Today I will give you guys an overview of the large scale BfA shuffle. The shuffle in BfA is actually quite interesting and involved for large scale crafters, and I will show you how the steps fit together.
What is the large scale shuffle?
The large scale shuffle is when you use a large number of professions together in a process where you generate materials for other professions. You want to utilize as many input materials as possible to maximize the number of finished items you can craft.
There have been several variations of this throughout the history of WoW. Typical ones have been jewelcrafting and enchanting combining to use prospecting to generate gems to make rings and then disenchanting those alongside generating other gems.
BfA and expulsom
The lynchpin in the BfA shuffle is expulsom. Expulsom is needed across a wide variety of professions and if you want to get a really big crafting empire started you have to get a good method for generating expulsom. Then you need to get the other materials needed for your output whether that is ore, inks or leather.
You obviously want to maximize the profit of all the intermediary steps as well to maximize your total professions.
Expulsom production
There are really only two realistic methods to generate Expulsom in BfA. You can craft and scrap either the tailoring bracers or one of the leatherworking bracers. This means that tailoring or leatherworking has to be one of your professions to get a large scale operation going.
Leatherworking and tailoring can both produce sinister combatant gear which requires a hefty amount of expulsom, so you can actually have these professions and be self-contained. But that won’t be enough if you want to go further.
At this point a simple version of the shuffle would look like this:
Maximizing bracer profits with disenchanting
The bracers have a 15% chance of turning into rare versions with a higher item level. With the current prices of Umbra Shards you are usually much better off disenchanting the rarer bracers as they are typically worth 2-3 times what an uncommon bracer is worth in terms of enchanting material yield.
This would then add another intermediary step to our process., which now looks like this:
It’s now started to look a bit more complex, and we are still only using two professions. Luckily new professions will really just add more lines of scrap greens for the most part.
Adding Inscription
Inscription is one of the most expulsom-hungry professions in the game if you want to do darkmoon card crafting. You can do this either by milling your own herbs or by buying inks. I prefer buying inks as the quantity of ultramarine pigments is so unwieldy that the potential gold savings just aren’t worth it.
A full process
If you want to add all professions to the process it will start looking something like this, at which point you will be running a large empire. The process below includes jewelcrafting as well as all the armor professions and inscription. The only professions that are not included are engineering and alchemy as these are on some level more self-contained in terms of gold making as they do not make much use of expulsom.
Hopefully this gives you a good view of what you can use the various materials for and what the main outputs are for the majority of professions!