afford to lose!