Large Prismatic Shard

For those who like to gather their own reagents, here's a personal favorite method of farming these shards, among other things. It involves a Miner on a swift flying mount, an Enchanter, a Tailor, and a Jewelcrafter. If you have alts with these trade skills, you're in great shape. Otherwise, get assistance from a friend. The Miner is the most critical.

Large Prismatic Shards are just one of the many lucrative byproducts of this process. You'll also receive...

• Uncommon Gems
• 
  
• Rare Gems
• 
  
• Adamantite Powder
• 
  
• Primal Earth
• 
  
• Primal Fire
• 
  
• Arcane Dust
• 
  
• Greater Planar Essence

MINER
A swift mount helps cover a lot of ground, accelerating the gathering process. My favorite area is Terrokar Forest. There are nearly equal quantities of Fel Iron, and Adamantite. Mining provides a moderate quantity of Motes of Earth, and a few Motes of Fire.

Mining nodes appear on the rocky terrain surrounding the large regions of the forests, the periphery of Bone Wastes, and the broken rocky edges of the region, at the south, and southwest. With a well-planned route, you can hit every node on the map in about 20 minutes. My route takes me by Shattrath. When the bags start filling up, mail all ore, Primal Earth and gems to your Jewelcrafter.

JEWELCRAFTER
Prospect ALL the Adamanatite. It provides Uncommon Gems, Rare Gems and Adamantite Powder. (I typically get 1-2 rare gems per stack of Adamantite ore.) The Powder can be combined with Primal Earth to make Mercurial Adamantite. The red, blue, yellow, and green Uncommon Gems can be combined with Fel Iron to make a few very low-cost rings, which can be disenchanted.

Balance your supply of Fel Iron Ore with gems. Prospect Fel Iron Ore, as needed. Ideally, you'll use nearly all the ore and gems, except orange (Flame Spessarite), and purple (Shadow Draenite) gems. Excess quantites of these gems can be sold to a vendor for 25s each. (Better yet, send them to guild members, who are leveling Jewelcrafting. They'll appreciate it!)

ENCHANTER
Disenchant the rings into Arcane Dust, Lesser Planar Essences, or the rare Small Prismatic Shard. Send all Arcane dust to the Tailor.

TAILOR
Anyone can farm or buy large volumes of Netherweave Cloth. Send those immediately to the tailor. Use the cloth and Arcane dust to make Arcanoweave Bracers. Send those back to the enchanter.

ENCHANTER
The bracers will almost always disenchant into a Large Prismatic Shard, or around a 1/500 chance of a Void Crystal.

The Pattern: Arcanoweave Bracers drops from the Arcatraz Sentinels. That's the ONLY difficult part of this chain. The Jewelcrafter's rings are all trained. The highest requires 320. An enchanter of 300+ can disenchant all of these items.

This is a little complex, but it allows you to enhance the value of ordinary farming, by producing reagents worth far more than the source materials.

I'd stopped selling Adamantite ore, when experience showed that the prospect value was more than double the AH value of ore. Fel Iron and Uncommon Gems are also very cheap. Converting them into enchanting reagents doubles or triples their value.

Arguably, the Arcane Dust may have an Auction House value equal, or greater than the shard. You might be able to sell dust, and buy shards, but the dust market is very full, and sales are unpredictable. I much prefer cloth + dust = guaranteed shard. :)

* * *

If the intent is purely on making money, consider buying Uncommon Gems, rather than Prospecting any Fel Iron Ore. Prospecting 5x ore typically gives you 2-3 Uncommon Gems, and Fel Iron Powder. That's about half the value of the ore that was destroyed. Buy gems. Buy ore. DE the Jewlecrafter rings.

Additionally, purchase Adamantite Ore on the AH. You can buy 20g of ore, and get 40-80g of gems out of it.

I'd still recommend converting cloth & dust into shards. The dust market is always very full, and quite competitive. However, there's never been any difficulty in selling a shard, when needed.

Happy hunting!

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• Disenchanted from Rare (blue) items with an item level of 100 to 115 (Required level 65 - 70)
• 
  
• Disenchanted from Uncommon (green) items with an item level of 100 to 120 (~3% chance)
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• Can be created from 3x Small Prismatic Shard using Large Prismatic Shard (Formula: Large Prismatic Shard)
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• Can be created from a Void Crystal using Void Shatter ([item=34872])
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Items that disenchant into Large Prismatic Shards are found from:

Heroic Dungeons

Normal Dungeons

Crafting Professions

Vendors

[zone=3562]

[zone=3790]

Blacksmithing

Vendor Bought

[zone=3792]

[zone=4131]

Engineering

[zone=3713]

[zone=2367]

Jewelcrafting

[zone=3717]

[zone=3791]

Leatherworking

[zone=3716]

[zone=3789]

Tailoring

[zone=3848]

[zone=2366]

[zone=3847]

[zone=3849]

[zone=3714]

[zone=3715]

 
Other shards you may be interested in:

Small Shard

Large Shard

Expansion

[item=10978]

[item=11084]

Vanilla

[item=11138]

[item=11139]

Vanilla

[item=11177]

[item=11178]

Vanilla

Small Brilliant Shard

Large Brilliant Shard

Vanilla

Small Prismatic Shard

Large Prismatic Shard

Burning Crusade

Small Dream Shard

Dream Shard

Wrath of the Lich King

Small Heavenly Shard

Heavenly Shard

Cataclysm

Small Ethereal Shard

Ethereal Shard

Mists of Pandaria

Small Luminous Shard

Luminous Shard

Warlords of Draenor

Level 70 version of Large Brilliant Shard (needed on most enchants), but unlike small and large brilliants, you can turn 3 Small Prismatic Shards http://www.wowhead.com/?item=22448#c0z into a 1 Large Prismatic Shard. Smalls can be acquired from lvl 58+ blue items.