With 9.2 PTR approaching, we can start figuring out how the legendary market will work in 9.2. As most of you will be aware legendaries is by a significant margin the best goldmaking method in retail right now, and nothing else really comes close in efficiency.
Demand explosion
As with every other time this expansion where we have gotten access to a new rank of legendaries we can expect demand for legendaries to explode. It looks like we are getting just one more rank of legendaries this time. The moment players can equip these demand has exploded, with extremely high prices and very fast sales, having the right slots ready to go can make you millions, even a full gold cap in profit within a couple of days. This will be aided further by the ability to equip two legendaries, one covenant legendary and one other.
The new belt
For the covenant legendary they are adding a new legendary you can get from the zone in the belt slot. This one will change with your covenant always giving you your covenant power. This power can also be crafted onto other slots. If you can add this power to a helm, legs or chest then I expect everyone will want to do that, if you can’t then everyone will use the belt, as belts are shared for the second most stats per slot.
What slots will we wear?
Since the beginning of Shadowlands legendary sales have varied wildly between various slots. Some sell at incredible rates, while others have been almost impossible to sell.
No more domination sockets
The Sepulcher raid does away with shards of domination in favour of the return of tier sets. This will have a very serious impact on which slots players will prefer to buy their legendaries in. Exactly how demand will look is impossible to predict yet, as we do need to see more details. It will depend on the number of slots and how you can mix and match them.
How do players pick legendaries?
So to make some inferences we have to look at what players consider when picking legendaries. Since legendaries usually have been higher item level than anything else, which means the main consideration has been to put legendaries in the highest stat budget slot you can. In 9.0 that meant helm, legs and chest whenever possible. Outside of that it just depends on which slots you can craft whatever the BiS legendary power in 9.2 will be. Since we haven’t seen any balance changes yet, we can’t guess that part.
Losers
Some slots will take a nose dive as they have been propped up heavily by the existence of domination shards. This is primarily capes, necklaces and potentially rings. Rings can be good if secondary scaling gets out of control, but I expect most classes will prefer more main stat and an armor piece when possible. Capes have the lowest stat budget of any slot outside of bracers and will almost never be chosen unless tier sets are extremely restrictive.
Level to rank 4
The new rank 7 legendaries is crafted with a new optional reagent. Which means you need to have the rank 4 legendary to make them. I would suggest holding off a bit before leveling legendaries, as materials will likely fall from the current price point once players finish off their rank 6 collection.
We also don’t know what the best slots are yet, so we’ll have to wait and see before we know which slots should be prioritized in 9.2.
New vestige, new materials
The new vestige requires almost exclusively new materials from Zereth Mortis. This means that prices on current materials are unlikely to spike as much as we saw with 9.1 or 9.0. The main cost will likely be the new materials from Zereth Mortis, particularly the Progentia essences, that we do not know the source of yet.
Stay tuned
I’ll be monitoring the PTR closely. So far I expect slot demand to change very significantly. Tier sets represent the biggest wild card, so once we see how they roll then we’ll see what the best approach will be.