Aetherna the Enchanter

Enchantress?  Enchantrix?

Whatever - she's dropped Mining, leveled enchanting to 525 over the course of a couple of days, and is now sporting a couple of nice +40 int ring buffs instead of a boring old +120 stam buff.

All for the cost of... (drumroll, please!)

... 17,000g.  Give or take a few coins.

But hey, who's counting?

Note that this was the cost to go from 0 to 525 - my original estimate of what it would take to level enchanting to 525 in Cataclysm assumed that you were starting out at 450 skill already, and was based on market prices from over a year ago.  On my server, the price of hypnotic dust has fallen to about 10% of what it was a year ago, and celestial essences are running at about 75% of what they once were.  That reduces the total cost to go from 450 to 525 from 14,950g to around 5700g.

Yowza.

Now, granted - I was in a hurry, I had the cash, so I was willing to pay more than the lowest possible market price for a lot of mats.  What's the difference between 42g for a BC-era essence and 45g for the same essence?  Well, 3 gold, times 50, times how many times I made that decision... it adds up.  Plus, I spent quite a bit of gold at the end of the process to buy up some heavenly shards to trade for the top-end Cata enchantments.  So let's say that I was paying at least a 15% surcharge for my mats, and knock the total price down to 14,450g.

Still, that means leveling from 0 to 450 cost about 8,750g.

Ouch.

Yeah, it stung a bit.  On the plus side, I've made about 3k selling some of the enchants I used to level on the AH, so that helps knock the total price down a bit.  In real terms - what I actually paid - that means that I'm only out about 14k.  If I had been more careful about buying and stockpiling mats, I probably could have knocked the total cost down to 11k and some change.

But... hey, +80 int on my rings now.

That's only 175g per point of intelligence.

Definitely worth it, right?

Now to start running some dungeons to make use of my new found disenchanting skills... I figure I'll only need to run something like 100 random HoTs to make up the cash I blew on this little diversion.

Sigh...