(this post has been updated for WotLK.  To view the updated post click here)

Enchanting can be a very lucrative career profession. The only thing I hate about it is standing around in a major city spamming the trade channels with: level 345 ‘chanter LFW can do [some enchant] [another enchant] blah, blah, blah. Only to have to get into a 2 minute conversation with everybody anyway about every one of the 40 or 50 enchants I can or cannot do and what the mat price is and what I charge for it. It can really be a hassle. But you can still make a TON of gold with enchanting and never enchant anything but your own gear.

Just like fishing and cooking are great for new toons and making bags is perfect for the mid-level characters, there’s just no beating enchanting for making the big bucks for your epic and flying mounts. Questing in outlands will land you the most amazing greens, and I would personally swear that they drop twice as often as in Azeroth. Most of these greens are better than the level 60 dungeon gear from before the Burning Crusade patch. However, because of the stats most people need on their items, about 25% of these drops are completely worthless. I mean you can’t sell them in the auction house at all. You can’t even give them away. So the greens in outlands can be pretty hit-or-miss. They will either leave you agonizing over whether to equip it, sell it at the ah, or vendor it away.

Don’t worry about that if you have enchanting. The great thing about this technique is that you don’t have to mess around with maxing out your enchanting skill to make money at it. At skill level 275 you can disenchant nearly anything you would ever want to. The blues which might require a higher level enchanting skill to disenchant you don’t have to worry about either. Almost every party will have at least one other enchanter, if there is a roll everyone passes on, just let the guy who spent 2000 gold getting his enchanting to 375 disenchant it and then everyone can roll on the shard instead of the item.

So you can do this without having to spend a ton of money leveling up your skill. The greatest thing about disenchanting items for money is that there are NO auction deposits for enchanting mats. Which means you can go for the highest price possible and re-list them all 100 times if necessary to get the very maximum price. On top of that, the amount of materials needed to get even one skill point in enchanting past 325 is insane. So the materials are in high demand no matter what your server. Plus, at the level of the people buying these materials, money has usually ceased to be a big deal, because you can easily earn 100 gold just off of trash items in a few hours grinding.

So when you begin dreaming about that flying mount – you might go retrain in enchanting and spend a couple hundred gold getting it leveled up. After about three weeks of casual questing in outlands, I was able to disenchant enough mats to sell the whole pile on AH for well over 1,500 gold, enough for my flying mount and a riding crop to boot on one of my alts. So whether you are farming, questing or raiding, enchanting is one way to make some serious dough without having to advertise. Next, our favorite farming spot.