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Gold Capped: Sha Crystals are about to get a lot cheaper

WoW Insider brings you Gold Capped, in which Basil "Euripides" Berntsen aims to show you how to make gold on the Auction House. Check out Basil's gold making podcast, Call To Auction, and email Basil with your questions, comments, or hate mail!

I hope you don't have too many Sha Crystals saved up for this upcoming patch. The 5.4 PTR has new epic craftable PvP gear on it which will likely disenchant into them, and some of these pieces will take very few materials. Six Bolts of Windwool Cloth, for example, will make you a nice disenchantable purple cape. The Sha Crystal from this can be turned into two Ethereal Shards, each of which can make three Mysterious Essences.

Right now, the vast majority of enchanting materials are made through disenchanting gear crafted by tailoring or jewelcrafting. Jewelcrafters turn green quality gems into rings and amulets which DE into a lot of dust and a few essences. Tailors make blue PvP gear that disenchants into shards. Sha Crystals are only made on the daily cooldown that enchanters get, or through disenchanting epic gear obtained in other ways than crafting. Patch 5.4 will change everything. These methods will still work, but it'll get you more materials per bolt of cloth if you use the new recipes. Each purple Crystal will be able to be broken down into two blue Shards, which can be broken down into 6 green Essences. This new way will make more enchanting materials per cloth than the existing ways.



Before you consider holding a panic sale, you should know that this doesn't drastically increase the yield of Ethereal Shards. Instead of making a single blue out of 4 bolts, we'll be making two blues out of 6. Really the biggest change is that it'll never be worth making Sha Crystals out of 5 Shards with an enchanter's cooldown. Also, if you have a bunch of cloth that you're about to turn into materials, if you can afford to wait until you have access to the new recipes, you'll be able to get more.

That said, this change will happen during a patch that introduces new content, and these are always accompanied by massive surges in demand for enchants. Even if you have tons of Sha Crystals on hand, remember that it'll take a while for the market to start producing them more cheaply than they're currently produced. People need to make the discoveries and actually start using them to stock the AH. Also, since they'll be buying things that can be made into PvP craftable epics to do this, the base materials will probably go up in price for a while which might help shelter you while you work your way through whatever you've got saved up.

We actually had a similar situation occur in patch 5.2, before which the craftable PvP gear only disenchanted into small shards. On my realm, as well as many others, what happened was that for the first week or so, prices went up like they always do on a content patch that gives people lots of new gear to enchant, but once they started falling, they fell lower than they were before the patch. I worked through everything I had saved up and then some, so the reduction in prices was actually helpful.


Maximize your profits with advice from Gold Capped. Want to know the very best ways to earn 10,000 gold? Top gold making strategies for auctioneers? How about how to reach 1 million gold -- or how one player got there and then gave it all away? Fox and Basil are taking your questions at fox@wowinsider.com and basil@wowinsider.com.