Whilst there are differences between the garrisons my level 100s have, there is one constant – all of them had a Salvage Yard.

Or at least, they did until yesterday!

I used to open up the salvage crates every day – mostly since they’d get out of hand quickly thanks to them not stacking.

And then Blizzard changed them to stack up to 20 at a time; when that happened I started to only open the crates at weekends.

Around two months before 6.2 hit I stopped opening them on all of my characters.

This meant that I had one or two crates to open after a while. And started to run out of bag space thanks to the number of crates I had on some characters!

At that point I realized that I was spending quite a bit of time sending followers on XP-only missions, just for crates. And with the reduced drop rate with crates, it probably wasn’t worth it any more. Also, the lack of bag space was becoming a problem – I think the postmaster started to get irked with some of my characters!

So this weekend I opened up all of the bags and crates of salvage on all of my characters, replacing them as I went along with storehouses instead. All of the storehouses were built to level 3 as the void storage access is handy.

When I opened all of the salvage I vendored pretty much all of the items with some exceptions:

• Transmog items with a value of over 500g
• Any 665 BoEs
• Any of the missing class specific transmog sets

One note on transmog – the salvage yard has effectively killed a lot of the transmog market by flooding it with items. But there are some nice bits which have cool looks which have held their value. However selling transmog on the AH is a long game – it will take some time to sell what items I did get. Most of them had unique names – ie no “… of the owl” bits as its likely people will search for unique names – which tend to have more unique looks – instead of the ones with random stats.

From all of those crates I got a single 665 BoE epic – Dunestalkers Mantle – which sold for ~3k on the AH. Whilst nice, the value of the 665 BoE items salvage could give you has really dropped of late; understandable given the gear available in Tanaan. Why spend lots on a 665 BoE when you can use Baleful items and upgrade them to 695?

However I also had to take into account the cost of purchasing all of the storehouse schematics and the cost of upgrading. That works out to be 2,450g per character, so 17,150g over all.

The final result was 15,599g from all of the salvage and the BoE, after opening 2,535 bags & crates of salvage. Whilst some transmog items are selling, it’ll be long slow process so I’m not including them here.

Doing that took me a total of 2hrs 40 minutes.

This isn’t that much gold for the effort involved when it comes down to it.

I could’ve looked at each BoE, then vendored, sold on AH or disenchanted based on which gave most value. However doing so takes more time per item – and with over 2,000 items small amounts of time add up fast.

Since transmog sales are slow, you tend to list items often. So you want to keep AH fees low. This means ensuing the vendor value is low as well as AH listing fees are based on that. Thus vanilla BoEs are good as their vendor value is low. So for TBC or later items I just vendored. Vanilla ones were then checked for AH value & kept if it was a good amount.

That said, I’m glad I had the salvage yard on those characters – it gave me a good number of follower upgrade items to help with building a stable of treasure hunter followers with 675 ilvl across the characters. It also gave me some nice transmog sets – except for the hunter one. That was horrible was just vendored.

The transmog items were also 610 ilvl which helped fill in gaps with gear on fresh 100s – although now the BoA baleful items from the shipyard are helping with that.

The remaining characters I have which ened to be leveled to 100 will all get the salvage yard for a bit. For the transmog if nothing else.