What Enchanting Costs and What It Earns
Enchanting is the one trade in Forever whose product is a service and whose raw material comes out of items rather than out of the ground. That changes where the money goes in, where it comes out, and why the auction house barely touches either end of it.
The only trade that eats finished items
Most crafting professions begin at a node. Enchanting begins at a finished item: a green weapon nobody rolled on, a drop that would otherwise go to a vendor, a piece a tailor made purely to move a skill point. Disenchanting breaks that item into dust, essences and shards, and those are the materials the trade runs on. The practical result is that an enchanter's supply line runs through other players' loot and other players' crafting rather than through a spawn timer, so there is no route to plan and no camp to hold.
That makes every input a second-hand price. Dust is worth whatever the greens behind it are worth, and greens are worth whatever the levelling market is doing that week, which is why what a reagent bill looks like reads differently for an enchanter than for an alchemist buying herbs. The other way in is to make the items yourself on a character with a crafting slot, in which case the bill is paid in cloth, ore or leather and in the hours behind them rather than in coin.
The third source is a group one and it is settled socially rather than mechanically. Greens that drop in a dungeon can be handed to the enchanter in the party and broken down on the spot, which is why how a group splits green drops is worth agreeing before the first pull instead of after it. An enchanter who runs with a regular group collects materials from content they were going to run anyway; one who does not is buying the same dust from somebody who did.
What skilling it up actually costs
The levelling bill is counted in items rather than in stacks. Every point comes either from applying an enchant to something or from destroying something, so the question is never only what dust costs but how many objects have to pass through the character to reach the next tier. That is a different shape of spend from the cost of training a craft in a profession that buys ore by the stack, and it is the part newcomers underestimate: the coin is fine, the supply of cheap greens is the constraint.
There are two honest budgets and they rarely stay separate. The coin budget buys dust and low-level greens off the shelf and finishes quickly. The time budget puts a crafting profession on a second character, feeds it cheap materials, and turns its output straight into disenchant fodder, which is one of the reasons spreading trades across a roster is planned before the first slot is taken rather than after. Most enchanters end up doing both, switching whichever one is cheaper that week.
What the shelf charges for those inputs is its own market, and it moves with how many people are levelling at the same time. When a realm is full of new characters, greens are everywhere and dust is cheap; when that wave passes, the same point costs more. Anyone budgeting the climb should price the materials a skill point needs on the day they intend to buy them, not from a figure quoted months earlier.
Selling an enchant when nothing can be listed
The output side is where Enchanting stops behaving like a craft at all. The product is applied to somebody else's equipped item, so there is no object to post and no stack to undercut. The sale happens in a trade window between 2 players who found each other first, which is the whole reason enchanting outside the auction house is organised around chat rather than around listings. Visibility, not price, is the thing an enchanter actually competes on.
In practice that means the trade channel, a guild roster and whoever happens to be standing at the bank. The usual arrangement is that the buyer brings the materials and pays for the application, which prices the recipe and the waiting rather than the dust; the alternative is a full-service price where the enchanter supplies everything. Both conventions exist side by side, and how services get advertised in chat decides which one a buyer sees first. The same framing covers work sold for coin rather than items generally.
Demand is lumpy in a way a gathering route is not. It clusters around fresh gear, new tiers and the evenings before raid nights, and it disappears for days in between. That is why an enchanter's week looks nothing like a miner's, and why what the enchanting service returns is better measured over a month than over an hour. A character who is never visible at the right hour earns nothing from a maxed skill.
What we do not know yet
Several pieces of this are genuinely open. We have not seen published Forever notes covering the full recipe list, the sources those recipes come from, or whether disenchant results change at any point in the trade's range. Anything circulating as a complete table should be read as a prediction until a note says otherwise, and we are not going to invent numbers to fill the gap.
The vellum question sits in the same bucket. Whether an enchant can be written to an item and sold like ordinary stock changes the entire shape of this market, because it would give the trade something to list, and an enchant applied face to face is the working assumption only until that is settled. Reports from the beta are useful as claims from players, not as confirmations, and we label them that way everywhere on this site.
Questions
Is Enchanting cheaper to level than other crafts?
It depends on what you count. In coin it can be cheaper, because much of the material arrives as loot nobody wanted rather than as bought stacks. In effort it is often more expensive, because each point needs an item to destroy or an item to enchant, so the constraint is a steady supply of cheap greens rather than a pile of gold. An enchanter with a crafting alt feeding them finishes faster than one buying everything off the shelf.
Why does an enchanter need another profession behind them?
Because Enchanting consumes finished items. A tailor, leatherworker or blacksmith on the same account turns cheap gathered materials into objects that can be broken down for dust and essences, which closes the loop without paying another player's margin. It is not required, and plenty of enchanters simply buy greens, but the people who level fastest usually have a second character making the fodder.
How do buyers find an enchanter if nothing is listed?
Through chat, guilds and reputation. The sale is arranged in a trade window after both players have found each other, so the enchanter who is online and visible at the hours people are gearing gets the work. That makes the service closer to a scheduling problem than a pricing one, and it is why the same enchant can go unsold for days and then sell several times in one evening.
Who normally supplies the materials for an enchant?
Both conventions exist. The common one is that the buyer brings the dust and shards and pays a separate fee for the application, which keeps the price easy to compare. The other is a full-service quote where the enchanter supplies everything and charges one number. Neither is standard in Forever as far as we have seen published, so agree which one applies before the trade window opens.
Sources
- Blizzard's official site for Forever announcements and profession notes — World of Warcraft official news.
- Community database used for recipe and material references — Wowhead professions database.