Blacksmithing was an incredibly hot market the first week of BfA. I was selling items for 30k-100k. While those numbers are no longer possible the market has now largely been forgotten and it represents a great source of profit.
The market
Some of you will probably scoff at this market.
“Who would buy item level 300 gear?”
I don’t have an answer to that question, except that it’s a surprisingly large number of players as my sales below will attest to.
My crafting cost is around 1000 gold for most pieces. As you can see they are selling from between 1.3k up to 8k, with a surprisingly large number selling in the 2k-5k range.
Sales are also very steady, and I’m not even stocking a particularly large number items. I keep about 5 of each item in stock at any time. More crafts will definitely mean more profit though as you generate way more epic items if you craft more.
Materials
In terms of materials this market is as straightforward as they get. You only need two materials for all of these recipes, and one of them is from a vendor.
Storm Silver ore is going to be the major part of your crafting cost and you should try to look for it on the auction house every day. Buy it when it’s cheap to increase your profit margins.
You also need Elemental Flux which is sold by your blacksmithing trainer for 2g70s per.
The recipes
For this guide I will focus on the Honorable Combatant gear. The reason is simple. They do not require expulsom. This makes them much more time-efficient to craft than the stormsteel weapons.
The rank 1 recipes are all learned from your trainer, so you can get started in this market with just a level 110 character. Another major advantage is that the difference between rank 1 and 3 is generally quite small. The difference is usually about 4 storm silver ore per rank.
I only have rank 1 and some rank 2s, but I’m still very profitable. Unlocking the higher ranks requires you to pay using marks of honor. These are account bound and obtained through PVP. If you want to obtain them just go do some PvP on your favorite PvP character. You should also keep an eye our for any Broken Isles PvP world quests that can reward marks. Run through those on as many alts as possible, as the marks are BoE.
My experience is that the armor sells much faster than the weapons, so prioritize your armor recipes when buying higher ranks.
How much should you stock?
So far I have mostly been stocking up to 5 of each item. I just started increasing my stock to 10, and it’s going to be interesting to see if this increases my sales.
I suggest starting by focusing on the armor pieces, as these have performed best for me. Craft up to 5 each of these if you can afford to.
TSM setup
My TSM setup includes my BfA crafted gear operation. It includes some checks in case the variation in question does not exist. I also include an if clause that will increase your normal and maximum prices for the epic variations. As usual I post one of each item for 24 hours with a minimum price of 120% crafting.
One warning is that the group may not be complete. I keep making new variants that are not in the group, even though it’s based on muffins import. Every time you craft a batch it’s good practice to check that the new items are all in the group. You can read my TSM guide for a quick rundown of how to add items to a group.
The import string is in my pastebin.
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Is there a way to undercut crafted gear despite what stats it has? Let’s say the cheapest honorable combatant chest got the Aurora stats but the fireflash is on the AH for 2000g less? Because so far i have not been able to find a way to do this
Theres a tick box to ignore item variants when adding items to a group. If you do that it will treat all the variants the same, but then you will have to increase the post cap in the operations as otherwise it will just post one.
That being said I think that’s a terrible idea for current expansion gear as the higher priced stat variations are typically more expensive because they are more useful.
On my server the Inscribtion gear is selling for around 3-4k but the Aurora are going for around 9k, but rarely sell. Will people really pay 6-7k more for a 300ilevel piece of gear? i mean at that ilevel the stats doesn’t make a huge difference
I also have another question.. When looking at profits in your crafting tab, the price of the materials are set to DBmarket, which shows a loss of profit. Is it possible to set this to a specific amount of gold or a % of dbmarket or even minbuyout? currently on my realm the material prices are far below the dbmarket values, so it would be nice to be able to see a more accurate picture of the profits / loss on crafts
You can change it per material under the crafting reports tab in the crafting window. You can open it with /tsm crafting. You can also change the default string under the main settingsz
Are you using the default string of “min(dbmarket, crafting, vendorbuy, convert(dbmarket))” or have you altered it to be more precise?
I have kept the default string, and I change it separately for any other items. I like to have my material cost be dbmarket due to opportunity cost considerations.