How to compare items:In Shadowlands enchanting materials have an interesting property: You can right click 3 Soul Dust to convert them into 1 Sacred Shard and you can right click 3 Sacred Shards to convert them into 1 Eternal Crystal, which also means that you can convert 9 Soul Dust into 1 eternal Crystal. You don't even need to be an enchanter to do this.
There are also two recipes for enchanting that let you do the opposite. One recipe lets you shatter 1 Eternal Crystal into 3 Sacred Shards (this recipe is taught by the trainer), and one recipe that lets you shatter 1 Sacred Shard into 3 Soul Dust (this recipe requires honored reputation with "The Wild Hunt" in Ardenweald and can be purchased from a vendor for 1350g).
What this means is that all Shadowlands enchanting materials can be converted into any other Shadowlands enchanting material. We can use this to assign a score to items based on how many materials we will get if we disenchant them:
Uncommon items disenchant into 2.258 Soul Dust, so we can assign them a score of 2.258 * 1 = 2.258
Rare items disenchant into 1.406 Sacred Shards and 1.5 Soul Dust, so we can assign them a score of 3 * 1.406 + 1 * 1.5 = 5.718
Epic items disenchant into 1.055 Eternal Crystals and 0.349 Sacred Shards, so we can assign them a score of 9 * 1.055 + 3 * 0.349 = 10.542.
The score represents how many Soul Dust we'd get from the item if we were to disenchant it and convert all the enchanting materials we get into Soul Dust.
Item quality |
Soul Dust |
Sacred Shard |
Eternal Crystal |
Score |
Uncommon |
2.258 |
0 |
0 |
2.258 |
Rare |
1.5 |
1.406 |
0 |
5.718 |
Epic |
0 |
0.349 |
1.055 |
10.542 |
You can use these scores to figure out which item gives you the most materials per gold spent. For example, let's say you can craft epic items for 1000g/ea, rare items for 200g/ea and uncommon items for 120g/ea. You can then use the scores to calculate how much it would cost you to get 1 Soul Dust:
Crafting and disenchanting epic items will give you 1 Soul Dust per 1000g / 10.542 = 94g85s87c.
Crafting and disenchanting rare items will give you 1 Soul Dust per 200g / 5.718 = 34g97s73c.
Crafting and disenchanting uncommon items will give you 1 Soul Dust per 120g / 2.258 = 53g14s44c.
In this example, crafting and disenchanting rare items would clearly be the best option.
Making gold through conversions:Since you will be able to convert enchanting materials up and down without a loss or CD, you might expect that prices on the auction house will always reflect that.
If Soul Dust for example goes for 50g on the AH, you might expect Sacred Shards to go for 3 * 50g = 150g and Eternal Crystals to go for 9 * 50g = 450g. But in reality, this likely won't always be the case and there will be room for us to make a profit by buying the enchanting material that is priced too low compared to the other two materials and then converting what we bought and reselling it.
For example, Eternal Crystals might be listed at 600g/ea, Sacred Shards at 150g/ea and Soul Dust at 65g/ea. In a situation like this, you can buy Sacred Shards for 150g and turn them into 3 Soul Dust that sell for 3 * 65g = 195g, and/or you can turn the Sacred Shards into Eternal Crystals which would give you 200g per Sacred Shard.
I will keep updating this post with more disenchanting data in the future, but I think the data we have should be a good starting point for now.
Enchanting in Shadowlands will be really interesting!
Cheers,
BilisOnyxia