On Sunday I stumbled on a gold making idea that seemed almost to good to be true. I was shopping for Spirits of Harmony, and someone had posted 37 stacks of 200 at a very low price (200 gold per). So I bought about 1000 of them. I have been using them for Riddle of Steel transmutes as well as for the engineering rocket mounts. When I found a bunch of them this cheaply I decided to check what else I could use them for and it blew my mind. So I bought another 1000 spirits on my challenge realm for 272 gold each. 540k gold, in seconds.
The Spirit of Harmony Vendor in Vale of Eternal Blossoms can be used to easily flip a bunch of spirits of harmony into other materials. They can usually be resold straight up on the AH for a profit.
Direct crafting uses
The Spirit of Harmony is the Mists of Pandaria equivalent crafting recipe to Blood of Sargeras. It is used as a reagent in a bunch of different MoP crafting recipes, including the no cooldown Living Steel transmute and the rocket mounts. Sadly wowhead is failing me so I can’t give a full list of what it’s used for, but it was a reagent in a lot of the MoP crafted BoEs in addition to the two uses I mentioned.
If you are crafting any of these recipes you should obviously be on the lookout for deals.
The Spirit of harmony vendor
In the Vale of Eternal Blossoms there is a vendor that sells various Mists crafting materials for Spirits of Harmony. I have known about the vendor for a while, but I had never actually gone through everything he sells.
So I decided to check what else the vendor sold. I found that there were several of the materials that it would be very profitable to buy through the vendor. This usually depends on buying Spirits below market value. Luckily the supply of spirits is usually very variable, so you should easily be able to find good deals.
Now lets look at the most profitable uses.
Golden Lotuses
You can get 2 Golden Lotuses for the price of one Spirit of Harmony. The EU mean price for Spirits is 355 gold, with the EU mean price for Golden Lotuses at 197 gold. Add to this the fact that you can regularily find Spirits down close to 200 gold on most servers and you can see how this is a great vendor shuffle. Golden lotuses are still very useful for the MoP gem transmutes. I use this transmute all the time to get gems to craft jewelcrafting panthers, and you should be able to sell them. If you have alchemy you can even craft the finished rare gems and sell those.
Ghost Iron Ore/Bars
This was the one that really shocked me. I was able to buy a ton of Spirits of Harmony at 200 gold on my main realm and 272 gold per on my challenge realm. On both of those realms Ghost Iron Ore sells for about 20 gold. You can get 20 Ghost iron ore for one Spirit, so some quick math indicates that I had profit margins of 100% and 45% respectively just for flipping into ore. On my main realm I go through a LOT of Ghost Iron to fund sky golem crafting, living steel transmutes, MoP PVP gear crafting (upcoming post alert!) etc. Just crafting Sky Golems for me requires on average 160 bars per day in addition to three spirits of Harmony.
The EU mean price is 20.42 per ore, which indicates about a 15% profit margin if you buy at market value. If you can smelt bars it’s slightly better as they have a mean price of 45 gold, giving you 450 gold per Spirit, which is a 30% profit margin.
Kyparite
This one is more of a special case for people crafting the Depleted Kyparium Rocket. Kyparite can be hard to get as there are very few people farming it. You can 20 kyparite at the vendor per Spirit of Harmony. This will likely be the best source of Kyparite if your Auction house is out. If you’re not crafting that mount or you can get enough from the AH, then this is usually worse than Ghost Iron.
The EU mean price is down at 13 gold, so unless you can’t find this on your realm I would stick to Ghost Iron.
Trillium
You can also use one Spirit of Harmony to buy 5 White or Black Trillium Ore. If you are planning to get Trillium bars it is slightly more efficient to buy the Trillium Ore and melt it than buying Ghost Iron Ore and melting and transmuting that. You get about 4% more Trillium from choosing the Trillium Ore.
If you are just looking to flip it without any intermediate crafting Trillium looks even better. The EU mean price for White Trillium ore is 93 gold. This puts the value at 465 gold, slightly better even than the Ghost Iron Bars. Black Trillium Ore has an EU mean price of 105 gold. This puts the value of one Spirit of Harmony at 525 gold. Considering you can regularly find them well below 300 gold, that’s pretty damn impressive!
The great experiment
All of this put together is why I choose to buy Spirits of Harmony for 41% of my total gold on my challenge realm. Using the TSM settings I will get to in a bit I will try to unload the spirits as Ghost Iron Ore, Trillium Ore and Golden lotuses, with no plans currently to do any intermediate crafting. Although I am leveling alchemy on my Demon Hunter that just hit 110, so I will probably dip into some of the transmutes.
TSM settings for flipping everything
I have created a quite detailed TSM setup to use all of this in practice. The TSM setting is designed to be used for players who only want to flip Spirits of Harmony into other Mists materials. If you are planning to use the materials for crafting you will have to setup your own shopping operation and max price or compare prices by hand.
Custom price source
The settings use a custom price source that just evaluates to the average purchase price of Spirits of harmony. This makes it way easier to write minimum price formulas for the various auctioning operations. You can find custom price sources on the front page of TSM, as shown in the screenshot below.
The custom price source should be named spiritbuy and have the following pricing formula:
120%first(avgbuy(item:76061),80%dbmarket(item:76061))
Shopping operation
The shopping operation is based on the prices of the materials you want to turn the spirits into. The formula used for the maximum price sets it to 80% of market price of the least profitable material. The formula compares prices for Golden Lotuses, Ghost Iron Ore and the Trillium Ores. You can use the spirits to flip any of the markets as the maximum price is set to 80% of the value of the LEAST valuable flip. To find the most valuable flip, just hover over the tooltips at the vendor and do some quick math. If you get large volumes of Spirits, you will likely want to do all of them.
Auctioning operations
The auctioning operations use the spiritbuy custom price and ensures that you have a profit margin of atleast 20%. If you want to change it, you can just change the 120% in the spiritbuy price source. If you haven’t bought any spirits the spiritbuy price source defaults into 80% dbmarket for spirits.
I have set up operations with a ton of different stack sizes for all the materials. For ghost iron ore and bars it posts in stacks of 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200. For Golden Lotus the stack sizes are 1, 5 and 10. Trillium ore is posted in stack sizes of 10, 20, 50 and 100. Lastly Trillium bars are posted in stacks of 6, as this is optimal for people using them for Living steel.
Get the TSM settings here
Make sure you pop any questions you have on the setup in the comments, on discord or on twitter.
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