Enchants Sell as a Service in Forever
Every other crafting trade in Forever produces an object. Enchanting produces an effect on somebody else's item, in front of the enchanter, at a time both sides agreed on. That one difference moves the whole market off the auction house and into arranged meetings, and it changes what a buyer is paying for.
An enchant is a meeting, not an item
Beta reports describe enchanting in Forever without vellums or scrolls: there is no item that stores a finished enchant for later. The enchanter casts onto gear that is in front of them, and the effect stays on that gear. Compare that with every other trade. A potion, a bag or a pair of boots is an object, and an object can be posted, mailed, held in a bank and sold while its maker is offline. An enchant cannot be any of those things. It exists only as the result of an appointment.
That removes the usual shelf from under the market. There is nothing to list, so the trade channel does the job a listing does for everyone else, and advertising work in trade chat is the closest thing enchanting has to a search function. The pricing mechanics follow from the same gap: why enchants cannot be listed is a recipe question rather than an interface question, and no amount of auction house skill works around it.
So the unit being sold is attendance. A gatherer sells stock that keeps its value overnight; an enchanter sells a slot in an evening, and an unused slot is simply gone. That is why the two trades behave differently even when their materials come from the same auction house, and why an enchanter who logs in at a quiet hour earns nothing while a herbalist's stack still sells.
What the buyer is paying for besides reagents
A quoted price has 2 parts inside it that are worth separating. The first is materials: dust, essences and shards, all of which have an open market price because they are ordinary items on the shelf. The second is the enchanter's presence, and that part is negotiated rather than quoted by the game. Buyers who only compare material costs end up confused by the spread between 2 enchanters charging very differently for the same recipe.
Travel sits inside the second part. Somebody has to cross the map, and the hours lost to riding are paid for by one side or the other even when nobody writes them into the price. An enchanter who stands in a capital city pays that cost in waiting instead; an enchanter who rides out to a raid entrance pays it in minutes. Both show up in the quote.
Materials can move either way. The buyer can bring everything and pay a fee on top, or the enchanter can supply the lot and charge a package price, which turns the sale into a stock business as well as a service. Where that stock comes from is its own habit, and greens broken down for dust is how most enchanters avoid buying reagents at retail. What the trade returns over a longer run is covered in what enchanting pays an enchanter.
BoE gear is the only part that travels
The market splits cleanly along one line: whether the item can change hands. A bind-on-equip piece can be traded to the enchanter, enchanted at their convenience and handed back, or bought outright, enchanted and resold with the effect already on it. That is the only route by which an enchant reaches the auction house at all, attached to a weapon or a chest rather than sold on its own. It is also where most of the arbitrage in the trade lives.
Bind-on-pickup gear has no such route. The owner has to be in the same place as the enchanter, with the item equipped or in their bags, which is why gearing deadlines turn into scheduling problems. A great deal of that demand lands in the same few weeks, since a pre-raid set before December is assembled by many players at once. The same constraint applies to crafted pieces that bind on pickup, which arrive already stuck to their owner.
Handing a BoE item over without the owner present is possible but it is an arrangement, not a mechanic. The item sits with somebody else until it comes back, and items parked in the mailbox add a delay to that on top. Trading in person settles both sides in one window, which is why most enchanters prefer it even when it costs them a flight.
An alt cannot be stocked in advance
In versions of the game with vellums, a main character buys scrolls, mails them out and every alt on the roster gets enchanted on its own schedule. None of that works here. Each character has to meet an enchanter separately, which means a roster of 5 characters is 5 appointments rather than one shopping trip. Players who plan their alts around a single evening of buying usually discover this the first time they try to send an enchant through the post.
That changes the arithmetic of a roster. Levelling gear often goes unenchanted simply because the meeting is not worth arranging, and the spend gets postponed to 60 where it lands all at once. The wider version of that sum is in what a second character costs, and the case for taking the trade yourself rather than buying it sits alongside the other slots in which profession pays best.
What we do not know. We have no published Blizzard note confirming that vellums and scrolls are absent for the whole of Forever rather than for a beta build, and no figures for what enchanters actually charge for their time on any realm. Tipping conventions, whether guilds will run enchanting as an internal service or as a paid one, and how quickly a realm builds enough enchanters to make meetings easy are all open. We will not publish numbers for any of it until there is something to measure.
Questions
Why can I not just buy an enchant on the auction house?
Because there is nothing to buy. With no vellum or scroll item, the enchant is not a tradeable object at any point; it is a cast applied directly to gear. The only way an enchant reaches the auction house is attached to a bind-on-equip item that somebody enchanted before listing it.
Can I send my gear to an enchanter instead of meeting them?
Only if the item is bind-on-equip, and only as a private arrangement rather than a game feature. The item leaves your hands, sits with somebody else and has to come back, and mail adds a delay on both legs. Bind-on-pickup gear cannot be sent at all, so the owner has to be present.
Should I level Enchanting myself if I run several characters?
That depends on how often your alts actually get enchanted, which for most rosters is less than people expect. The trade removes the scheduling problem entirely, but it costs a profession slot on one character and still requires that character to be online when the others need work done.
Why do 2 enchanters quote very different prices for the same enchant?
Because only part of the quote is materials. The rest covers the enchanter's time, their travel to wherever the meeting happens, and whether they are supplying the reagents themselves. Materials have a visible market price; presence does not, so that half of the price is negotiated every time.
Sources
- Blizzard's official World of Warcraft site, where any change to how enchants are delivered would be published before it reaches the forums — World of Warcraft official site.
- Wowhead's news coverage, which is where most beta build notes on professions get collected and compared — Wowhead news.