Now that I have motivated the general case for why you would invest in Legion materials it is time for the last armor profession. I have already analyzed how much ore and cloth it makes sense to buy and today we will dive into leather.
Why are we doing this
I’ve outlined the rationale for stocking up on Legion materials in a previous post. In general crafted armor from old expansions will remain a decent market for money making even after they stop giving power increases. Players always work towards getting more transmog items in their wardrobe and crafted gear is an easy source.
Couple this with the fact that Legion markets are soon going to hit their all time low and the question becomes “how much should I buy?” and not “Should I buy?”.
Legion Leatherworking
As with Blacksmithing and tailoring our main focus will be on crafted armor. Leatherworking in Legion can craft 4 full sets of armor. 2 sets each for leather and mail. The sets have unique transmog looks and will likely remain potential money makers, just as we have seen with the MoP PvP gear and the WoD crafted Armor.
The large amount of items is of course a major advantage to leatherworking. It covers a lot of different classes and increases your sales potential.
Which materials do we need?
Leatherworking uses a wide variety of crafting materials. I will assume level 2 recipes and note below if any of the materials are irrelevant if your recipe level is higher. We assume that Blood of Sargeras is made tradeable so we can stock up on all of the items from the Auction House.
- Stonehide Leather
- Stormscale
- Blood of Sargeras
- Leystone Ore (ignore if rank 3 Gravenscale Hauberk and level 3 Dreadleather Jerkin)
- Arkhana
- Maelstrom Sapphire
- Dawnlight
How fast do the items sell?
To calculate how fast the items sell we will look at the sale rates for the equivalent crafted WoD gear. Sale rates for leatherworking gear is quite a bit lower than for blacksmithing, especially for the mail gear. This is partially made up for by the increase in the number of items.
The total average number of sales per month is pretty much the same for Blacksmithing and Leatherworking when you take the increased number of items into account.
How much do we need
Based on the assumed salerate above you would need the following to be stocked for one month of sales.
All of this assumes rank 2 recipes, if your recipes are rank 3 you will obviously need significantly less.
If you want to stock up for the full duration of Battle for Azeroth (estimated at 2 years) we get the amounts below.
[b]Does it make sense?
To figure out if this makes sense we need to look at the amount of inventory space that this claims as well as how much gold it will cost you as well as how many inventory slots it would take. I used mean EU prices below to calculate the total cost for the full 2 year stock. As you can see the total comes out to just under 300k. You would need 155 slots, which is about equal to 1.5 bank tabs.
This is certainly within reach for many of you. Especially considering that prices are likely to trend down over the next month. I would definitely stay on the lookout for players dumping their stock to get some great deals on this stuff.