There are really two answers to this question, each has pros and cons.

First You can craft the commonly used gems. To get a good list on what cuts are used the most, check out WoW Popular. They give a nice list of the most popular gems being used across all servers. The Pro to this method is that you will sell gems quickly and in mass quantities. The Con is most Jewelcrafters will be doing the same thing, this makes undercutting pretty common.

One way to adjust for the undercutting is to list the gems for 12 hour auctions. This allows you to relist the auctions quickly if you are undercut and they do not sell. This also saves you some money from deposits.

The other method is to get unique cuts that have mid range demand. On my Server you can sell a Deadly Ametrine or Stark Ametrine for 50g + more than the more common cuts. The Pro is you make more money per gem. The cons are you will not sell as many and may have auctions expire.

If you haven’t read, these gems will be obtainable by many ways.

1. Prospecting titanium

2. Icy Prism

3. Alchemy transmute

4. Purchased with emblems

5. Purchased with honor

There are methods to obtain (and sell) these gems to make profit, but stocking up on the mats needed before the costs go up is where you will allow you to either make more profit on the epic gems, or sell the items needed for a good mark up when 3.2 goes live.

Prospecting Titanium

From all the numbers I have seen in the PTR and researching it. It seems like the epic gem proc rate on prospects is around 1 epic gem per stack of titanium prospected.  Here are some things to keep in mind.

If your server’s market hasn’t been tapped yet, you can probably get titanium ore for cheap. I watch the market and stock up when it is slightly below the current marketplace. If I find out the expected value of the prospect (when the markets are set after the patch) is less than the value of the ore I will resell it (most likely at a higher price).

Titanium Powder can be a result of the prospect. 10 of these can be turned in for a Jewelcrafter Token. These may be valuable in the beginning of 3.2 if you don’t already have a stock pile, since the epic gems recipes will be purchasable with the tokens.

You will still get rare and uncommon gems. All of which are useable for either icy prisms (which will drop epic gems in 3.2) or rings you can de; Bloodstone band, Sun Rock Ring, and Crystal Citrine Necklace (more information on the Jewelcrafting Gold Guide)

Icy Prism

These will drop epic gems. I have yet to see reliable data on the proc rate of them, most likely due to the timer on creating them. If you have any further information I would love to hear more on it.

Alchemy Transmute

You will be able to transmute a mixture of rare gems and eternals into epic gems. This is a very good reason not to mass cut all your rare gems before 3.2 to try and sell them off before the patch comes. It is also a good reason for an alchemist to stock up on some rare gems if your market is low, so you can do these transmutes in 3.2

5 colors transmutes are available at the Dalaran Alchemy trainer. The only one that isn’t trainable is the Cardinal Ruby which is obtainable by completing a quest from the trainer which requires you to do one of each color transmute. I would strongly recommend working towards this quickly since red gems are very desirable.

The materials for each transmute are as follows

Blue: 1 Sky Sapphire, 1 Eternal Air

Green: 3 Forest Emeralds

Orange: 1 Monarch Topaz, 1 Eternal Shadow

Purple: 1 Twilight Opal, 1 Eternal Shadow

Red: 1 Scarlet Ruby, 1 Eternal Fire

Yellow: 1 Autumn’s Glow, 1 Eternal Life

This transmute will be on the same Cool down as other transmutes (20 hours)

Emblems

They will be purchasable for 15 emblems each. Red gems will probably give the highest sell value due to demand and the inability to transmute them for at least 5 days after the patch

Honor

You will be able to purchase the gems from the PVP Jewelcrafting Quartermaster in Stormwind and Orgrimar. They will cost 10,000 honor each and as with the emblem purchasing Red gems will probably give the highest sell value.

Over the next few days I will try and cover more 3.2 preparation and market suspicions.

Its rather annoying to click/press the action then click the item you want to use it on. For example milling Adder’s Tongue 100′s of times because your crafting Darkmoon Faire cards for profit.

Well here is a macro that can help easy the pain of mindless doing the same thing over and over again

/cast Milling
/use Adder’s Tongue
/use Goldclover
/use Talandra’s Rose
/use Deadnettle
/use Lichbloom
/use Tiger Lily

For prospecing you would change the word milling and so on. You would also change the herb names to ones that you mill, prospect or disenchant.

This has saved me the time of clicking on the stack of herbs/item to de. It may seem like only a little bit of time, but it adds up. Also you can mindless press 1 button while you watch tv, which is pretty nice.

Today’s gold making tip is a response to an email I received a couple days ago. The person wrote:

Hello !

I’m planning to level a second character on the other faction of my server, using a death knight as a banking alt.

And I was thinking, since that death knight can be leveled to 60 without blinking, and Grand Master <Profession> requires lvl 60, I could perhaps use it as a profession mule too.

What would you recommend as the best four-profession combo ? The main I would be leveling from 1-80 would be a rogue.

Thanks in advance,

Aeltyr

This is a very good question. First I will cover the Death Knight aspect. If you have a DK “bank alt” that you can get to level 60 that you do not plan on playing, there is one way you can make fairly good amount of gold. I would recommend Tailoring + enchanting. You are probably thinking WTFBBQ are you talking about?!?! There are 6 main reasons why I say this.

1. Tailoring and Enchanting go very well together. You can level Tailoring at no net loss if you sell the DE mats, or use those mats to level your enchanting.

2. There are also many ways to make gold off crafting tailoring items and DE’ing them for profit. (I DE Brown Linen Robes, Azure Silk Cloaks, White Bandit Masks, and Low level Netherweave items for a 50% profit margin)

3. Tailors can make gold crafting Netherweave Bags, I sell about 100 a week. This also gives you a cheap source to obtain bags for other alts/banks etc. (I will have a article on the numbers of this tomorrow)

4. You can Purchase items off the AH and DE them for profit if you don’t want to craft things.

5. You can take the cloth that you receive from leveling and turn it into something more valuable (enchant mats) and that have no listing fees.

6. You can DE all the greens you get and sell the enchant mats, again enchant mats have no listing fees while greens do.

However if you do not want tailoring as a profession on your alt, you can try inscription. This is a nice way to make gold (through Northrend Darkmoon Faire Cards, crafting glyphs etc).

For leveling, I always recommend Skinning + (Mining or Herbalism). I know some people say to do Mining and Herbalism, but I find it rather annoying to use macros to switch tracking etc. Skinning is easy money that you can get just for killing the mobs you need to xp and you don’t need to go out of your way.

If you want to be a leatherworker at 80, save the leather you skin. This will allow you to not have any upfront costs of leveling the profession. You can do this by having a bank alt with a bunch of bags, or use the mail system to send mails to your alt that you never open. (if in 30 days you haven’t cleared it out, it will be sent back to your main, but make sure you do something with it then or it will disappear when the mail expires)

Choosing between Herbalism and Mining depends on what you want to do when your 80 .

Do you want to be an Alchemist or Inscriptionists? Choose Herbalism. Herbalism also works great if you choose Inscription on your DK and Alchemy later on your main.

Do you want to be a Jewelcrafter, Engineer or Blacksmith? Choose Mining. However, do NOT smelt the ore, I repeat do NOT smelt it!!! Even if you’re going to choose Engineer or Blacksmith. Lower level ore sells for more than bars since it can be used for more professions (all three + someone leveling mining with smelting). Bigger market to sell too also means a quicker sale. If you choose to go Mining or Engineering, I recommend dropping skinning first to pick it up so you have your smelting ability still available to help speed up the process of leveling.

If you want to pick professions based on money making abilities I would choose Jewelcrafting and Leatherworking (assuming you already have tailoring and enchanting). There are several Leatherworking items you can DE, along with selling armor kits. Jewelcrafting is also a goldmine as well. However, with the increasing numbers of Jewelcrafters, you would need to be smart with the market. Save gems for big rush times (ie new seasons, new instances that provide lots of new gear)

If you have any questions your self, feel free to email me at webmaster@wowconomics.com and I will try my best to answer your questions.

If Your a Jewelcrafter, and you don’t like the prospecting gamble, you can usually buy/bid on rare quality gems, cut, and resell for more. One of my biggest profit margins and quickest sellers are Scarlet Ruby cuts ( Bright, Bold, Delicate, and Runed). I can usually buy them for 80g and resell them cut for 100g +. My other one is Solid Sky Sapphires. I can purchase these for 10g and resell fro 25-30g.

But what if your not a Jewelcrafter, how can you make gold off buying gems? Check out Rare gems from BC. They vendor for 3g each, and since people are dumping them, you can buy/bid cut and non cuts for less than that. Vendor them and you have made a quick amount of gold.

You can do the same with Forest Emeralds. Since there is a large supply on my server and very little demand they usually have bid prices of 2.5g, I bid and win about 10-20 a day making about 5-10 g in a matter of 1-2 min. You can make even more on them if you are a Jewelcrafter since a cut version vendors for 4.5g.

Below is a general guide on how to level it. The results on how much you spend (or even gain) leveling will depend on your server prices. The trick is to pay attention more to the process on what I select than the actual item it’s self. If the item in the guide says to make it to say 135 but its still green and will make you a profit to DE/sell, keep making them, these are “free” levels when you look at the net cost to you.

I also tend to lean towards DE’ing items than selling them. You will usually recoup more of your cost of leveling the profession to tip a friend to DE all your items than to list the items for sale. The reasoning behind this is Enchant mats have no listing fee.  You can re list the item till it sells with no cost to you if it doesn’t and many craftables have a steep listing fee, which cuts into recouping your gold from leveling. Enchant mats also tend to sell quicker. Someone power leveling enchanting will buy about 4-5 stacks of a dust in 1 day, while someone leveling will most likely buy only one item.

For Jewelcrafting, you may want to use prospecting to get your gems. Download the Jewelcrafting Excel file here. And follow the directions to figure out if you can prospect ore for more than the gems are worth. If you can for the level of gem/ore range you need, prospect ore for “profit” and use those gems to level. (sell the excess you don’t need). Using this method can take more time, but you could also lower your leveling costs and possibly make a profit.

General rules when leveling crafting professions
1. Spending more mats on something that is more desirable or gives a higher DE value will give you a smaller net loss.
2. If you have to sell items, don’t list them all on the same day. List 1-2 items at a time
3. Have an enchanter handy. Either one of your other characters (strongly recommended even if it’s an alt you rarely use) or a friend that you can trust, and just give a tip to DE the items.
4. Look for the smallest net lost, not the cheapest to make. Sometimes it’s the same item, sometimes it’s not.
5. Profits will vary by server. If you have a lot of people DE’ing for profit you won’t make as much back. If you don’t you will make quite a bit of gold.
6. You may be making things that don’t get you a skill point every level however, you are not “losing” gold if you evaluate the cost, AH value and DE value properly.

And now for the Jewelcrafting guide:
** please note that prices are based on Wowecon.com average prices**

The most straight forward way to making profit with Jewelcrafting is cutting gems. There are couple ways to make the most money in the beginning when you first start out. One tip is to get one desirable cut for each color gem first, before getting multiples of the same color. For example if you have Runed Scarlet Ruby, Pick a Orange or Purple recipe first before picking another red cut. This will give you more options with prospected gems.

Cutting “green quality” gems yields about 15-20% of the gems becoming perfect, resulting in a 20-35g gem. The best way to calculate the value of cutting several green quality gems for AH sales would be calculated as:

Now sometimes you will get 3 perfects in a row, sometimes none. In the long run each cut will average out to the expected value.

Personally I like to cut and sell the Solid Chalcedony. I sell the solids for about 1.8g (pay 2g to buy the gems) but when I get a perfect I can get 25-30 for it. For every stack of 20 I cut I cut about 105-110 worth of gems for 40g. (Estimating conservatively) . Since these perfect gems sell for a decent amount it’s something that has to be looked at when deciding how much to spend on uncut gems to cut for profit.

If you don’t like the risk of prospecting, there are a lot of options to buy uncut “blue quality” gems on the AH and resell them for 20g+ more. Look at what the sell price of all the cuts you have and the price of the raw gem and decide.

Don’t forget to craft enchanted pearls! The pearl can be purchased for around 15g on the ah + 1 infinite dust on my server, and I have turned around and sold them for 80g+

I recommend taking it slow in the beginning because gems do have a high list fee. This is also the only thing I list on a 24 hour auction. Since prices fluctuate hourly, I like to be able to relist and try and keep mine the lowest possible.

Prospecting for Profit

There is a lot of gold to be made in prospecting lower level ore. The best way to decide what price you are willing to pay for a stack is to use the prospecting Excel sheet linked below.

Crafting for DE

There are several items you can craft for DE profit. In order to determine what will work on your server you would need to compare the total cost of the item to craft and see if it falls in your acceptable DE value (for more information look at Enchanting)

The main items I use for DE purposes:

Azure Moonstone Ring

Fel Iron Blood Ring

Golden Draenite Ring

Bloodstone Band

Sun Rock Ring

Crystal Citrine Necklace

Crystal Chalcedony Amulet
Stoneguard Band or Shadowmight Ring

Jewelcrafting Excel File – Contains formulas to calculate prospect and DE values

Patch 3.0.3