“Secret” Goldmaking: Rare Transmog Patterns

If you are looking for some nice goals to focus on for the last part of Legion this post will be perfect! One very profitable niche in this game is crafted cosmetic items with rare recipes. One obvious example is the Vial of the Sands mount that I have written extensively on. In addition to this there are a ton of rare armor and weapon patterns that are very valuable.

Low competition means high margins

The obvious advantage of rare transmog recipes is that competition will be really low. There are recipes that you have to go out of your way to get, and as such there will be very few players that have them.

Finding the recipes

I know of some of these recipes, but not a lot of them. Personally I do not have any truly significant rare recipes that I am aware of outside the vial of the sands. This means that I can’t give you the answer, but I can show you the tools you need to find some recipes with potential. I will also give you a couple of examples, and show you how you would go about obtaining them.

The three research tools

There are three research tools we will use to figure out what we want to target:

  1. Kruithne’s Recipe tool for finding recipes
  2. The tradeskillmaster website to check the profitability and the sale rate
  3. Wowhead to figure out how to farm the recipe

Checking your recipes

Kruithne’s web tool has one purpose. It will scan a character using the Battle.net APIs to give you a list of all the recipes you have unlocked and the ones you are missing. The recipes are sorted by source. This will give you a great idea of where you can go to unlock recipes. Generally most unique look items will have value as transmog and just using the tool to work on unlocking recipes will help you get more potential high value crafts.

For recipes that can be traded you can just add them to a watchlist. You can use TSM notifications to get notified when one of them gets posted on your AH. If you have the desktop app you can setup notifications whenever an item from a specified group is posted below your maximum shopping price. Some recipes are so rare you may just want a notification when it get’s posted.

Some recipes are Bind on Pickup and you will have to farm for those.

Prioritizing your farm

For recipes you are farming for you will have to make some kind of priority. Sadly there are no quick and easy ways to check the potential profitibality of a lot of different recipes that I’m aware. This means you will have to do this manually, and this puts a limit on how many recipes you can consider.

Luckily the tradeskillmaster team has you covered to some degree. You can look up items from their database on their website. The lookup will calculate the crafting cost on your realm as well as the potential sale rate. Put these together and you can quickly see if a recipe is worth it. You can also see the number of items on your AH to see if there’s a lot of competition.

How long does the farm take?

This is really the final part of the analysis. You can easily check wowhead to figure out how long you should expect to farm. For reputations you are likely to find the best methods in the comments and the same holds true for recipes that are drops. You will want to prioritize something you can farm quickly. or obtain without farming it.

Putting it all together

If you look up your character on Kruithne you are likely to have a ton of red recipes. My first suggestion is to focus on a blacksmith if you have one. This is the only profession that can craft a meaningful amount of weapons, which is usually a massive advantage.

Some examples

At last I’m going to leave you with two examples of recipes I know are profitable. I don’t have either of these, but I would love to have them.

Phantom Blade

The Phantom Blade is a vanilla crafted sword. It drops from the banshees on the undead side of the Vanilla dungeon Stratholme. The sword is quite cool and has a very decent sale rate. It is generally also incredibly low in competition with most realms have 1-2 swords posted. I have tried farming for this recipe unsuccessfully. I hope to get it soon though.

Felsteel Longblade

This sword is quite popular with it’s red katana look.

This recipe is a world drop from the Burning Crusade. It has an incredibly low drop rate. To get this recipe you should setup notifications using TSM or The Undermine Journal to get notified it is posted on your realm. To setup a notification from TSM you simply search up the item on the TSM website. Then scroll down to the notification part of the screen. Fill it out as in the screenshot below and you will get a notification if it is ever posted on your AH.

Happy hunting!

I will personally be diving into my recipes list to see if I can find any forgotten goodies. I highly recommend you look around a bit, you may be able to find some forgotten items or markets with great profit potential!

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2 thoughts on ““Secret” Goldmaking: Rare Transmog Patterns

  1. Rare crafted transmog is a market I’m very interested in as welk, and I’ve always tried to get any patterns that I don’t have yet.

    I was wondering though, when buying a pattern from AH, what would you consider to be an acceptable price for the pattern when compared to the crafted item? DBMarket (crafted item) x 10? DBHistorical (crafted item) x 5?

    1. It depends on the profit margin, expectes competition and how long you expect to play the game. There’s really no way to make a rule. I’d say you will want to break even in about 6 months or less. So that would be profit*monthly sale rate*6 as the maximum price.

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