Infinite Potential With Infinite Dust

Infinite Dust This post originally appeared in my newsletter. Subscribe now to get these Auction House tips before they are published on the blog.

Infinite Dust is usually the biggest mover on any given server. It’s always in constant demand thanks to its use as a requirement in over 60 different crafted items and enchantments in Wrath. With an average buyout price hovering around 5 gold per dust there’s some money to be made if you know how to go about getting your own Infinite Dust on the cheap.

This week’s newsletter will be a quick one as I offer up a simple way to, with the help of your friends or your own professional skills, produce an item that you can easily build and disenchant into Infinite Dust without the need to grind for quest items or buy high priced blue and green gear on the Auction House.

The Secret Is Cobalt

For eight Cobalt Bars you, or your Blacksmith friend, can craft a Horned Cobalt Helm that when disenchanted produces between one and five Infinite Dusts approximately 75% of the time. The trick to making this work is to obviously build the Helm for as cheap as you possibly can.

On my server, the typical Cobalt Bar goes for 1.5 to 2 gold. The ore, on the other hand, usually floats in the 1 to 1.5 gold range. Of course, if you can mine it yourself then you can build these Helms for no cost.

But if mining isn’t an option… Since it only takes one piece of ore to create one bar it makes logical sense to buy the ore and have your Blacksmith buddy, who is going to be making the Helm for you anyway, smelt the ore into bars first. If you can build the Helm for anywhere under 10 gold and you can get lucky with a 5 Dust disenchant you can turn a decent profit by selling to Dust for around 25 gold.

There Are No Guarantees

Of course, the problem with disenchanting is that you never quite know what you’ll end up with. You aren’t guaranteed five Dusts, or any Dust at all, for each Helm. If the price of Infinite Dust makes the margins of this idea too thin you might be better off waiting for the price of the Dust to rise before giving it a try.

But if the price of Infinite Dust is well above the 5 gold average on your own server than you most definitely want to look into turning low cost Cobalt Ore into high priced Infinite Dust the next time you play.

To subscribe to the newsletter, simply fill out the form below and then confirm your subscription via the email you’ll receive afterwards in your inbox.

Euripides on July 5th, 2009

The problem is that there’s very few servers where infinite dust goes for that much. Most populous servers I’ve seen have prices in the 2-3 gold per infinite dust range, and 6-9 gold per greater cosmic essence.

The Loot Council- Patch 3.2 and Other Good Reads « WoWenomics on July 5th, 2009

[...] Volley posted a great gold-making tip using the old cheap-craft-for-purpose-of-D/E [...]

Rob on July 6th, 2009

While I appreciate the notion, the analysis isn’t quite up to par. For example, you fail to mention that at a certain ilvl threshold the probability of IDs increses dramatically. I think it’s player level 74, but don’t quote me. According to your math you are looking at an investment of 16 ore per item, which costs itself 1.5 to 2 gold. Versus saronite, which costs probably lower than cobalt (on my server it’s routinely 17g a stack vs cobalt which is about 20g but fluctuates).

Anyway there is no best or magic track for DEing. You need to know the raw material costs and the ID prices at the moment. For our server, ID is quite stable at 4.15g each, and DEing level 77 items which can be obtained for 10g each leads to on average 3.5 IDs, about 5g profit each. Multiply that by 40 and you are looking at real gold every day. However, if your raw costs go up to say 15g, don’t bother with this trick.

Also its pretty foolish to go out and farm up the stuff for the purpose of DEing profit; the numbers aren’t there. Sure, if you are farming for X anyway you might as well do it, but to me farming is a huge waste of financial opportunity and time.

Beyond the BSing, there are the rings for JC, and certain LWing items which can be DEed profitably sometimes. As far as I know there is no way tailooring would be profitable right now, in reality you lose about 90% of your investment in tailoring for most items if you DE them.

Nance on July 6th, 2009

Thanks for the comment, Rob. The cost of the Helm is only 8 pieces of ore since Cobalt Ore smelts into Cobalt Bars on a 1:1 ratio.

Molsan on July 9th, 2009

I’ve been doing this recently with my Blacksmith and it’s making great use of the extra ore I’ve been accumulating while questing. He always has a couple stacks of Cobalt on him, and nothing to show for it… until now.

Jul200905

Nance

5