Determining The Value of Mogging Items - Time

As the community works to understand how transmogrification (hereafter called "mog" or "mogging") will fit into our gold-making efforts Keelhaul and I have been discussing how best to tackle the task of valuating and categorizing various mogging items.

In a game with thousands upon thousands of weapons and armor pieces the task of how to organize and analyze which may be good candidates for resale is very intimidating. Luckily for me Keelhaul has thought about it a lot. After the jump I share some of our initial thoughts on how time-to-acquire effects the value of mogging items.


Time is Money

One factor we might use to determine the potential resale value of a mogging item is the time and effort it takes to acquire it. I'll let Keelhaul explain.

"My next tip is to farm rare spawns with unique model BoE weapons like Doomwalker, Kazzak, etc.  You've got the Ethereum Nexus Reaver there, for example, that if a Singing Crystal Axe can go for 10k, the Reaver is likely to fetch the same price if not a tad more. The reason to chase the rare spawns is to avoid parity among other moggers.  Your rarity/desirability scale of weapons in particular likely also has a baseline of time and effort to acquire. Something like this: 

1. Dungeons that require little time or risk to complete.  Ex: Soloable dungeons.
2. Dungeons that require a few extra hands to reduce time or risk.  Ex:  Wotlk dungeons.
3. Raids that require 1-3 extra hands to reduce time or risk.  Ex:  Molten Core, BWL.
4. Raids that require multiple hands to reduce time or risk.  Ex: endgame Wotlk/Cata raids.
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This is the threshold of a guaranteed set of drops
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5. Rare world boss spawns. (No guarantee they're available, thus increasing the rarity of their drops.)
6. Extremely rare world drops.  (Just have to get lucky. Period.) Ex: Teebu's Blazing Longsword. 

If you combine this baseline of time/effort to get yourself into position to acquire the item with the tips I mentioned earlier, then something like the Ethereum Nexus Reaver has excellent potential as a BoE for sale to moggers on the AH.  So farm the rare spawns while everyone else is chasing dungeon bosses in the race to all look the same again (Paladin tier 2).  Long term, BoE items that offer rare differentiation will likely become more desirable for purchase.  Time will tell."

What Does This Mean?

So what we can take away from what Keelhaul is saying is some BOE items are going to be harder to acquire than others. In addition some will take other people to acquire. His advice to us is that if we are working towards farming any sort of BOE mogging items we'd do best to start by looking for solid looking BOEs that we could obtain with as few people as possible.

While this may seem rudimentary the simple fact is the more effort a BOE takes to acquire the more we can expect to be able to sell it for. While the community will continue to find and share items that have the greatest potential to be purchased as mogging items rare spawns are a good place to start.

Also searching the auction house for items dropped by rare spawns now may mean you can pick them up now while they are relatively cheap in order to resell them once the mogging demand spikes after Patch 4.3. Here is Doomwalker's loot table and and Doom Lord Kazzak's loot table.

If you liked Keehaul's advice be sure to check out the post "Keelhaul's Tips On Selling Transmogrification Items" for more advice for getting prepared to selling mogging items.

Items In This Post

Here are images of the items linked in this post. If you love great looking armor and weapons be sure to check out our sister blog Warcraft Looks.

The items shown in the post header image are the Lieutenant Commander's Redoubt (Alliance level 60 Paladin  PVP) set along with the Grand Marshal's Battle Hammer.

Ethereum Nexus Reaver

Ethereum Nexus Reaver

Singing Crystal Axe

Singing Crystal Axe

Teebu's Blazing Longsword

Teebu's Blazing Longsword

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