Old materials from World of Warcraft could soon rise significantly in value. Those who stock up now could earn a golden nose.
The next expansion of World of Warcraft, Shadowlands, brings many changes to the game. Not only is there the major level squish, but numerous revisions of the old crafting professions, up to the maximum level. These changes could mean that players with seemingly outdated materials can soon earn a lot of gold.
What’s happening? With the Patch 9.0 of Shadowlands, crafting professions are being overhauled on a large scale. It will ensure that almost all recipes from all expansions can be upgraded. For example, when a tailor crafts a “Relic of the Past V” from 5 Rune Cloth, it can then be used to upgrade a Brown Linen Pants during the crafting process.
A pair of pants that is actually intended for level 3 thus becomes a pair of pants that has an item level of 100 and can be used for level 50. Although the stats of these pants are not good, they have a solid selling price of almost 52 gold pieces at the NPC vendor.
The necessary materials, namely 4 Linen Cloth and 1 Thread (for the pants) as well as 5 Rune Cloth (for the relic) currently cost about 3-4 gold on many realms, often even less.
Those who stock up on these materials now can increase the value of the items tenfold by simply crafting the corresponding items and selling them to a vendor with the launch of Patch 9.0.
Such opportunities exist not only for tailors but for all major crafting professions. So those who stock up on materials now could process them into items with Patch 9.0 that will then bring comparatively more gold in sales.
Economic chaos with Patch 9.0?
What consequences does this have? If the numbers remain as they are and crafting low-level items with high gold value remains lucrative, it will have a massive impact on prices in the auction house. Where linen cloth is currently traded for a few silver or even copper coins, the price could soon rise to several gold. After all, all prices below this are a profit for tailors who can literally craft gold from linen and rune cloth.
However, it remains to be seen whether Blizzard will not change the numbers after all. Because aside from the items with justifiable prices (as described above), there are also a few bugs.
Bugs cause curious numbers: The system is still not fully refined on the PTR and the beta of Shadowlands. There are a few strange outliers that generate extremely high gold values. For example, you can currently craft a tuxedo on the PTR and upgrade it with a relic of the past. The result is a tuxedo that can be sold for 34,412 gold at the vendor – and that with a material value of maybe 5 gold pieces. An increase of more than ten thousand times.
Such errors are also the reason why testing is done on the PTR. These massive outliers are unlikely to be present with the release of Patch 9.0, as they would throw the economy of every realm into chaos.
Are you stocking up on old materials hoping to earn some gold coins with them? Or is that too much effort for too little return?
