Even if it were theoretically possible (and I am doubtful, but I haven't tried ringing the gong myself so I'll never be 100% certain)- what does it have to do with making gold? If, for some reason it were possible to ring the gong and get the mount/title- how on earth could you restrict access or grant access to it through gold payments?

Sure, people would pay a very very large amount of gold (or hell, real cash) for the mount/title. But without the ability to give the product in exchange for the cash/gold- there's no gold making opportunity and this is a complete derail of the topic at hand.

You are of course right in advocating caution in this speculation. I'm just going to mention that the wording Drysc used in WoW Forums -> Transmute: Void Crystal into Large Prismatic points towards a trainer bought recipe. If the aim of this change is to then there's no rationale to make this recipe hard to obtain.

Also keep in mind that he mentions "the possibility of additional 'help' for Void Crystal value in the future". Also, if you got in fast it is likely that VC prices will rise BEFORE the patch, and if you want to hedge your bets you can dump some stock BEFORE the patch, but after speculation has pushed prices up. I've already dumped about 2k of gold into Void Crystals, buying any under 20g until I ran out of cash (on a server where LPS sell for 20g-30g) and I hope to double my investment.

It is a risk, yes, but no risk, no reward.

Because you need other people to help with the pre-quest. Because the quest requires rare and expensive materials which cannot be solo farmed (eternium bars), because it requires a small raid to do the Dr. Weavil questline, and a full-raid to do the fragment questline. These are all opportunities to provide a service for a fee, so it's a fantastic gold making opportunity if there's a market for it. As for the gong part, that remains the second largest impediment to this being a viable opportunity, the first being having customers with the requisite amount of gold to buy the package in the first place.

You've missed the point. If the gates open with everything complete (which is, in fact, how it happens- regardless of gonging) except, perhaps, the gong (which is debatable)- then someone transferring on to the new server needs to be on the server within the first 12 hours or so of the server going live in order to have a reliable chance at hitting the gong. The eager early jumpers won't be doing that questline at the time- they'll already have everything except the gong ringing finished.

You could sell the questline as a package if you could commit the full raid for it (cuts into the profits, and not a lot of people are eager to repeat the AQ gate experience for someone else) but the going price for it cannot assume a guaranteed mount/title at the end, and will probably cost the person in question an additional 25$ transfer fee even IF they can be sure to:

1) transfer to the appropriate server. It's a kick in the balls to have to transfer PvP to PvE just for a title... there's no going home- and PvE to PvP is impossible.
2) Ring the gong- remember, anyone can ring it and start the 10 hour timer as soon as the server opens- assuming, of course, that the gong is ringable- so they've got to get there in an incredibly small window.

That's a tough sell. While I might pay a high premium for a guaranteed title- I wouldn't pay much at all for just the quest line and a 3 month transfer cooldown- especially if there's a chance I'll be stuck forever on a PvE server. It is, in fact, a crummy enough set of circumstances that I'd be hard pressed to spend more than a couple hundred gold for the underwater breathing ring.

I have a question for the Leatherworkers out there. I'm stockpiling primal nethers, and plan to turn all of them into epic leg enchants when S4 hits. For those that did this for S3, which one is in more in demand at the start of a new Arena Season, [Nethercleft Leg Armor] or [Nethercobra Leg Armor]?

I think it's safe to assume that the [Nethercleft Leg Armor] will be a bigger seller. I think your kicker will be selling to the PvPers that don't want/need the Stam and want more stats (From my exp. most warriors with max resil/stam look to boost damage not Stam when they're doing really well and want to push it higher). Safe to say that most people will stock up on the Stam mats/enchants to release for S4, maybe you can let a few of those types of people you'll be there to sell to them.

Based on 2.3 sales, I'd guess that Nethercobra will sell more.

So, I've noticed a drastic drop in LPS (Not to worry, I'm a very patient man and willing to wait). The real problem is finding adequate suppliers of either JC or tailored items to de into LPS, and it seems, at least on my server, too many people ahve become wise to the ways and thus over charge immensely. Anyoen have ways around this? Also, what are some other ways to utilize the mass shards I have without haveing to wait months for the market to clear out?

1. Look around at all the TBC faction vendors. They will each have a few cuts available for purchase. There are only a few green cuts that are world drops.

2.
a) I wouldn't pay 600+ for a blue cut. I'd hold out for decent designs in the 300 range, which is the price I paid for all of my cuts that I didn't get from drops or donations from guildies. If I were going to consider this price, it would only be for a cut that I was sure I would make a lot of money on; this is impacted greatly by the JC competition on your server though. Solid Star of Elune is a great money-maker in general, but if your server has a ton of JCers that can all do it, you won't make your 600g back anytime soon.
b) You can always get Steady Talasite and Mystic Dawnston from Halaa. Luckily, these are also great money-making cuts.
c) I personally wouldn't have a problem, but then on my server the market for gems is extremely crowded anyway (in other words, there are tons of JCers selling cuts on the AH and one more wouldn't impact things much). If I was on a server where I was one of the few regular suppliers, I might have issues with you doing it. Though my relationship to you would also play a part.

3. No experience with this, sorry.

I've already touched on it above, but making money with JCing is largely dependent on your server's JC community. See if you can figure out who the big players are and how crowded the market is before you sink tons of gold into designs. If there seems to be a lot of room, go spend some money on cuts. If not, wait for good deals or lucky drops and make money more casually with your profession until you build up a good inventory of cuts and you can really start flexing your muscle in the market.

One reason could be that Transmute Primal Earth to Water requires revered reputation with Sporeggar, which isn't something you'd normally get without grinding the rep specifically for it.

Not sure about 2.3 as I wasn't playing the AH then, but currently on my server it is far easier to move nethercobras than netherclefts, with higher profit margins.

If you look at top teams and players, virtually all of them use nethercobra /cobrahide / spellthread. Nethercleft is more of a pve tank enchant.

When you do research what's available at higher JC skill levels, you'll find that getting your skill to 350 means you are essentially done. All blue cuts except metas are at 350, metas are at 365, and the only other things above 350 are mostly-useless jewelry (the most useful, the cash cow braided eternium chain is 360), and epic gem cuts (BoP ones at 360, Hyjal/BT ones at 375).

So don't worry about being stuck in the 350 range for a while. When you get here, you've arrived at the profitable regime of jewelcrafting. If you want to push it to 360 or 365 but don't want to buy world drop patterns, you can cut steady talasites. Rare gem cuts are yellow as soon as you learn them and go green at 365, and metas are orange through 375.

Greetings,

This will be my first post to the EJ forums, longtime reader. This thread has been so full of exciting information I finally felt the need to man up and make a meaningful (hopefully!) contribution. In particular I would like to address two of the issues: BOE drops from world bosses and the ever popular 1VC -> 2LPS conversion.

First, It seems to me that the world boss changes represent the new cutting edge for a high end guild to leverage their skill and progress into cold hard cash. Much in the same way that nether vortexes and patterns from SSC/TK or the epic gems from BT/MH have afforded the few guilds doing them to make expensive demands and get them, doing the world bosses will allow guilds who can muster the man power to both down the boss and (on a PVP server) fend off the enemy to make a consistent profit. Certainly at first the temptation will be to offer the items to guildies who were unable to make it to the raid at a reduced price, or possibly sell to somebody's recently 70 alt who you need to gear up quickly.
But in general, the precedent that's been set before is that even really terrible epic BOEs will fetch a great price because the potential market base is just too huge! Anybody, be they hardcore raider or a king of dailies who can never get a group could be a potential buyer. The stuff that drops from these guys is actually GOOD though, so even if through consistent downings the market is flooded a good product will be in demand and call for a higher price. Now, this will really only be good for a guild as a whole, but even guilds need to make money, and a guild that makes money might start paying for your resist gear or your consumables or your repairs, leading to incremental money gains for you.


Now, onto the issue of the transmutes. The initial assumption is that, given a large enough number of enchanters able to do the transmute on a given day, the prices of the two items would stabilize at around:

2L = V

where L is the price of a LPS and V is the price of a void crystal. This is a bit of an oversimplification of course, because it assumes the only daily method of income of large prismatics and void crystals is conversion between the two (made more innacurate since the conversion is one way). If additional sources of LPS outstrip the additional sources of VC, the price of VC would be higher by comparison. Therefore we can add two more terms
2L - Ps = V - Pv

with Ps and Pv being the effect of production of Large prismatic shards and void crystals on their prices. Still this paints an incomplete picture (yes, even more incomplete than the fact that we have a 4 variable equation!) since Large prismatics, by investigation of the recipes that require them, are in greater demand than void crystals. While the few recipes that require void crystals ask for many, there are several recipes with a sizable LPS component and no VC component. If the demand for LPS is high enough, in particular enough that it outstrips the demand for VC, the price of LPS will exceed VC. If through some miracle the reverse becomes true (since there are more ways to create LPS than VC). We might right it out as

2L + Ds + Ps = V + Dv + Ps

And as you might guess Ds and Dv are the effect of demand on the price of their respective items. Now, to make this equation useful we may want to expand the equations further, but hopefully just creating a general framework to talk about can put into perspective how much of an impact each factor will have on the eventual end price. This theorycraft is somewhat incomplete, but I'd like a little more feedback on weather people agree or disagree with my general concept before trying to dig deeper. Hope this was a good post!

Not sure if it was mentioned already, but Lhara, at the Darkmoon camp (currently in Terrokar) sells rare herbs, and sometimes gems, at extremely low prices. I bagged 2x Black Lotus and 1x Fel Lotus, along with some terocone, mana thistle and nightmare vine this morning while making coffee, etc.

The restock timer is on a 15-minute cooldown; what appears every 15 minutes seems to be a random spread of low to high value items.

Finally, while I couldn't confirm it (there were 3 people perma-camped in front of her), it also also appears that there are a maximum of 10 slots for stockable items, so buying out the junk (e.g. mageroyal, thick leather) would seem to create more space for valuable items on the next restock. At least, I've never seen her with more than 10 items.

My observation has been that most alchemists are just fools. In the old days it was quite common to see folks advertising arcanite transmutes in the trade channel for 3-5g or similar nominal fee, even though the AH price spread between thorium bar + arcane crystal and arcanite bar was 10g or more. For whatever reason it seemed to them a better plan to waste time barking in trade than to risk their own funds on what was almost a sure sale. I still see this today with Might transmutes, though depending on your policy regarding transmute spec procs this can be long-term profitable. And of course on the earth->water note, if there is hibiscus for sale on the AH you can go from zero to revered in one day (I did this on my priest) at very small cost yet there are plenty of alchemists who have not done so.

The two key differences between that pattern and the VC->LPS transmute are one that enchanters don't have a cooldown-based opportunity cost like alchemists do, and two that the value-add is so massive as to be impossible to miss whereas optimizing alchemy profits takes some reasoning.

Yeah but you just cleared out your operating capital so you won't be able to take advantage of other offers that come up near to 2.4 being released. Considering it has a big outdoor area, several instances and class changes it will be a while.

The good thing from a guilds Point of View on the BoE drops from world bosses is:
a) you can't satiate the market, the loot table of Kazzak and Doomwalker are reasonable big, they are on a reasonable high respawn cooldown.
b) you can monopolize the market if you have the man-force. park an alt over at Kazzak, check from time to time with your BT necklace at Doomwalker. Just like many guilds did with old Kazzak and green Drakes.

Well, I recently bought the runed living ruby recipe for 600. I aim to sell 5 per day, I should break even 15 days or so. I would never pay that for a recipe of gems that do not sell, but runed living rubies sell well on my server. I'd also pay it for solid star of elune for sure. Those are just always wanted and should give a good profit until they become obsolete (WotLK).

Has anyone found 2-3 items that are crafted that cheaply yield 2-3+ Arcane Dust? This morning the first 3 pages were all 5g+ for lvl 61-63 Items. :-/ (I usually never buy these items anyway)

I believe it was mentioned towards the beginning of the thread, but depending on uncommon gem prices [Fel Iron Blood Ring] and similar JC rings are pretty good for disenchanting.

I make [Netherweave Bracers] for Arcane dust when I need it, on my server it's a little better than a break even rate, and I usually have access to way too much Netherweave to know what to do with.