The Shadowlands Enchanting Shuffle

Tuesday I wrote about a very expensive market in Darkmoon decks, so today I will cover something on the complete opposite side of the spectrum. Enchanting shuffles are a tried and true way of generating gold that often works really well even with just a little capital available. 

Shuffle basics

A WoW shuffle is a process where you take some raw materials and turn them into something else. The most common one is to craft cheap tailoring items, because cloth is always very plentiful, and disenchant it for the enchanting materials. Usually you go for whatever the cheapest item is for a given rarity and focus on that. 

Shadowlands enchanting materials overview

As usual there are three different types of enchanting materials in Shadowlands. Soul Dust that you primarily gets from disenchanting uncommon items. Sacred Shards obhtained from disenchanting rares and Eternal Crystals obtained from disenchanting epics. 

Currently Eternal Crystals are selling for insane amounts as many players are leveling enchanting (you can potentially make gold by buying enchants now and selling them down the line, absolutely not guaranteed though) to get access to the enchanted materials for legendary crafting. Soul dust is needed in huge quantities for these materials. I quickly realized when I started crafting these that there is zero chance I will bother spending the time to shuffle my own materials. 

Sacred Shard shuffling

The cheapest tailoring rares are actually fairly low in crafting cost. Lightless silk is not that expensive, and Shrouded Cloth is also very cheap on many realms. My testing indicates you get about 1.5 Shards and 1.5 dust for disenchanting a rare item. The Shadowlace cuffs will cost you 10 Shrouded Cloth, 2 Lightless Silk and 3 Penumbra Threads. The math is not straightforward to do in your head, but you can easily make a price source representing the value of disenchanting a rare equal to 1.5*dbminbuyout(i:172231)+1.5*dbminbuyout(i:172230)

You can then add this custom source to the tooltip as shown below. 

Soul Dust shuffling

Personally I have more faith in the Soul Dust shuffle as the uncommon bracer is incredibly cheap. Legendary crafters will also need large amounts of Soul Dust and will already be spending tons of time crafting the intermediate materials and are likely unwilling to shuffle dust (at least that’s how I feel). 

The Shrouded Cloth Bracers will cost you 3 Shrouded Cloth and 3 Penumbra Thread. The penumbra threads now cost 9 gold each (or 7.2 if you buy in Dazaralor/Boralus with a rep discount), which brings the price of bracers up significicantly. The rate of disenchanting was also recently changed, and it is now likely somewhere between 2 and 2.5 soul dust per bracer on average. On most realms the largest part of the cost will likely be the penumbra threads and you should aim to buy cloth as cheap as possible.

Eternal Crystal Shuffling

There are no large scale Eternal Crystals shuffle that have been discovered yet. If you find one then ride it to the moon as the crystals are selling for insane prices right now. The only AH based method is the Fallen Disciple’s cloak BoE which will disenchant into an Eternal Crystal. There are two variants though, make sure you get the ilvl 122 variant. You can easily distinguish them using the normal AH UI, which I would strongly suggest for this item. 

Long term prospects

I thin Soul Dust shuffling will be strong for a long time. The demand for legendaries is strong and consistent. Overall quantities of materials used and generated is lower than BfA so the impact of Legendary crafting on actual enchants should be significant. If you want something on the lower risk side that does not require leveling professions or even a character this is a great bet. 

Getting started

To do the Soul Dust shuffle you just need a single character that has made it through the maw intro. As soon as you arrive in oribos you can learn both SL enchanting and SL tailoring and get to work. The Shrouded Cloth Bracers recipe requires level 10, which just  means you need to craft 10 or so shrouded cloth bandages for 1 cloth each. 

Selling the dusts

You can easily sell the materials just using the base UI. At the moment prices will be volatile so personally I would prefer just using the base UI. It’s just 3 items and you can post all of them with one click so this is the best option overall. Longer term you will probably want to use TSM to speed it up and then you can use the setup included to post them. It will just post at the current value, but not for less than 90% dbmarket. I don’t include the crafting cost in the valuation, so if the market moves against you or you pay too much for cloth you will lose gold, but in those situations it is still better to at least get some gold back than to post at an unreasonably high price and never get the sale. 

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12 thoughts on “The Shadowlands Enchanting Shuffle

  1. Correction to above: The Shrouded Cloth Bracers will cost you 3 Shrouded Cloth and *3* Penumbra Thread. It will disenchant into an average of 1.5 dust (either 1, 2, 3 dust with an equal chance of each outcome).

    1. I updated the post to reflect the hotfixed cost. In my limited testing I only ever got 2 or 3 dusts though, so average rate seems to be the same at 2.5. I’ll clear the cache to make sure its not showing the old post to someone.

    1. The post has been updated to reflect the vendor shuffle nerf, but as far as I have seen the average dust yield per bracer has not actually changed.

  2. Waste of time on high pop realms after price nerf.
    I have to make 1500 pieces > disenchant them to get 3k profit LOL 😀 ….

  3. I’m a little confused about how to find the crafting price for shards. Shouldn’t I just take the cost of the shadowlace cuffs and divide by 1.5?

    1. I calculated yhe disenchant value of the cuffs, which includes soul dust, but yes shadowlace cuffs over 1.5 is a good approximate sacred shard price.

      1. I was just trying to isolate the price of the shards so that I know how much I can sell them for after I add in some profit. Thanks for the quick response!

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