With a small announcement, Blizzard has disrupted a very special market in World of Warcraft – and heated up another one significantly.
Blizzard has announced a small hotfix for enchanting. However, these words immediately caused the price of a resource in the auction house to explode. A whopping 1,800% price increase within just a few hours. Anyone who acted early here likely earned themselves a handsome profit.
What has Blizzard announced? Blizzard has announced a new way for enchanters to obtain Storm Dust. This resource was previously quite limited. In the official WoW forum, the community manager Kaivax wrote:
We are working on a hotfix to address this issue.
The hotfix will add a new shattering recipe, which allows you to shatter the blue crystals and obtain dust from them.
We expect this to appear in the game within the next few days.
What was the problem? Characters with enchanting have had quite a hard time in The War Within. This is because a variety of enchantments require the resource “Storm Dust.” This can be obtained by disenchanting uncommon (“green”) items.
The problem is that green items are frequently received by characters during the leveling phase, but hardly at all afterwards. After all, in dungeons and raids, mainly rare (“blue”) or epic (“purple”) items are available, which grant higher quality resources when disenchanted.
This led to the price of Storm Dust continually increasing and the demand not being met. A peculiar circumstance for a resource that is considered a “mass resource” and is essentially needed in large quantities for almost every recipe.
How has this changed the market? Drastically. Until now, Gleaming Shards were practically in abundance. They were only used sparingly, and since many characters disenchanted blue items, they were in fact much more common than ever needed. The price was last at 4 to 5 gold pieces per shard.
After it was announced that the shards could soon be converted into dust, the price literally exploded. Just a few hours later, Gleaming Shards already cost 95 gold pieces per unit – representing a price increase of 1,800%. Meanwhile, the price is fluctuating quite significantly again.
Many players apparently bought up large amounts of shards to soon convert them into Storm Dust and then sell them profitably.
The plan is likely to succeed, as Storm Dust currently costs 89 gold per unit. And since you will probably get 3-5 dust from each crystal – if not more – you should be able to make a lot of profit in the first few hours. Others have made a handsome profit in The War Within – and it worked well for them.
