With millions of active players, World of Warcraft’s players invest lots of time and cash to get a competitive advantage in the game through either grinding or purchasing coveted gear and items.
However, when you accidentally sell, disenchant, or even destroy your hard-earned in-game items while cleaning your inventory, hours of farming and real cash can easily be lost. With this, Blizzard Entertainment has a feature to help you retrieve them.
Read this guide to learn how item restoration works in World of Warcraft.
What is item restoration in WoW?
Item restoration on World of Warcraft restores sold, destroyed, and disenchanted items. Once the process is done, the items can be retrieved in your character’s mailbox. This feature is available for all iterations of the game like Season of Mastery, Wrath of the Lich King Classic, or their newest expansion, Dragonflight.
The process is simple and easy to do, however, it’s a limited service, so only restore necessary items. Not all of them are recoverable as well. First, let’s go through how to recover lost items using item restoration in World of Warcraft.
How to use item restoration
To restore lost, destroyed, or disenchanted items in your World of Warcraft game, follow these steps to use the item restoration feature by Blizzard:
- Log in and choose your server
- Go to the Item Restoration page
- Click on the Begin Item Restoration button
- Select the character/s and/or item/s you want to retrieve
- Click on Continue once done
- Finalize and confirm by selecting Restore Items
Check your mailbox and you’ll finally see your items back and available again for your in-game character. It’s important to note that you can only use this feature once every seven days and only if your account is active and has a good standing. With this, take careful note of all the items you need to restore before doing all these steps.
What to do before using item restoration
Should an item be irrecoverable using the item restoration service, then they are permanently lost. Even the game’s Customer Support cannot restore them, so take note of the following before using it:
- If you accidentally deleted the character that had the lost items, undelete the character first
- If you disenchanted an item by mistake, ensure that your character has the crafting materials that you obtained. The game reclaims them in exchange for the restored item
- Disenchanted gear in a raid group will not have the trade option, even if it was restored within two hours
- If the items lost were a pet, mount, or heirloom, check the Collections tab first, or log in with the character that originally acquired the item
Limitations of item restoration in WoQ
A single batch of items can be restored using this feature only once every seven days. You also cannot use item restoration if you neither have game time nor an active subscription. Players with accounts that are suspended or banned are also logically not allowed to use this service.
Similarly, you also cannot restore the following:
- Items are destroyed in your current session until you log out. You can always interact with any vendor and go to the Buyback tab, as you can repurchase the last 12 items you sold since you last logged in.
- Stackable crafting material and quest items
- Consumables like potions and reagents
- Collectibles added to the Collections tab
- Items available only for a limited time like holiday items
- Items that were traded or mailed to another character, or sold at the Auction House
- Items destroyed before a Faction Change or Character Transfer
If you still cannot restore your item, then it is purged from the game’s database. Generally, items with a higher level or better quality get retained longer. For example, a Common item may only be restored within a day, while an Epic item may be recovered using item restoration for 30 days.
So if you accidentally lose a much-valued high-tier item, the game allows you more time to recover them.
Resolving issues with item restoration in WoW
If you find that the item restoration page is not working normally, you can clear your browser cache and cookies, or try a different browser. It may also be worth checking first if your realm is in maintenance or if the server is down through the Realm Status page. For further issues, you can always contact Blizzard’s Customer Support for assistance.
