I'm loving the gem market right now. It's a roller coaster on alliance Mal'G at the moment. Prices for everything go down for a very short period of time, and then go up for the rest of the week.

I'm finding the meta gem cutting business to be decent. I just bought 7x uncut earthstorm diamonds for 65 per and am selling them for 110g each right now. Skyfire bids go down to about 75-80 and if I win those, it's an easy 130g flip.

I'm noticing however, other competitors becoming very sneaky in how they undercut others. They are undercutting the bid, while keeping the BO higher than normal.

Example, I put a gem for 60 bid 65 BO. They do 59 bid, 75 BO. Theirs is listed before mine. I'm wondering if this these people are successful in selling their gems. One of the people doing it is a new guildie of mine. He just "lol'ed" when I mentioned it in guild chat so I decided to start announcing in trade what he's doing.

Seems making money is becoming much more cut throat than it has been. I mean guildies undercutting you, while keeping a high BO just to bury your items is pretty shitty thing to do IMO.

--- Edit so I don't double post ---

Also, do you think this would be a viable way to flood markets. example, list a TON of arcane dust for super low bids, but higher than norm BO, flood the first few pages and collect higher than avg returns?

If I was buying something worth 50+ gold I would take the time to actually look at all the buyouts and wouldn't just grab the one at the top of the list. Maybe it would work with items whose individual cost is inconsequential (I probably don't care if I get cheated out of 10s on the one arcane dust I'm buying) but it seems unlikely that someone wouldn't take the 5 seconds to scroll down a bit and check buyouts when they're paying 65-75g.

You can also hit the one guy on his ninja-hs needing a new gem or what not between two instances when he got some good stuff in the first.

Low bid, high BO is a good thing for everyone though. If you don't do it yourself, you'll get the sales from the guys who're actually looking for the cheapest item. If you do do it yourself, you'll catch the ones in a hurry.

Either way, more people make more money. It's one of those win-wins we hear so much about.

You lose money flooding with certain items because of the deposit.

He mentioned arcane dust, which has no listing price.

Yes, flooding in that situation is viable, and quite common. Chances are you'll lose out if someone bids on it all, though.

You can always cancel the auction though, since you will only lose your deposit of nothing, no drawbacks.

Runic spellthread is a very good moneymaker for me, Primal mana sells for <15g on my server and the thread sells anywhere from 350-400g everytime. Best way to get gold from badges and nethers (about 200g per 10 badges or 1 nether).

Holy moly, yes! I've already seen a steady rise on prices of khorium, spellcloth and shadowcloth, all of which I have for thousands of golds worth. Also have some of the rest of the mats, but those three (and especially the cloth), is focus for (and subsequently I also expect the price of primal fire/mana/shadow to go up).

It was for me as well for 3 months.... until the trick was posted in this thread :P. Since then, Runics have been at the expected value of 10 primal mana + 50g nether fee.

Wanted to make a contribution to the thread that has made me so much gold, hopefully give someone a hand as well.

I try to keep fairly diversified and farm a lot, play the AH, and have dabbled in some cross faction trading as well. If you are Horde side, you will be amazed at the selection and price difference an allie AH.

Main- Miner/Eng: Fly routes in Nagrand, get ore and siphon gas clouds from air motes. Toggle "Find Fish" every few laps and gather motes of water, and mudfish/bluefish. Swing through elemental teraace every once in awhile, hit some more pure water pools, grab a water elemental or two. Rinse and repeat. Enough variety that if you have a bunch of competition for one, can do another for awhile.

Alt - Herb/Skinner: Go to Twilight Ridge in Nagrand and farm the snakes there. They are nuetral to you, so can set up great openings combos. Skin for scraps, leather and cobra scales. Also multiple spawns of Mana Thistle and something else...(cant remember off top of my head). another good spot is the mine you go to for the netherdrake dailies, everyone kills and runs there, leaving tons of skinnable bodies.

Concerning cross faction trading, watch out for the posting fee's on the nuetral AH, they are horrible. Try to go with something with a low (or none) posting fee. Be aware that the nuetral AH also charges 15% vs 5% for regualr AH transaction. (I know this has been stated, but it still shocked me) I look for single items, usually epic, with a LARGE proftit margin. Try for epic gems, patterns, ect.

Currently leveling up a Ench/JC pally. Should be fun when it's hi enough to do more than just DE stuff.

EDIT: spelling and grammar

I think you mean Twilight Ridge.

As far as Jewelcrafting goes, unless you managed to jump on the ship extremely early in the game, you more than likely missed the boat completely. Individuals who went into the expansion with the mindset of making a profit from it went in guns blazing with cash upfront to invest. These were the people making bank off gems at maximum price for minimal input - I can remember being appalled that red and blue gems were over 100g each about a month into BC. Now that nearly every player has access to jump into the market, I've found personally that outside of playing the Adamantite prospecting game as a crap shoot for blue gems, there's really not a reason to be in the market for me - that being said, I'm sure like minded people will go into WotLK prepared to spend everything to control Inscription if it proves to be worthwhile. Back to Jewelcrafting, I found that it was nice to stockpile massive amounts of gems, but after looking at what I was inputting for Adamantite, as I don't have a miner, I was breaking just a tad over being even. I realize that for many people making 100 to 250g off of a 1200g investment is probably alot, but I'm used to moving massive amounts of traffic for huge profits; I make most of my cash playing the auction house, and the less control over something money related in game, the less I want to deal with it. I'd like to hear what others are pulling in through flipping and DEing from the AH; I've made 2.5k since Friday. Back to Prospecting though, relying on chance just wasn't cutting it for me, I ended up nerd raging at one point because I'd spent 300g on ore and only pulled a Topaz and a Talasite from it - that's just the way the RNG goes.

At any rate, I, like others have mentioned, try to get my hands on patch notes as soon as possible in the interest of making as much as I can through changes. I managed to make a fair stockpile of Void Crystals for my mage, whom is an enchanter, and I also spent about 400g on Talasites, picking up the initial stockpile of cheap ones the second that I read the note about haste gems in 2.4 (anywhere from 5-10g). Ever since then, I'll pick up more if I see them for around 5-8g, because I figure it may take a month or so to sell them, I'll still make a nice profit for such a tiny buy-in (I did the same thing with the resil Talasite when it was introduced). Although I liquidated most of my excess gems over the past month or so, I also try to keep a small supply of each gem for 'just in case' general use purposes, like if I get a new item on an alt that needs gems or what have you. In addition to the Talasites however, I've kept about 40 Noble Topaz and Dawnstones, because I anticipate the price to skyrocket on them. I've been watching Dawnstones fall on Tichondrius over the last week, and it doesn't seem that there's really a reason other than a massive influx of supply and not enough people to buy them out fast enough, other than the small birgade of us on the server that play the AH constantly - and it's pretty obvious we're all at the capacity that we want to snatch up. People placing their gems on the AH are incredibly hasty and often will undercut others by absurd amounts (much to my satisfaction). Dawnstones I don't predict will rebound quite as well, as I've seen them sell for nearly 15g each recently, so in my conditions I'd expect them to reach around ~30g when the patch hits - if I'm lucky, perhaps a tad more. However, I have a strong, strong feeling that the orange spell haste gems are going to make the topaz market absolutely skyrocket. You can pick up a gem uncut now for about 30g (orange), but after the patch I don't think you'll be able to find one on Tichondrius for under 55g - and that's alliance side. I play both factions, so the exchange rate minus the neutral AH cost sometimes makes it extremely profitable to transfer gems and gold crossfaction. This is another niche market that obviously costs more 'real money' to make a dent in, but oftentimes you can make a killing selling items on one faction that are low, but it massive demand on the other. The Horde AH on Tichondrius was a great dumping ground for the excess gems on my Alliance toons - especially red, I sent a few stacks over and cut them to Teardrop Living Rubies, and sold them all for 80g+ in around 24 hours and netted a ~25g profit for each one.

One final tip that I can offer, though I believe I covered it earlier in the thread, is to farm Uldaman. I realize that it's a shitty, boring instance, but it's a treasure trove if you don't mind looting lots of mobs, and are a bit lucky. I've turned over Legguards of the Vault for 500g in the last couple weeks, and a Pendulum of Doom for nearly 2k that I looted taking my mage on a run through there a few times out of boredom. The Large and Small Radiants still go for a fair price, plus the gold that mobs drop, as well as Mageweave, which sells well on my server.

And by all means, do your dailies. Seriously. Especially if you're feeling lazy and have multiple 70s, at the LEAST do your Skettis bombing quests; that's nearly 100g per character per week for less than 10 minutes of work each day, and double that if you take the 5 minutes to get a group to camp a location for the prisoner (extra tip, camp 1 spawn unless your group is full of people with 280+% mounts, and keep destroying eggs that spawn above you, 2 birds one stone [shitty pun]). Log your character in a tree or something if you're feeling to lazy to move it from Shatt or whatever, it's worth it. Get some friends together and make a regular routine, I do the PvP daily as soon as I wake up every day with the same group of friends; through my 4 70s, that's ~1kg per week doing absolutely nothing. There's lots of way to make cash out the, you just have to keep looking to find what works best for you.

I really can't foresee Primals spiking significantly, there's already so much influx - as anyone can farm them. However, you'll probably see a massive leap in Spellcloth and Shadowcloth for Sunfire Robes alone, your estimates on 50-100% would be pretty accurate. It'd be smart to start now if you have a tailoring mastery that'll grant you one of the two, even if you don't plan on using it yourself, stock it up, whatever your spec is. If you don't want to spend the gold, take an hour or two and go grab the primals yourself and blow them whenever your cooldown is up between now and the patch, even if you're not mastery specced you'll probably end up with a good 6-10 pieces by the time the patch hits.

Same can be said for Khorium Ore, I've been building up a stack for it since the patterns were revealed, the increase in mats only makes me happier meaning I will get more gold for them as they will be in even bigger demand, and they are quite rare to come by.

Atm the price for khorium is around 15-18g/stack,is it profitable to buy it now and resell after the patch?

Suppose that depends on the amount of potential customers you'd have. And if they already have the mats or are in the process of storing them up in anticipation of 2.4

I've noticed with 2.3 that I made more profit in the build up to 2.3 then I actually made when it went live. Since people are alot more informed they often try to get the stuff they need before the patch goes live, rather then wait for it to go live as that would mean increased prices.

I've managed to make some nice gold off of that by simply playing the LPS market and buying out the whole lot and relisting them for 5 - 7.5g higher.

The Spellcloth and Shadowcloth are going to be barely wanted.

For 1, these recipes will only be available to top raiding guilds for the first while. And it will still be a rare drop, like once a month per guild.

For 2, since almost no one uses their cooldowns these days, the majority of that cloth will be immediately generated by asking fellow guildy-tailors to use their cooldowns right now.

In general, I expect any price change based on new recipes in 2.4 to take a very long time to show up. Especially on small servers, which is where most profitable price fluctuation is anyway.

I've been doing this too, it's like there's two mindsets on my server -- the people that sell these shards for 15-18g apiece thinking they're going to be worthless once the patch hits, and the people that still snap them up for 22-25g at off hours. Buying them in the afternoon and listing them before I go to bed usually means I can get anywhere from 5-10g profit per shard.

Also re: Spellcloth, the price has recently jumped on my server and I'm selling now rather than later for the reason someone else stated earlier, that there's a lot of Spellcloth tailors out there who will use their cooldowns when the patterns start dropping. The price had evened out around 42g/ea for the last few months but has recently jumped as high as 55g, which is a price worth selling for, especially when you farm all the mats.

I'm not sure this is true... as far as has been said, you get one pattern per Cache of the Shattered Sun, and on Bloodscalp that'd be 15 guilds who could have two caches in the first day if they put their mind to it (i.e. walk in and kill Vashj and Kael quickly).

I mean, it's not like everyone and their sister will have them immediately, but I'd expect most healthy servers to generate 30-40 patterns per reset even leaving out Sunwell Plateau.

This is along the lines of what I'm preparing for. Like it was said earlier, the high-end guilds are already cranking out as much cloth as they can in anticipation of, but that supply will be blown through - at least I forsee - fairly quickly. Because my server is fairly large, and there are still guilds trying to struggle through Vashj/Kael, there will more than like be a good few that need additional cloth. What has to be weighed is how many of those guilds are going to suddenly assume that they're good enough to focus solely on Hyjal/BT.

In addition to the increase of cloth required for the craftables on the PTR, I imagine that a lot of people who were leveling up caster alts got some of the crafted gear, and since there was no forseeable future use of the cloths, either used up their / friends / guildies stacks of cloths, or bought out their cool downs. People have probably started stacking now though, and with the chest + gloves total requiring even approximately 40 pieces of cloth, thats 10 sets of cool downs, assuming you can do a 1 for 1 trade of the cloth you don't need to someone else. 10 sets of cool downs is roughly 6 weeks, and since I can't see people who are farming T6 for SWP being lazy, I would imagine they will be doing their combines religiously. This doesn't leave much room for cloth inflation, in my opinion.

On a similar note, its amazing that some people still don't realize what stuff vendors for. I have been able to snag sets of netherweave cloth off the AH for 2.2-2.8 gold per stack. While this isn't terribly much profit, at 3g per stack of bandages, its still completely free and guaranteed. Don't watch yourself make 400 bandages though, its painful.

This is going to sound extremely strange and go against all the principles we've come to know and love playing the AH: I've been having good luck on the AH on Sunday evening/Monday. This could just be an anomaly (and I'll continue to watch it), but I wanted to see if other people are seeing the same thing.

It's very possible that the past few weeks I've just gotten lucky with my timing (between the point where people buy out the weekend undercutters and new undercutters post their auctions), but it seems like more people are trying to heavily undercut on Tuesday/Wednesday and let the auctions go till Thursday/Friday, when the weekend undercutters jump in.

Am I lucky/crazy, or has anyone else noticed this on other servers? (This is on Ursin Horde, by the way)

This happens on all servers, but each is different. Once you get more exposure to the fickleness and nuances of the AH you will see that there are certainly better days than others depending on whether you are selling or buying. As for firetree I'd rather not say which days those are.