Mists of Pandaria is upon us soon and today I wanted to take a closer look at the disenchanting shuffles available to us.
What is an enchanting shuffle?
For those of you new to goldmaking we need to start at the beginning with explaining what a disenchanting shuffle is. The idea is very simple, you buy materials to craft many of the same item, then you disenchant the item and sell the enchanting materials for more than the initial materials you purchased.
Material conversions and rare procs
There are two important things to note about mass crafting items for the disenchant shuffle in Mists. The first is that items have a 15 % chance to proc into a higher item level rare version. The rare variants can be sold on the AH, or disenchanted for rare enchanting materials. You can also convert materials from one to another, but this was not active on beta, and you do lose some efficiency, so we will look at the raw yields.
Windwool bracers
Tailoring is a staple of enchanting shuffles, with bracers usually being the cheapest item to craft, and thus the most profitable one as item level determines the drops usually. The bracers will set you back 15 Windwool cloth. This is not particularly expensive and may be the top option. I did a batch of 100 bracers on beta. I got 20 rare bracers for my sample, which is a bit above average.
I got 137 Spirit Dust, 8 Mysterious Essences and 23 Small Ethereal shards. That means we get an average of 1.7 dust and 0.1 Mysterious essence per uncommon and an average of 1.15 Small Ethereal shards per rare.
The ore shuffle
Back In original mists the most popular variant was to buy Ghost Iron Ore, prospect it with Jewelcrafting, use the rare gems to craft gems and then use the uncommon gems to craft ornate bands and Shadowfire amulets. In total they use one each of all the uncommon gems, making them a great way to get rid of uncommon gems. I did a test batch of 100 Ornate bands to see what the disenchanting yields are. I only got 5 rares in this sample, highlighting that the proc rate can vary quite a bit.
Based on my 100 ring sample I got a lot more materials from the rings than the bracers. 214 Spirit dust, 17 mysterious essences and 6 Small ethereal shards. Which gives average yields of 2.3 spirit dust and 0.17 Mysterious essence per uncommon and 1.2 Small Ethereal Shards per rare.
Macros
Below is a macro that covers both windool bracers and the two JC recipes. You can spam click it and it will disenchant all items you have. It does include the rare procs, so if you wanted to sell those you should delete the items with numbers that begin with 90.
/cast Disenchant
/use item:90474
/use item:82402
/use item:83793
/use item:83794
/use item:90904
/use item:90905
Final verdict
It is possible some other tailoring items have higher yields, but Wowhead is missing the data and I don’t have time to test all the items. It looks like combining enchanting with prospecting is your best bet, but the rings are more valuable for vendor selling, and the gems are also usually more valuable than cloth, so it will depend on pricing.