Gold Capped: Making money with enchanting scrolls

Want to get Gold Capped? This column shows you how. Join author Basil "Euripides" Berntsen, also of outdps.com, the Hunting Party podcast and the Call to Auction podcast.

Enchanting is like the auctioneer's sonic screwdriver. Having a maxed-out enchanter is a major boost to many other professions, as their ability to disenchant is just amazing. It will help you recuperate money when leveling your professions, as well as open up business opportunities that may not have been profitable otherwise.

So how else can you make money with enchanting?

The wrong way to make money with enchanting

Working for tips is something that can be worth it if you want people to help you level; however, it's a complete waste of time if you want to make serious money. The reality is that even if you're making 10g per job, considering all the hassle of getting to the person, trading mats and haggling over the tip, linking your book in trade brings in less money per hour than, say, doing a random dungeon. It brings in way less than someone who has access to the auction house and a little bit of entrepreneurial spirit can make!

If you have rare recipes or something, it might be worth your while; however, I never link my book in trade. I respond to people asking in trade, but more often than not, I'll just offer to sell them one of the scrolls I've made.

The best way to make money enchanting gear

Ever since Blizzard announced the ability for scribes to make armor and weapon vellum that will store an enchant to make a tradable scroll, selling enchant scrolls on the AH has been the best way to make gold from enchanting gear.

The process is simple:

• Enchant vellum

• List scrolls on AH

"Enchant vellum" sounds like simple a instruction, doesn't it? The problem is you need to know which enchants are profitable! Go read about a third of the way down in my post about blacksmithing for instructions on how to setup LilSparky's Workshop. Do a scan of the auction house with Auctioneer. Now when you open your enchanting window, it should look something like this:

Look down that list, and ensure that you only make scrolls that are going to sell for more than you could sell the mats for, whether you farmed or made them yourself or not. Otherwise you're spending gold enchanting other people's gear. Admirable though that may be, morally, I prefer to save freebies for friends and guildies.

You might want to look into finding some sort of profession addon that inter-operates with LilSparky's Workshop so you can sort. The one I use even lets me sort by profitability. Unfortunately, it barely works these days and is not seeing much love from the guy who kept it taped together when I started using it. If you feel like tinkering with a recalcitrant, always buggy and occasionally data-corrupting addon, download the Lilsparky's Skillet clone at your own risk here. There's light at the end of the tunnel, though; the author is apparently rewriting this from the ground up, which will be awesome.

"List scrolls on the AH"? Easy enough! These days, even the default UI lets you post stacks based on unit or stack price and list as many stacks as you want with one button click. Still, for this, I like to use Auctioneer's Appraiser tool to automatically undercut everyone. Click on my post about it to see how to configure it. You'll have to go over your whole inventory once to set all the scrolls you made up, and as you expand your production, you'll have to mark each scroll as auto-post once (click to embiggen).

Lastly, while I rarely advocate this if it's done with any level of dedication, if you wanted to mass cancel and re-undercut anything, these scrolls are probably the only thing where that's worth it. It's usually going to be less than 50 different types of scrolls, there's no deposit fee and there's often a butt-ton of margin on them. You don't want to give it away, but if you log in once in a while to cancel and relist, you're trading profits for volume.

If you do choose to cancel and relist, this macro will be handy:

/run local i=1;local n=1;while n ~= nil do n=GetAuctionItemInfo("owner",i);if n~=nil and strfind(n,"^Scroll of") then CancelAuction(i) end i=i+1 end

It will cancel any enchanting scrolls auctions you have up, allowing you to relist them.

This market may or may not work out for you; sometimes there's too many aggressive undercutters or too many aggressive AH campers. If this is the case, your only option is either to find some other profitable niche or try to shock them out of the market. If you elect to shock them out, you're going to need another addon: Quickauctions. It's much more suitable for pricing wars, although it takes a long time to configure. More on that later!

Being an auctioneer is like being able to print money (or gold, as it were). Wait, that doesn't make sense ... You can print on gold, but you can't print gold. That would be closer to transmutation? I can transmute titanium, but that's only worth it if the price of saronite is low enough to justify the time spent making it. I need some sort of analogy here. ... Whatever, I'll figure it out later. Making gold? Every week, Gold Capped will teach you the tricks of the trade, from setting up your auction addons and user interface, to cross faction arbitrage, to learning how to use your trade skills.