Engineering is an interesting profession in classic. Although all the items you can craft can only be used by other engineers you typically need a huge number of them. The profession also relies to a very large degree on crafting intermediate items to use in finished items, and players are willing to pay to avoid having to spend the time to craft these intermediate items.
But everyone who can use these items will have engineering
Yes, but crafting still takes a lot of time. I sell tons of thistle tea to rogues who can all get the recipe extremely easily. Paying to save time is something that always happens and it works really well.
Types of intermediate crafts
There are several types, but we will split them into two main categories:
Blasting powder, and the rest. Blasting powders are made from the various stones and are used in most explosives, as well as several other crafts. The three most important blasting powders are Dense, solid and Heavy from the stones with the respective names. These are used in the three main grenades that are used for PvP: Thorium, Iron And sapper charges.
Blasting powder varies a lot in price and is often selling for less than the crafting cost though.
The rest
There are two items in particular that are interesting here. Unstable Triggers are used in a lot of different explosives, and on both the realms I’ve played so far they have sold for quite a bit more than what they cost to craft. You also have the Thorium Widget, which is used in Thorium grenades. Widgets are also one of the turn-ins for the Darkmoon faire, so casters looking to get their neck will need quite a few of these to get enough tickets.
There are others as well including Delicate Arcanite Converters for the scope and truesilver transformers, but most of these are only used in very expensive recipes where the engineer is very unlikely to not craft it from the bottom to save money.
TSM setup
All of these items are stackable so we will sell them in a couple of different stack sizes. Our main market will be volume crafters so we want to prioritize the larger stack sizes wherever possible. As usual with crafted goods we use 120% crafting as the minimum price to ensure at least 20% profit margin.