Cutting gems
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:
price of the cut *.8 (85%) + Price of the perfect cut *.2(15%) = expected value of one gem.
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:
Crystal Chalcedony Amulet
Stoneguard Band or Shadowmight Ring
Jewelcrafting Excel File – Contains formulas to calculate prospect and DE values
Patch 3.0.3
