Supplementary Items

First of all i guess i should start by defining what the hell i'm talking about. By 'supplementary items' i mean anything which is added on to items - so, enchants, armor kits, oils, etc.

I would expect there to be a natural temporary surge in the price of permanent supplementary items whenever a patch is released containing a large amount of new content and new items. A large number of players getting new items (in this case from 2 seperate new instances, 1 for the hardcore raiders and 1 for the more casual player) means that you're going to see a natural spike in demand for ingredients as people go about replacing or upgrading their previous item supplements.

The patch also introduced a new enchant - Enchant Cloak: Steelweave - but I don't think it's a particularly desireable enchant compared to the alternative options. I could be wrong about this - if i am, let me know.

Anyways. Most people who are replacing supplements will be trying to do their same task with the same talent spec, and therefore most people are going to want to essentially buy the same supplement again.

Head enchants are all reputation based, and therefore there is going to be hardly any impact in the auctionhouse. The only possible way i could see is if someone wanted to buy their way to Revered status with the Cenarion Expedition, but most people who are replacing a head enchant will already have the appropriate reputation status (small addendum: not me, i'm a horrible nub). The Blackrock auctionhouse seems to bare this out, as the market for Coilfang Armaments does not seem particularly volatile at this moment.

Shoulder enchants are a different story - they are also reputation based, but in addition to that they are obtained by trading in items which can be purchased from the auctionhouse - Arcane Tomes for the Scryer enchants, Fel Armaments for Aldor. You would expect these to be a lot more volatile to market forces - not for their reputation, but because 8 are required for a full-strength shoulder enchant. The market in both those products seems reasonably volatile - each of the two had more than 80 available for purchase, with a broad price range. The average price was approximately 50% more than the cheapest price (for both products), which suggests to me that you have a large amount of demand to go with what seems like a large supply. I would expect that within a month or so this demand will lessen a good deal, so i think both these products will probably lessen in volatility down to a steady rate of their current minimum price or thereabouts.

Leg armor kits seem to have come into their own with this recent patch - demand has predictably sky-rocketed. Cobra scales - whose main use is for armor kits - have seen a price hike, but not all ingredients have done so. Primal earth and clefthoof leather have not seen huge cost jumps. Primal mana, air and life have gone up, but not by the disproportionate level seen with the scales. In fact, now that primal nethers are available on the auctionhouse it is possible to in some cases buy all the ingredients needed to make a leg armor kit off the auctionhouse, construct the kit, and then sell it for a profit. This is a reasonably rare occurence in WoW, and it might not last depending on how kit prices go when demand begins to taper off.

The last thing i'll cover is the cost of enchantments. The market in enchanting reagents seems to have well and truly hit saturation point, especially on items like Arcane Dust. I'm not sure what effect the introduction of the ability to split Void Crystals into multiple Shards has had, but it'll be interesting to see how that market settles down.

What will be interesting is the extent to which casters change over from MP/5 based enchants to Intellect in order to take advantage of the recent changes to mana regen. Will raiders now take up +6 All Stats instead of +6MP/5 on chest armor and +12 Intellect instead of +6MP/5 on bracers? It will be interesting to see.