Disenchant is a spell that you learn when you acquire Enchanting from your profession trainer. This spell is used to extract the magical elementals from weapons or armor, but it destroys the weapon or armor in the process. After you disenchant an item, a loot box will pop up, and you can pick up the items you have created by disenchanting.
The type and quantity of materials produced from disenchanting vary by item type (armor or weapon), item Level, quality, and from which WoW expansion it's from.
The following general rules can be used for most items (there are a few exceptions):
- Dust and Essences usually come from uncommon armor and uncommon weapons, but weapons have a lot higher chance to give you Essences.
- Shards come from rare equipment.
- Crystals come from epic equipment.
Level Scaling and item levels
Due to the level scaling in Old zones, players can now level up to 50 in any old zone. This means you can no longer sort enchanting results just based on item level because they can be from any expansion. This change made the Disenchanting table almost useless, so it's now basically just a page that lists enchanting materials by expansion.
Vanilla zones
- Strange Dust
- Lesser Magic Essence
- Greater Magic Essence
- Light Illusion Dust
- Lesser Eternal Essence
- Small Brilliant Shard
- Rich Illusion Dust
- Greater Eternal Essence
- Large Brilliant Shard
Outland
- Arcane Dust
- Lesser Planar Essence
- Greater Planar Essence
- Small Prismatic Shard
- Large Prismatic Shard
- Void Crystal
Northrend
- Infinite Dust
- Lesser Cosmic Essence
- Greater Cosmic Essence
- Small Dream Shard
- Dream Shard
- Abyss Crystal
Cataclysm zones
There are 6 zones where you can get materials from the Cataclysm expansion. These zones are Mount Hyjal, Vashj'ir, Deepholm, Uldum, Twilight Highlands, Tol Barad.
- Hypnotic Dust
- Lesser Celestial Essence
- Greater Celestial Essence
- Small Heavenly Shard
- Heavenly Shard
- Maelstrom Crystal