What if I told you you can guarantee a profit by turning in grime-encrusted salvage regardless of your professions? You can!
Not as good as it was
When I posted about the grime-encrusted salvage shuffle some people “helpfully” pointed out that this was much more profitable early on. That is usually the case and by the time ANY strategy makes it to youtube, it will be less effective than it was at it’s peak. The shuffle is still very profitable for some professions, and due to what we will focus on in this video it sometimes even profitable without professions!
A pile of random parts is the key
When you turn in a salvage at the salvageomatic you get a box. This contains 3.5 of each BoP material for any professions you have at 200, as well as 3.5 of a white item called a Pile of Random Parts. The random parts can be turned in for a mystery box of materials, but they can also just be vendored for 25 silver. This means that if you just vendor what you get you will on average get 87.5 silver from each salvage box.
The cost
Salvaging will cost you 30 silver, and whatever the price of a grime-encrusted salvage is. On my realm this price has been as low as 40 silver lately. So 40 silver for a salvage and 30 silver to clean it up is 70 silver. And you get 87.5 silver just for vendoring the random parts, that’s 17.5 silver guaranteed profit every salvage. So even if you just destroy all the BoP materials you are making a profit.
Materials will tank
Once this cat is out of the bag and more players realize this expect the intermediate materials to tank in price. I doubt any of them will sell for prices significantly above the price of materials, as the BoP materials are effectively free. This is particularly bad for blacksmithing and engineering, as Truesilver Bars are a lot more expensive than any of the other intermediate crafts.
Take advantage
This is a not insignificant method for generating raw gold into the economy. It’s not super broken, but there are a lot of grime-encrusted salvage dropping every week. This is something it’s possible Blizzard changes if a lot of people utilize it, but it depends on how many salvages actually drop each week. It’s possible the gold in flow is small enough that it does not matter too much.